I’m reading On the Other Side of the Hill, part of a spinoff series of the Little House on the Prairie books. It was written by Roger Lea MacBride about his adoptive mother, Rose Wilder, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder. This particular book has so many fascinating little historical details it makes my head spin–I just spent a while reading through information about how pink used to be associated with boys and blue with girls, after a little aside in the book about Laura Ingalls Wilder sewing a pink layette set for her friend who was hoping for a boy.
There are a few things I’ve run into, though, that were not explained and that did not easily yield answers via the magic of Google/SDMB search:
A darning egg. Laura refuses to buy a darning egg from the Sears Roebuck on the grounds that she already has a perfectly good goose egg. I assume this is used somehow for darning socks, but how? And is she talking about a literal goose egg that she just keeps around indefinitely in her sewing basket? Wouldn’t it smell bad eventually? Couldn’t you end up poking holes in the egg with your sewing needle, or cracking it?
Stockinet dress shields. Same context–they’re offered through the Sears Roebuck catalog, but Laura decides that muslin will suffice. Are these the equivalent of sanitary napkins? (Seems far too racy for Little House on the Prairie, but it was the first thing I thought of.) Do they go in your armpits? Are they some kind of larger, more inclusive undergarment, like a chemise or something? I assume the “stockinet” part means they’re knitted, or is this just my current obsession with knitting speaking?
Also mentioned: a butter fork. One of the hits on Google mentions that this is a fork used to transfer butter to your bread plate, but this seems like an incredibly fussy, silly item for a poor farm family to even consider ordering. Was there a different type of butter fork back then with a different use or is that pretty much what it must be? I don’t think they have a cow, so I assume it’s not used for actually making butter.
When I was a kid, way back in the '50s, my mother used to darn the holes in our socks with a darning egg. In fact, I think I may actually have one somewhere in the house. It’s an egg-shaped thing with a handle (all in one piece).
Dress shields were (are?) used in the arm pit, to protect a dress or blouse from perspiration stains. I don’t know why men’s shirts didn’t have them; maybe some did.
Your other two questions were answered. And yes a butter fork is for transfering a pat of butter to your butter plate. My grandmother had one. The stick of butter was cut and laid out in pats on a plate. You used the butter fork to take a pat and put it on your butter plate. You never ever took butter from the main butter plate directly with your own butter knife.
Dress shields still exist. You can buy them at fabric/sewing supply stores.
Butter forks (and all sorts of other weird untensils) actually had a purpose. It was to keep the grease and bits of food picked up by your knife/fork/spoon from being transferred to the butter. Since butter was hard to come by and had a tendency to turn rancid, you wanted to keep your butter as clean as possible.
And most tableware sets were expensive and handed down from generation to generation. Sometimes when you got a few dollars ahead you replaced the missing pieces or added new ones.
As for darning eggs – my mother had a darning egg. Probably my sister still has it somewhere. You pulled the sock tight over the egg and darned it while the sock was fully stretched. Think of it as writing on a balloon. If you write on the balloon when it is deflated, the leters will be faded and distorted when the balloon is inflated. If you darn a sock when the sock is fully stretched, the stitches (and the repair) will be much stronger.
I am not a goose, but I believe goose eggs have much tougher shells than chicken eggs. And if an egg starts to smell bad, you can make a hole in it and blow out the yolk and white.
My aunt had an egg darner in her sewing box, but it was made from a dried out squash! I was fascinated by it when I was a child in the 1940’s.
A few years ago, I had a small squash just the right size left over from a harvest table decoration. I kept it and let it dry out naturally. Now I have a darning egg! I can hear the dried out seeds rattling around inside.
I’ve seen butter forks included in flatware sets at stores and in peoples homes. It’s one those odd pieces that always goes in the “everything else” part of the silverware caddy. I also see them at restaurants on the butter dish. I’d never really thought about it until now though.
Since no one else has mentioned it, most darning eggs I’v seen have been wooden…my mom still uses hers.
And dress shields are important not merely for absorbing perspiration…I mean that is their primary purpose…but the reason is, you didn’t launder clothing as often back then, and antiperspirants/deodorants weren’t widely used, so you could just launder the dress shields instead of the whole garment. That’s why a lot of women these days use them when wearing dry-clean only suits.
