and the joy - not - of sewing the latter on.
You remember name tapes don't you? I remember actually seeing them made at a state show. I must have been about eight or nine at the time. I know my mother ordered more while we were there.
Oh yes, we had name tapes. They were skinny little pieces of material with our names woven into them. You could get blue on white, red on white or green on white. They were printed in block letters or written in "cursive". Ours were always printed in block letters and blue on white.
My mother made us sew our own name tapes on too - as soon as she considered we were old enough to do the job ourselves. It was our responsibility to make sure they were sewn on so well they didn't come off. It was "Grandma", my paternal grandmother, who saved the day for me. She would thread the needle for me and get me to put a few stitches in and then finish the job. She did much the same for my brother and Middle Cat. I don't think the Black Cat had too many problems because one benefit of the hand me down clothing was that the name tapes were still there!
I suppose my mother was aware of the help we were getting. It was one less job for her.
Most children seemed to have those sort of name tags at the time. I know that not having something properly labelled was considered to be a major sin at school. Our teachers made sure we knew if something was not labelled. "How can you expect to get it back if you haven't got your name inside it?"
Our clothes were not the cheap, mass produced chain store type clothing children wear now. School uniform was something you were expected to take great care of. Our "Brownie" and "Cub" uniforms were the same. Even our socks were labelled.
I have gone on labelling things with my name throughout my life. At a meeting a couple of years ago there were three raincoats all the same and much the same size. Mine was one and the person handing them out said, "No, that is Cat's. She has her name in it." Oh, it is very useful.
We have labelled all the Senior Cat's clothing. It doesn't stop things going missing in the residence but it does make it easier to track things down. I like to think it has stopped him losing more than he has.
And what have we used to label many things? Yes, you can still get those exact same labels all these years later. People must find them useful.
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Oh they are useful indeed! One friend ordered them with the surname in the middle, and one child's initial before and the other's after - so they needed careful folding when sewing, but did for both the youngsters. I had just the one forename, so since it had the same first letter as my Father's middle name, my Mother adopted the same trick on some leftover tapes of his.
The ones I like best were the ones that said "Made by . . . " with a little design of a reel of cotton. Not much call to sew them in now since I am past making stuff, but they still give me pleasure when I am ironing.
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