Going Metric tea towels

A couple of tea towels I missed out last week........Grrrrrrrr!

Belinda Lyon clothkit oxfam cut out doll

Last week my brother in law was clearing out his parents loft and he found this old doll. It looks remarkably like a figure I posted back in 2010. It turns out that she is designed by illustrator, Belinda Lyon who created a whole series of dolls for Oxfam, called cut out dolls. Sold as a pattern, and printed on a cotton tea towel, which you then, cut, stuffed and made up as the doll. It was a pretty impressive series, and so, of its time.

This doll is Malee, a Thai Temple dancer, you can see Nada, the Algerian girl from the series at h is for home, who have also set up a small flickr site celebrating Belinda Lyon.

Stay Sharp..... Harp lager tea towel

Electrical Association for Women: 1970s Wiring Tea Towel

As promised in my last post, here is the tea towel that was issued by The Electrical Association for Women! It dates from the early 1970s when the wiring colours, inside electrical plugs changed from red, green and black to blue, brown, yellow & green.

Why they produced a tea towel, I dont know?

Miroslav Sasek

As I hinted in the Jill Mcdonald post,the other day. Miroslav Sasek was one of my favourite Illustrators as a child. I was delighted to see that the This is Miroslav Sasek site has been redesigned and looks better than ever! I was really excited to see the link to the film of This is Israel on You Tube. Many thanks to oldlibraryfilms for uploading it.

Ive long collected anything to do with Sasek, and in fact probably my first purchase on ebay was for a signed Sasek book. Since then a few strange things have turned up, there were postcards from France and a poster from Hong Kong. But most excitingly, a tea towel of This is London. The tea towel came from America where the sellers aunt had collected "dish cloths" on her travels around the world. Screen printed on Irish Linen, its a lovely thing, but its lost some of the warmth of the book.

This tea towel is different from the one on the Sasek site, so who knows perhaps there are more gems out there waiting to be found. In 1996 I did attempt to find Sasek only to learn he had died in 1980. Virgin owned the rights to the books back then, and in a brief telephone conversation , I suggested it would be great to reprint. At the time I was told the world had changed a lot since the original books release and there would be too many inaccuracies if they were reissued.

Funny How times change!

Luckily I did manage to track down some original art work, more of which another time. Till then just a little detail from the above tea towel.