Amazingly not departed: Tri-chem "paint"

One of the dorkiest craft ideas ever is amazingly still around: Tri-chem. I bet your mom had a case of these little metal tubes of "paint" that she used to create spectacularly stupid dish towels with streaky drawings of owls or puppy dogs. I bet she tried to make you do Tri-chem, too, insisting that you Need a Hobby and it's a Fun Thing We Can Do Together. Or maybe that was just my mom. (I love you, Mom, but even you did this crafty stuff reluctantly.)

I get acutely uncomfortable on the rare occassions I need to visit a craft store. I think it's the smell of middle age dorkdom that wafts past the silk flowers and cheap candles. Or possibly it's that craft stores remind me of my own inadequacies as a crafter, an anxiety which can perhaps be traced to childhood Tri-chem frustration. It's all your fault, Tri-chem! 

The little metal tubes with their ball-point tips never seemed to give much paint, and what little paint you squeezed out never seemed to go on smoothly. Tri-chem was marketed as liquid embroidery; you used a metal frame to hold the material while you filled in pre-stamped pictures. I remember feeling frustrated and annoyed and not even liking the finished product, which did not resemble embroidery at all.

Check out this awesome picture of a Trichem party--like a Tupperware party, but even more lame. Trust me when I say our finished creations didn't look nearly as good as those in the picture.

Tri-chem has been rebranded for today's hip craftsters (are there really hip craftsters?): listen to the plucky little score and watch the video on their website. The paints are probably better formulated now and I'm sure the patterns are less cheesy. But I'd still probably create only streaky craftbarrassments.

Not dearly departed: flocked wallpaper

Those crazy kids at Retro Renovation were praising mid-century wallpaper this week. (Just kidding about the "crazy kids" thing. I love them, even if I don't always share their tastes.)  Which got me to thinking about the truly hideous wallpaper in the 60s rambler I grew up in. I remember helping my parents pull off little tiny bits of a dark olive green flocked wallpaper on what would be my baby brother's bedroom. And by "flocked," I mean a raised felt-y pattern. I think it was only on one wall, an "accent wall, " if you will.

The wallpaper was awful. Just...awful. Even the LBHG doesn't like everything from the 70s.

Click here for more 70s wallpaper ideas. If you must.

Back-to-school bags: old skool backpacks

Every year around Labor Day, I was excited to get a new plasticy vinyl bag to start school. Below is one I managed to save. The little girl with the flowers in her hair is just too cute. Would this qualify as ephemera, even if it's not really paper? I can't imagine many of these survived 35 years--I couldn't find any on ebay or anywhere else on the 'net. Anyone find any?

Lesson: fail. But the book was great

You know how parents like to give you lessons disguised as things you actually like? I think that was the point of this book, which I read over and over and memorized. I can still recite some of the lines today.

Being neat and tidy has never been my thing (except for the canopy bed; see below for details.) This book didn't help.

How cool and 70s-esque are the colors and artwork?

And so goes the fusty dusty musty mess she made of her nice pink room.

My (almost) first cake: Stir'n Frost

In my evolution as a baker, sometime after saucer-sized, hockey puck-like Easy Bake Oven cakes came Betty Crocker Stir'n Frost Cakes. The cardboard-y pan, cake mix, and frosting all came in the box--you were even supposed to mix the cake batter in the pan (no need to dirty a bowl!) After the cake was done, you squeezed the frosting out of the foil packet. You didn't even need a knife to spread the sticky frosting--you just dragged the foil packet around the top of the cake.

Kid-sized, kit-ized, and sugar-ized. Anyone remember the other flavors? I remember only the chocolate.

And there's no truth to the rumor my hair looked exactly like that little girl's hair, or that I repeatedly combed it throughout the day so that it would flip back just like hers.

My Sears canopy bed, 1976-style

When I was seven or eight,  I mentioned casually to my grandparents that I wanted a canopy bed. On my next birthday, one magically appeared in my bedroom. (The pic above includes my dear friend, Kelly Knight, who did not magically appear with the bed. But this was the only pic of my bed I could find, so I hope she forgives me for publishing her picture. Hi, Kelly, wherever you are!)

Talk about a bed making a little girl feel like a princess. I even made the bed and put the stuffed animals in the same places every day.

This Sears commercial features a similar bed frame in white, but it's a bit later, I think.

Old Seattle that's still here: Seafair

Like much of Old Seattle That's Still Here, Seafair makes me happy.

Seafair is Seattle's summer celebration. It culminates in the hydroplane boat races and Blue Angels performance over Lake Washington. I know it makes no sense that I wrinkle my nose at the mere idea of NASCAR, but I like the hydroplane races. And you know that I'm going to say the hydroplane races were better when I was a kid.

The races really were better, though! The race course was laid out differently back then, and drivers careened throgh five laps. Old piston engines were loud and not quite as fast as todays' turbine engines, and longtime random rivalries formed among brightly colored boats and drivers. Old hydros gave moments of real excitment--kind of like horse racing--with boats barely edging past one another at 100 miles per hour.

Maybe the best part about Seafair Sunday was seeing my mom in rare moments of happiness and excitment, enjoying Her Day, when she didn't cook or clean or take care of others, but merely cheered in front of the blaring TV with her potato salad (made efficiently the day before) and cooler filled with can after can of 7-Up.

And it all happened in the glare and glint of a magical Seattle summer day.

Check out general Seafair info here, the hydroplane museum here, and more cool vintage hydroplanes here.