Sew Simple

I have spent most of this project working on honing my cooking and cleaning skills.  I cannot believe I have neglected a different, very important branch of housewifery - sewing!  There are entire chapters about it in my fifties books,  but I've just kind of skipped over them.  Now that I'm back in Michigan, though, I have time to develop those skills.  My mom is an AWESOME seamstress, and she offered to teach me!  Woot!

As my first project in my quest to become a master seamstress, I decided to make a skirt.  That has to be pretty easy, right?  It's basically a piece of material wrapped around your waist, and then you just sew a seam up the back.  Maybe add a button or two if you're feeling crafty.

HAHAHAHA no.  That's not how it is.  I haven't even sewn a stich yet, and I'm already horrible at sewing.  When I bought my pattern to make a skirt, I chose one from a brand called "Sew Simple."  I thought, "Perfect!  This will be great for a beginner like me.  Plus, I like the play on words."

I opened my pattern to get started, and it pretty much went downhill from there.  First of all, they have all the directions in three languages.  What??  They did not do that in the fifties, I'm pretty sure.  There are pages and pages of directions that I don't understand a word of - and that's just the English directions.

Do you know what "basting" fabric is?  Because I don't.  I know how to baste a turkey...but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's not the same thing.  What is a "selvage"?  What do all of these little triangles mean?  Am I sure I'm on the English pages?!

I decided to skip the written directions and just try to follow the pictures.  After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.  I turned to the picture directions and looked at step 1, which had about a zillion parts.  I started with step 1A, the very first step, and here's what it is:

 

 That's it.  No explanations or anything.  What does it meeeeeean???  It's like looking at ancient Sanskrit.  I'm picturing this hanging in a futuristic museum.  A school group walks by, and the teacher says, "Okay kids.  Back in the olden days, women had to make their own clothes.  They did this by a process called 'sewing.'  A few hundred years ago, back in the 1950's, women could look at these strange markings and somehow know how to make a skirt out of it."  The kids would look up in awe, except for the one squirrelly kid who's probably on a futuristic GameBoy or something.  The future is bound to still have squirrely kids.  Anyway, the teacher would continue: "Women nowadays just program their fashion needs into an iFashion box, and their clothes come out.  Jimmy!  Put away your HoloGame!  Anyway, before we had iFashion boxes, this is what people had to do.  They had to follow the secret code directions to figure out how to make things for themselves to wear."

 

My mom helped me cut out the material into the appropriate shapes (did you know a skirt takes NINE pieces of material??  WHAT??), and by that time it was 10:00 PM and I gave up for the night.  I have to go back tonight and keep working on it.  Making clothes is way trickier than I expected.  Now I see why people just go to the mall.

Good News, Readers!

Sorry I've been gone so long, readers.  I've been moving 2000+ miles across the country, back to my hometown of Kalamazoo.  If you think about it, that seems very houewifey, does it not?  Take Rex's grandma for example:  she grew up in Kalamazoo, had all her kids here, had all her grand kids here, and then died here.  Isn't that kind of the fifties ideal?  Family all around all the time?  So HA - my life choices reflect my blog morals.  Zap.  Rex and I will now be around both my family and his family as much as we want to (and very possibly more than we want to...lol. I'm having visions of the mother-in-law on Everybody Loves Raymond.  You know, the one who pops in all the time and is totally nuts?  Ha ha...  My in-laws aren't like that.  Hopefully.  ;-)    Anyway, living zillions of miles from family (and in LAS VEGAS, no less) didn't seem very June Cleaver, but now I'm back.  You may breathe a sigh of relief.

I'm so happy that I'll be able to ask for cooking/cleaning help whenever I need it.  Already my mother-in-law taught me how to do dishes correctly.  Apparently there's a spinny thing in there that needs to be able to spin.  Who knew?  If it's not spinning, your dishes aren't getting cleaned right.  Now my dishes are sparkly every time.  Also, the good news for you is that I now have access to my mom-in-law's EXTENSIVE collection of fifties homemaking books.  That should yield many more blog posts.  Also, my mom bought me some awesome fifties books at the library book sale.  I already learned something from the first book:  "New brides often use too warm of water when baking bread.  The best temperature of water to activate the yeast is about 85 degrees.  Anything higher than 90 will scorch it."  THAT was my problem on my last batch of bread!  The yeast didn't rise properly, and I was so confused.  Little did I know that I had scorched it!  Poor yeast....  Sorry about that, little guy.  I didn't mean to kill you.  I'll do better next time.

