Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Swell Ties to Crochet

My brother is an avid stamp collector and recently acquired a stack of old envelopes. In one, he found a pamphlet of instructions to crochet neckties from the1920s, which was given to me.the envelope is addressed to Miss Katharine B. Collier, of Vassar College, who, according to my Google searches, must have been Katherine Brownell Collier, a 1908 graduate who went on to earn a PhD from Columbia University with her dissertation entitled Cosmogonies of Our Fathers: Some Theories of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Why she had this pattern delivered to Vassar is a mystery, but I found no other Katherine B. Collier among Vassar alumni.   

The ties are made up in Corticelli Spool Silk thread, which the instructions tell us is "the very latest thing in swell neckwear". The envelope has Corticelli's cute kitten logo, and I date the publication after 1922, when the Nonotuck Silk Company merged with the Brainerd and Armstrong Company to form the Corticelli Silk Company. 













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