Funny the way children change our hopes and dreams.
Part of it is to get things when they’re on sale or the style/pattern your kid likes is around, you don’t necessarily get to set the timing of that first move.
At the funeral of my husband’s uncle, I heard a small child ask, “Is Grandpa in the hope chest?” (“Grandpa” would have thought that was hilarious.)
It is hilarious. Kids ask the best, most logical questions. But hilarious.
That’s a mite confusing. How would you know what monogram to embroider on your linens before you landed a fiance?
It isn’t only monograms that get embroidered
Ta.
This has been an enlightening thread. I never heard of Lane before today. I’m beginning to imagine that in some regions it used to be as much a household name for high school kids as Josten’s. At least for the girls.
A lot of it was also just hemming, I think. Putting neat, strong, even hems on a household’s worth of linens is no easy task.
I’ve only heard of them as things in old books, and like some other people associated them more with Victorian times than something within living memory. My mother got a job and moved out into a bedsit at 16, so she wouldn’t have had anything of the sort.
I recall reading in a Miss Manners book that girls embroidered their maiden name’s initials on linen. (She mentioned something about that being a good idea, in case the woman was later widowed, so they could be used in a different household.) The same rule held for engraved silverware.
Same here (class of '81 high school grad), but not sure when my mother (born late 1920s) acquired the cedar chest.
Read about hope chests as a child and teen but had no expectation of having one or accumulating household linens for one.
And yes, pre-marital initialing/monogramming of dry goods was done with the maiden-name initials of the girl in question.
AFAIK this custom only really shifted to using married-name initials in the late 20th century, when department-store bridal registries and machine embroidery became so widespread that it was feasible to acquire all your household linen and silver—and to have it marked if you so desired—between the announcement of the engagement and the wedding itself.
And also making patchwork quilts, knitting blankets/comforters, and even seaming fabric breadths together for bedsheets because extra-wide sheeting fabric wasn’t available commercially:
Not to mention constructing pillowcases, towels, etc.
There was a hell of a lot of work involved in assembling a household’s worth of linens and other equipment, even before you got to the purely decorative elements such as embroidered initials and lace edgings.
I have been trying to figure out when sheets and tablecloths started to come already hemmed. I have an idea in my head it was later than people assume . . . that housewives were routinely putting hems on linens into like the WWI era. But I don’t know why I think that, and the internet is silent.
Gotcherback, sister, or at least I think so. Here’s a June 1934 article from the magazine Maclean’s discussing trousseau linens:
So yeah, even in the 1930s it would not have been unheard-of for a bride to be making her own bed linens, and even commercially produced ones were routinely cut to custom length before hemming. I’ll bet many housekeepers even in that period had sheets custom cut but hemmed them at home.
Thank you! That was my impression. It may come from reading too many girl’s books (not just Little House, but also Anne Shirley and Betsy-Tacy!) or my own grandmother’s stories.
What is Josten’s?
Also, i think of a trousseau as being the collection of goods, not any particular container to put them in. You store your trousseau in the hope chest, if you happen to own a hope chest.
I have a couple of pieces of Lane that I got at an estate sale. Decent stuff—plywood, not particle board dressers.
Growing up in the Midwest we had Herff Jones instead of Josten’s. These are class rings, graduation announcements, probably more school-related stuff. We had the choice of “square” or “round” for our rings plus a few other things. Have you seen them lately? Some go for dog tags, bracelets, lockets…
For me, Josten’s was the company that did class rings and yearbooks.
That was my experience with a “hope chest” growing up. Starting around 6th grade, several deaths in the family resulted in my house being flooded with cedar chests. My parents ended up keeping two – a nice Lane chest in the style of a lowboy, but with a top that opened like a traditional chest; and a very plain chest (possibly handmade). We used them for linen storage until I was in high school, when my sudden interest in Fiestaware caused my dad to realize that at some point very soon I would be living on my own. With a little input from me, he and my mom started stocking the plain cedar chest with useful household items – a couple of sets of Fiesta, basic pots and pans, inexpensive (but durable!) towel sets from Lowes – so that I would be set. I also ended up receiving quite a few small appliances as high school graduation gifts. So yeah, while I definitely wasn’t familiar at all with the traditional concept of a “hope chest,” the one I had ended up being very beneficial to me.
Josten’s is the company that does the yearbooks and graduation paraphenalia. At least that was when I was in high school (graduated 1998). I had no idea they were still around.