Vintage and Retro #dicraftswap

The theme of last months #dicraftswap was vintage/retro, a theme I thought would be super easy - turns out it wasn't, as there were just too many possibilities. I was sending to Jenny from the blog Pretty Column, who it turns out is actually not far away from me up north. She listed as her vintage interests the campaign of knitting for soldiers during the wars as well as war posters and propaganda (which made me happy because I'm a bit of a fan too!). I decided to embellish a wooden photo frame with buttons for Jenny to put her own 'retro' memories in, although I did include a 'make do and mend' postcard from the Imperial War Museum.

...Which is what gave me the idea for my bought gift. I sent a copy of the 1943 make do and mend guide produced by the government to advise people how to patch things up and reuse scraps. As Jenny is a knitter too I thought some of it was particularly appropriate...

I put in a few extra treats as well. The post office man laughed at my doily-decorated envelope!

Jenny wrote a post about what she sent to her own recipient here. Her crocheted bunch of flowers are just fantastic!

My parcel arrived from Jess at Dear Wildflower. I had said I loved the 1920's era, and so Jess sent me this beautiful notebook that made me instantly think of The Great Gatsby...

...so when I opened up the rest of the beautifully packaged items I wasn't surprised too see Jess had included a little page cut out from the book itself! She had also included an array of vintage floral patterned and polka dot craft papers and some lovely card blanks and envelopes, as well as a little hedgehog cross stitch kit. I think I'll incorporate the Great Gatsby passage into a card design using some of the flowers from the craft paper sometime. 

 Thank you so much Jess, and thank you as always to Hannah at Dainty and Ivory for organising the swaps. The next theme is Christmas, but is a little more general to allow people to incorporate other ideas too. If you want to sign up get in touch with Hannah by the 15th of November - I promise it's great fun!