your magnesia smile invites romance
3 June 2025
tom's family is planning on downsizing and will be putting their house up for sale this autumn. we have been making regular visits to help with the clear out — listing furniture on eBay, bringing home the CDs stored in tom's childhood bedroom, etc.
tom's mum (my mother-in-law) is a very sentimental person, which partly explains all the stuff they've got squirreled away in sheds, attics, and backs of wardrobes. she still has her old stamp and matchbox collection; scrapbooks of concert programmes and playbills; old photographs; and dolls she owned when she was a child. i feel like a downright minimalist in comparison!!!
a few weeks ago, while i was over there to help out, she gave me a large stack of vintage women's magazines and sewing/knitting patterns that must have once belonged to either her mother or mother-in-law.
i don't think she had the heart to just dispose of them (she has confided in us several times that many of the things she has inherited over the years don't feel enough like hers to get rid of). but because they were only taking up space, we agreed that i could bring it home with me, sort through the contents, and keep or sell any items at my discretion.
upon inspection, many of the patterns were too worn to sell or donate, but i have been enjoying the process of scanning them and transcribing the instructions, in the hopes that the designs might still live on digitally, despite their physical condition.
much to my surprise, one of the gems i discovered during The Sort was [lower-]middle-class British women's print culture from the 1940s-60s. i was originally going to have a page on my website dedicated to scans of these vintage magazines i found in the bundle, but decided against it on the basis that it's ultimately too British and too white to occupy so much space on my page, lol!
that said, i am still really keen on the 1947 issue of Woman's Weekly that is now in my possession, so i thought i would share excerpts from it in a blog post.
this November 8, 1947 issue was released during the publication's “heyday” — the “period between the end of the First World War and the start of the 1960s, when it... had yet to compete seriously with television for readers' attention” (source: Eleanor Reed)
