Let's Craft With The 1970's!

There have been good eras in which to be a child, eras of freckle-faced innocence and bikes and lemonade stands and polio (a not-so-good part) and then there was the 1970's, which was a time of polyester hitchhiker-murdering fleshy nastiness. I was 7 when the 1970s ended, so most of my memories of it involve the smell of marijuana smoke, dolls with genitals and itchy bellbottom pantsuits, but my husband was 11 and he remembers hard-core pornographic magazines and coke lines left out in the open at friends' houses, of TEACHERS AT SCHOOL casually talking in the hallway to each other about "swinging".

Lovely!

And as a charming souvenir, we have his gianormous set of 1970s Kids' Activity Books. The recommended "activities" are somewhat dubious. Observe:

Tigertooth Necklace

1) Save the bones from
a cooked turkey neck. Clean as much meat off the bones as you can.

2) Boil the bones until there is no meat left on them at all. Then
soak them overnight in some water and bleach.

AND BLEACH! No safety warnings, no measurements: JUST SOAK SOME BONES IN BLEACH.
But the finished product is exquisite:
That would look PERFECT with a tube top, polyester shorts and a faux-leather fringed purse, all being worn by some 8 year old. PERFECT.

There are, of course, a lot of macrame projects.

There was nothing SPECIFICALLY wrong with macrame - yes, it's ugly, but so are most crafts, really.

But do you remember macrame? DO you remember seeing macrame on the wall at your friend's houses - made by their mother, generally, in between going to primal screen classes and having affairs - and it would always be coated in STRINGS of dust because you CANNOT CLEAN MACRAME?

Gross.

I was just told that macrame is coming BACK INTO FASHION. This is a BAD IDEA.

This fish doesn't know what it did to deserve the fate of being cooked by paraffin on top of a piece of hacked-up garbage by an unsupervised child.


It just does not know.

But it certainly doesn't look happy about it.

That's from the volume entitled "Foraging." Because when I think of what I want my children to do for fun, "rifling through garbage" is RIGHT at the top of the list.

Of course, not everything is vile and loathsome, but a LOT of it is. Ever wanted your child to make a candle by pouring (unsupervised, of course!) boiling hot wax into a bucket of sand? OF COURSE YOU HAVE!


I remember those squatty little sand candles from the 70s. People actually BOUGHT THEM.

This salute to the Native People of North America was made from a meat tray. A meat tray on which the turkey that you used to make the neckbone necklace possibly came from. THE CIRCLE OF LIFE!

My kids, I should add, just LOVE these books.And my husband - the original owner of these breathtaking volumes - actually DID grow up to be an artist. (here's his blog - see?)

And the 1970s, with their casual Keep-On-Truckin' laid back grossness DID encourage creativity. Creativity and herpes and dudes with nose reconstructions thanks to snorting just MASSIVE amounts of coke. But mostly now? They just encourage me to feel kind of queasy. Art!