One of my mother-in-law's books is from the department of Homeland Defense in 1960.  It's about how to make a bomb shelter in your back yard in the event that we were to get nuked by the "crazy commies."  It even says how much radiation your livestock can be exposed to without yielding poisonous meat!  Cool, huh?  Expect a post on that soon.  :-)

So anyway, it's good to be back.  I'm sure this blog will be far less neglected now that I have a constant stream of fodder for it.

Stovetop Shame

I did a lot of cooking this week, but I didn't do a lot of cleaning.  I finally decided to clean my kitchen today, and I was disgusted by what I saw on my stove top.  You're going to be disgusted too.  Only proceed to the pictures below if you have a strong stomach and are feeling non-judgmental:

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWW!!!  I KNOW, okay?  I KNOW.  It's gross.  I shouldn't have let it get that bad.  I deserve to have my wife card taken away.  I deserve to be the star of a new reality show called "The Health Department Condemned My Apartment."  I know.   I'm sorry.  My range has always been kind of stained and yucky looking, but never this bad.  It needed an extreme makeover - range edition.

The bright side of this all is that I figured I could get a good blog post out of it.  I decided to clean my stove top fifties style.  After all, my fifties foremothers were the queens of clean - surely they could reform a hopeless slob such as myself?  I'd already tried sticking those silver thingies in the dishwasher, but that didn't really do anything.  I tried scrubbing with soap and water, but the stains were stubborn.  It was time to call in the big guns: my fifties housewife books.

I looked in the index and found an entry called "range; how to clean."  Page 71.  Perfect.  I turned to page 71, and here's what it said:

"Two ounces plus of prevention: Learn how to keep foods from boiling over and burning.  Here are some how-to-cook suggestions that will help keep your pans gleaming and your range clean."

Thanks a lot, book.  Clearly since I'm looking up how to clean my range, I've already failed at all of your preventative techniques.  I skipped ahead a few paragraphs to get to the next part.

"Cool range before cleaning."

No DUH.  I'm pretty domestically defunct, but even I knew that.

"Wipe with cloth rung out of suds; dry.  For stubborn spots, sprinkle on a little household cleaner; rub lightly with damp cloth.  Rinse.  To clean and wax, pour a little kitchen wax onto damp cloth; wipe cloth over surface of the range."

I'm sorry........wax my range?  What?!  I called over to Rex, "Hey, this book says I'm supposed to wax the stove top.  Have you heard of that before?"  He responded, "Is that sort of like waxing your legs?  You put on the wax and it pulls up all of the dirt?"  I replied, "No...I think it's more like waxing a car.  You know, to make it shiny."

Clearly we don't know about the waxing thing.  I skipped it. (Side note:  if you know what this means, please comment.  I'm curious).

The paragraph before was the one that intrigued me.  It said that for stubborn stains, I needed to rub a little bit of "household cleaner" on it.  What kind of cleaner, exactly, am I supposed to use?  Did they not have multiple types cleaners in the fifties?  Was there just a catch-all "this cleans everything" cleaner?  If so, WHERE CAN I GET A BOTTLE OF THAT?!

I'm hopeless in the household cleaner aisle.  I didn't know what to get.  I knew it wasn't Windex...I knew it wasn't toilet cleaner...I knew it wasn't Pledge...  I decided to use a lifeline and phone a friend.  I called the person who any rational wife would call in this sort of situation...my mother-in-law!

(Please picture triumphant superhero music playing as she appears in a jumpsuit in the household cleaners aisle)

My mother-in-law said I needed to try a cleaner called "Barkeeper's Friend."  She swears by it.  I was skeptical to say the least.  The title of it was strange, and the container itself looked shifty (not sure how a container looked shifty, but it did).  Still, I decided to give it a try.  I didn't have any better ideas, and I wasn't about to spray my range with Windex.

