18-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Thursday, July 24, 1913: This afternoon seemed so long to me because it rained for a long while.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Grandma—I know that the afternoon seemed long, but you must have done something. What did you do?
I want to imagine that you played with your 7-year-old brother Jimmie on this rainy afternoon. Did you ever make crafts with him?
I love some of the very simple—but fun– paper crafts that people made years ago. Often the crafts were very creative and used very basic techniques.
For example, here are easy directions for making a paper fish.
Draw a fish on a piece of paper. The body of the fish should be very long.
Cut the fish out. About one-third of the way back from the head cut a slit in the paper.
Put the tail through the slit. (You may need to gently fold the tail to get it through the hole). Decorate as desired.
If you like this craft, here are some previous posts with other paper crafts:
Patterns for Making Paper Birds
Such a great fish and the other papercrafts are great too.
I have fun doing paper crafts. It always brings back good memories of doing crafts with my children when they were small.
Did you make paper dolls and paper dolls clothes? That was one of my favourite past times as a child.
I did. I also remember enjoying paper dolls that I cut out of magazines. I can remember McCall’s magazine having a paper doll called Betsey McCall that I liked when I was a kid.
Ah! I can’t remember how I came by mine; possibly a magazine. I had an original , proper paper doll and then I made my own copies again and again.
That’s cute! (My problem would be drawing the fish to begin with…!)
I thought about including a pattern for the fish in the post–but decided that my fish wasn’t that great looking and that others could probably draw their own fish that looked better. 🙂
Thank you Sheryl, I love all kinds of hand craft and will certainly try this too!
I’m glad you liked it.
Would be a cool thing to do with kids – an original now a days too – might even make us cool!
Children once made so many toys and crafts that enabled them to develop their imaginations. I think that children miss out on some things today–though of course they now have many wonderful games and toys that weren’t available years ago.
They don’t use their own imagination though. I think they miss out too!
Paper crafts are fun. I like the fish.
As you can probably tell from the number of posts that I’ve done on paper crafts, I also really like them.
Thanks Sheryl… I’ve had such fun going back over your paper craft posts and loved every one of them… 🙂
I’m glad you enjoyed the previous posts on paper crafts. And, thanks for writing me note about it. When I write posts like this–I’m never sure whether or not I should create links to related old posts, so it’s good to know that you visited the previous posts.
Glad my comment helped Sheryl… You’d been blogging for some time before I “found” you so I really do appreciate the links to previous posts. Many thanks…
Cute, I remember cutting out paper chains in school of all kinds of shapes. It’s fun to make different snow flakes too.
I have similar memories. . . .Note to self: write a post on paper chains and snow flakes in December. 🙂
Fun!