All-Purpose Education

I was about eight years old when my mom signed me up for 4-H in the Busy Bees Club.

 

While many 4-H clubs focus on animal raising, our club was strictly about homemaking skills. (Yes I hear all of you gasping at the horror of teaching homemaking skills to young women during the ERA era. Get over it. You gotta eat some how. Honed cooking, baking, and sewing skills are worth a whole lot more than marching around with burning apparel when it comes time to eat and get dressed for the day.)

So I was signed up for the beginning baking unit and the beginning sewing unit. My mom was an assistant leader and Mary Hall was the head leader. The sewing unit was called "Wyoming Miss Learns to Sew". My very first sewing project was to make a felt needle case by hand. The purple one was my first attempt. I made the green one later for fun.



Lovely don't you think? 

Notice that you can store needles in Sun Bonnet Sue's petticoat and bloomers.

I also made an attractive elastic waist skirt, a red pull over tunic, and a poncho, which was made by sewing two rectangles together, finishing the neck and bottom edge and stitching on the ever popular pom-pom fringe.

Mine was navy. Remember the 70's??? Ponchos and pom-poms!

I must have received a purple ribbon at the county fair for the poncho, because I have the blue ribbon that I received from the state fair for it. 

That was 1977. I don't remember what I baked. It was likely cookies. I do remember being puzzled by the whole recipe thing. 

Recipes are rather confusing when you first start cooking. Now days with blogs, you can see every step along the way through gorgeous pictures, but back then many recipes were still hand written. If you were really lucky it was printed, and there was a picture of the finished product. Mostly all you had was boring black and white words. And in baking those words were and still are important.

I remember looking at a recipe and yelling to my mom. What's all-purpose flour? And she yelled back, "The flour in the canister." Who knew? I didn't buy the stuff.

One day, a few years later, I made a cake using cake flour. I think that was the first, last, and only box of cake flour I have ever touched.

Now days I buy my own flour. I have several different kinds. And when I feel like it I sew my own clothes because I have an All-Purpose Homemaking Education. And I know how to use it.