My friends.  Let me tell you.  Barkeeper's Friend is MAGIC.  If you don't have any, you must get some.  I sprinkled some onto my range, and *poof!*  all of the stains were gone.  I was so happy that I almost jumped up and down.  It worked!  Thanks to my housekeeping books and my mother-in-law, I will never have a nasty looking range again!  I can get my wife card back!  Hooray!

Swimsuit Shopping

I never thought I would find myself doing research on the history of spandex, but today I did.

It all started because I'm shopping for a new swimsuit.  For fun, I've been trying to follow the guidelines in my 1950's housekeeping books while choosing one.  The books tell me to check the fit of my swimsuit by doing a few things, and I have highlighted these for you underneath the picture below.

1. Sit on a chair or floor to check whether or not the suit is long enough for comfort and coverage.

Coverage?  Since when is a swimsuit about coverage?  I couldn't find one in stores that would pass the 1950's "coverage" standards, so I've been looking online.  So far, no luck.

2. Be careful not to catch your flesh in the zipper as you work the suit up over your hips and waist.

I have never seen a suit with a zipper.  That seems very strange.  Also, catching your "hip flesh" in a zipper?  Yowza.

3. Raise your arms in an action test to note whether or not the bra provides ample coverage in this position.

This one seems valid.  I'm really over the under-cleavage that you see at beaches nowadays, although I'm pretty sure some people do this on purpose.  Ew.

While searching my swimsuit options, I noted that the homemaking book tells me the best and most used fabric for making swimsuits is wool.  Have you ever heard of a wool swimsuit?  Apparently the professional swimmers in the 1950's used them.  I couldn't figure out why the book didn't mention spandex suits, as almost all suits today are made of spandex.  After researching the history of spandex, I found out that it wasn't even invented until 1959.  Wow!  So swimsuits in the fifties had no spandex whatsoever, because it wasn't invented yet.  Also, fun fact: did you know that the inventors of spandex named it "spandex" because that's an anagram of the word "expands"?  I thought that was super awesome.

So anyway, I've spent some time looking for an accurate fifties swimsuit.  I can't imagine that a zippered woolen swimsuit going halfway down my thighs could be very comfortable... but I guess I'll never know because I can't find one.  The only wool swimsuits I found were hundreds of dollars, and most of them were still at least partially spandex.  Most of the "vintage fifties swimsuits" online are made of spandex and incredibly revealing.  I guess advertisers feel that if you put polka dots on something and make the model wear cat-eye glasses, that makes it vintage fifties.  Well, that's not true!  I might have to make my own swimsuit this summer if I want it to be authentic...time to go buy some wool and zippers.

Cleaning the Refrigerator

Cleaning out the refrigerator is never a fun chore.  It actually might be my least favorite.  If I cleaned it out every week it wouldn't be so bad, but I don't.  After a while, gross leftovers sit and get moldy, and then I finally clean it out and am totally grossed out by the things that have been lurking in the dark corners of my fridge for weeks.

Today I had to clean out the refrigerator.  I thought to myself, "This would make a great Vintage Housewife post."  After all, women in the fifties had refrigerators, so obviously they had to clean them out.  I figured there was a technique to it, and I was right!  I found a whole section about it in one of my homemaking books (this one was from 1961).

First of all, the book reminds me to clean out my refrigerator frequently in order to allow for better cold air circulation.  If it is all cluttered up, the cold air can't get to all of the food evenly.  Ummm...oops.  From now on, I promise to clean out my refrigerator frequently.  Scout's honor.  Okay, moving on...

The book says that before cleaning, I need to be sure to unplug the refrigerator.  What?  I've never unplugged a refrigerator!  I don't even know how to do that!  The plug is behind the refrigerator, and I'd have to pull the refrigerator away from the wall in order to be able to unplug it. I think I'm going to have to skip this step.  I hope it doesn't make too big of a difference.

Next the book tells me to make sure I'm keeping the evaporator defrosted and to clean out the moisture collector box.  This needs to be done at least once a week.

I've lived in this apartment for two years, and I've never cleaned out the "moisture collector box."  I have also never checked to make sure that my evaporator is defrosted.  I don't even know what that is.  Do I have one of those?  Do you have one of those?  I looked all over my refrigerator and freezer, but I couldn't find one.  I'm going to guess that somewhere between 1961 and 2013, they stopped using those. I hope so, anyway. otherwise my moisture collector is probably really dirty.