My mom has a wooden darning egg, too, but she never uses it. It’s almost imossible to darn a sock without leaving a small clot of thread that will irritate the foot as it rubs in the shoe.
Darning eggs – they just had to be rounded and smooth and the right size to slip into a sock so the sock could be darned. An egg shape was perfect and darning eggs were made of different materials. I’ve also seen darning mushrooms. Wood was common, as was china or glass. A dried gourd would certainly also have worked, and been cheaper than a boughten darning tool. Same with a goose egg. The goose egg would have been blown out, and washed. Goose eggs are sturdier than chicken eggs, but would probably eventually have cracked or broken. But if you kept geese, then getting a replacement would have been as easy as getting another egg and blowing it out.
Dress shields – were indeed worn in the armpits of good dresses. Women wouldn’t have bothered with them for housedresses that were easily washable. But, back in the day, a woman’s ‘good’ dress or dresses were hard to launder – they were made of tricky fabrics, with fragile trimming that often had to be removed before the dress could be cleaned. So ladies wore dress shields in order to stretch the time between laundering. The dress shield were easily removed for laundering. Usually they were made of muslin, but stockinette would have worked too – and probably been softer. But it probably would have been more expensive, and probably not as sturdy and long-lasting as muslin. Men didn’t use armpit sheilds (usually, some may have, I suppose) because men’s shirts, like women’s plain housedresses were easily laundered.
The butter fork – during the Victorian era, tableware was filled with bizarre single-use implements. A butter fork is far from the strangest example. You could eat an entire 10 course meal and never use the same utensil twice.
What’s key about what Jess says is “in the Victorian era.” Mass-production of silverware really got going somewhere in the second half of the 19th century (I want to say the 1880s), and as a result the number of pieces of silverware available exploded also. Prior to this, a place setting consisted of a knife, a fork, a soup spoon, and a tea spoon, possibly with the addition of a “dessert service” that had a small knife and fork for eating fruit. Travel sets would also have a “bird fork,” a pointy, dangerous-looking thing for holding a roast bird while carving it. There are a few examples of very early egg-and-marrow spoons, too, used for scooping out the contents of tight corners.
It was the Victorians who invented bird forks and knives (as in, for eating birds), fish forks and knives, four kinds of soup spoons, luncheon forks and knives, dinner forks and knives, salad forks and knives, ice cream forks and knives, yada yada yada.
Serveware wise, also. Before the Victorian explosion a serving set would probably consist of just carving knives, a big carving fork, a fish slice, salt spoons, and some large spoons. A dessert set might also include cream spoons, which were like little individual ladles. It took the Victorians to think up asparagus servers and butter forks.
My mom has a couple of darning eggs, too. They’re about the shape and size of goose eggs (no handles), but hers are stone (marble, or something like it). I don’t know where she got them. But even as frugal, craftsy, and textile-inclined as my mom is, even she doesn’t darn socks any more. When they wear out, she buys new ones, and weaves the old ones into rugs.
One of my grandmothers kept chickens. Apparently if you always take all the eggs from the nests, the chickens tend to lay fewer, or even quit. So people who keep chickens have (had?) these glass eggs that they leave in the nests to keep the birds happy. They are a little bigger than the biggest real eggs, so that they are easy for humans to recognize. Apparently these make good darning eggs because that is what my mom, both grandmothers, and all my aunts always used when darning socks. One grandmother had a wooden egg which was apparantly inferior, as the needle would sometimes hang up on the wood, but never on the glass eggs.
Socks are knit, and are therefore stretchy. Darning is basically weaving, and therefore not stretchy. If you don’t stretch the sock while darning it, then you concentrate the stress at the repair, which will soon fail.
There is also the darning mushroom which I think is more common in the UK than the darning egg. I can remember my mother using these . They were either made of wood, or sometimes Bakelite (an early form of plastic)
A good portion of the dresses in my museum’s collection have a lot of damage under the arms because of sweat/oil residue. The cloth just crumbles away. I’ll never forget the time we were putting an exhibit together and found a dress with the “pit pads” still intact.The things were rock-hard.
My mother’s darning egg is made out of a kind of white, translucent stone. It’s quite pretty, along with being functional. She still knits socks on occasion – which are very comfy and seem to last much longer than the store-bought kinds – and has darned a pair or two of my favorites that I couldn’t bear to part with when they got holes.