So far I haven't done a single thing that the book tells me to do.  The third step is to make sure that the temperature is set correctly.  It should be set to 40 degrees Fahrenheit.  Well, I looked all over my refrigerator, and there is nowhere to set the temperature.  There are "levels" to set the temperature, but those range from 0-6 with no indication as to what the corresponding temperatures are.  With no other ideas, I stuck a thermometer in there (the kind you use if you have a fever) to try to see what the temperature of the air was. The only reading I could get was "LO."  I guess the thermometer doesn't go down that far.  I put my hand in the refrigerator and estimated that it feels about....40 degrees.  Perfect.  ;-)

The next step was one I could do - clean the shelves and the sides with a warm water/borax mix.  I couldn't believe that I actually had borax, but I did!  I used it in an experiment for fifth grade the other day, and I had no idea what it was before then.  Ha ha.  Apparently it's a great kitchen cleaning agent.

The book didn't say anything about throwing away the old moldy food, but I guess they just considered that to be a "duh," factor about cleaning out your refrigerator.  Or perhaps they did it so often that it wasn't a huge consideration.

This is the first day that I'm glad I'm not a real fifties housewife.  I really hate cleaning refrigerators, and theirs took a lot more maintenance than mine does.  I guess I should stop complaining.

Salsa Incident

In my quest to become the ultimate vintage housewife, I have yet to quote the highest authority on acceptable housewifery: the Bible.  Well, today is the day.  Our quote of the day comes from Proverbs 16:18, and here it is:  "Pride comes before the fall."

You've all heard that before, but I doubt you've heard it made in reference to Mexican food.

So there I was, mixing my guacamole to bring to our Southwestern-style barbecue.  Rex was already out at the grill with our friends, and I was putting the finishing touches on our contributions - the potato salad (I tried a new recipe!) and the guacamole (this was for chips but also to put on the burgers.  Yum.).  I learned how to make my homemade guacamole from the ultimate Guac Master - Josh Mackaluso.  Now, I can't give away his entire recipe lest I be hunted down and smothered with a particularly beefy bushel of cilantro, but I can tell you that one of the ingredients is Tositos salsa.  You may think it's weird to put salsa in guacamole, but just trust me - it's GOOD.

I tried to open the new jar of salsa, but it wouldn't budge.  I tried harder, but it wouldn't budge.  I squinched up my face and grunted like a pro-wrestler, but guess what?  It still wouldn't budge.  Normally in this situation, I would sashay into the living room and hand Rex the jar.  Without asking questions, he'd grab the jar, open it, and hand it back to me all without taking his eyes off of his notes.

If you've been paying attention, you know that at this point Rex was already down by the grill.  Well, I wasn't about to go walk across the apartment complex to have Rex open a jar for me.  It would be way too humiliating, especially since the only other female down there was a buff German feminist friend of ours.  I could only imagine the scowl I would get from her if I had to have a man open my Tostitos jar.

I decided to keep trying.  I grabbed the jar gripper out of our drawer, but it didn't do any good.  I hit the side of the jar lid with a knife, because that sometimes works for my little sister when she's trying to open a jar of pickles.  It didn't work either.  I tried everything!  It was no use! I considered making the guacamole without the salsa, but that just seemed wrong.  I would be bringing shame to the Mackaluso recipe.  Finally I realized I had no choice.  I had to have Rex open the jar.  (Side note real fast - how do you single girls out there solve this problem?  Do you have random unopened jars in your house?  I was not single long enough to experience this problem...please explain how you deal with this).

I packed up the rest of the barbecue supplies and prepared to go to the party with my guacamole only half assembled.  I put Elvis on his leash, and I took a deep breath, ready to face my embarrassment.  Just as I was walking out the door, I thought, "Maybe the lid is loosened up now that it's had a break for a few minutes.  Why don't I try one more time...?"

That was either a really bad idea or a really good idea, depending on how you look at it.  I will say this much: the jar opened that time.  "Opened" isn't really a good word for it, though.  What the jar actually did is EXPLODED.  I got salsa EVERYWHERE.  I got it on the counter, on the floor, on my dress, on my dog, in my hair...everywhere except in the guacamole bowl.  I'm serious.  I even got a chunk of onion in my eye, but none got in the bowl.  I looked like an extra from some low-budget horror movie.  I looked down at the dog, both of us dripping in salsa, and said out loud, "Elvis, let's never speak of this to anyone."  I don't think he was listening...he was licking tomato chunks off of his foot.

Anyway, in the future, I think I will just have Rex open the jar.  It will involve less clean-up, and I won't accidentally show up to the barbeque with salsa on my shoulder (so they all ended up learning what happened anyway).

Sorry, gotta go.  I have to do some push ups to get ready for our next grill day.

Preparing a Turkey

I think that preparing a turkey from scratch is pretty much the most domestic thing any woman can do.  My ultimate goal is to one day host the family Thanksgiving for my husband's family.  It's a big deal to them - all of the aunts and uncles and cousins come together and celebrate with REALLY GOOD food.  The aunts are pretty much my heroes in life.  So anyway, I'm going to do that someday.

In preparation for this ultimate goal, I decided to cook a turkey for Easter this year.  We had a turkey in our freezer since last Thanksgiving (that's a pretty good story in itself...you can read about that HERE).  I decided it was time to get out the turkey and try to cook it.  That way, if I failed miserably, it would be okay because no one would know except for Rex and I.  All of my in-laws are back in Michigan.  Plus, Rex has this thing about making a big deal for Easter dinner.  I figured it was a good time to attempt cooking a turkey.

Did you know that cooking a turkey and going to medical school have a lot in common?  It's true.  First of all, you have to pull out all of the turkey's guts.  It was like dissecting fetal pigs in high school, but it smelled less of formaldehyde.  It was still gross.   Even it's neck came out!  Ewwww!  I don't want to think of a turkey having a neck!  I only want to think of it as deliciousness!  Housewives are tough.  Women of the past even killed the animals themselves - I'm not there yet.  I got squeamish enough having my hand up a turkey's butt.  Gross.

Not only is it like medical school because there are guts involved, but also because I had to inject the turkey with stuff.  Did you know that's how to flavor a turkey?!  I got an injectable marinade, and it came with a syringe.  I had to screw the needle on and everything.  Then I started injecting it all over the place.  Poor turkey...good thing it was already dead.  In my head I was pretending to be a doctor giving vaccinations: "Now you won't get smallpox....now you won't get measles...now you won't get polio...."  Ha ha.  Anyway, I injected all of the marinade, and then I rubbed a bunch of spices on the top.  My friend Elle told me to "massage" the spices onto the turkey.  Two seconds ago I was a doctor; now I'm a masseuse for dead poultry.  It was crazy.  Below is a picture of me injecting the turkey.  Please notice that the picture is dark - that's because I prepared the turkey the night before in order to have it ready for Easter dinner.  WOW - a two day cooking project!  That's advanced.

I know this blog post would be a lot funnier if I could say that I attempted to cook the turkey but then I burned it to a crisp and had to call the fire department.  I would post a picture of our dog gnawing on the charred hunk of meat.  But GUESS WHAT?!?!?!  It didn't turn out half bad!  It was actually pretty GOOD!  I asked my friend Elle for advice on how to cook it (she came over and helped), and I also talked to my pastor's wife about it.  Now, if talking to your pastor's wife about cooking isn't stunningly domestic, then I don't know what is.  Anyway, it turned out really juicy and flavorful, which is good because we were eating leftovers for the next week.  Here is a picture of it:

This is me and Rex at our Easter dinner:

Okay, obviously I'm joking.  That's not me and Rex.  That's us fifty years in the future!  Ha ha.  But really, that's how I felt - very Norman Rockwell.  Do you know how proud I was of myself?  I was SO proud that I called my mother-in-law and said that when Rex and I move back to Michigan (this June), I would love to host a family holiday sometime.  Do you know what SHE said?  She said that none of the aunts have signed up for Thanksgiving 2013 yet, so it might be at our new house.  Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!!!!  Then again, that would be the crowning jewel of this Vintage Housewife project, wouldn't it?  I'll call that my final exam.  Time to start getting ready...