1920s Sealing Wax Art Jewelry

Over the weekend we went antiquing and I found this really pretty booklet on sealing wax art. Sealing wax art involves melting sealing wax, originally used to seal letters, and shaping the softened wax into different beads and pendant shapes. I had seen wax flowers and pearls before but this was new and I never thought to try and make some myself.

DIY Your Own Vintage Style Jewelry with the whole book here: Sealing Wax Art

Some of my friends and I have been mailing each other letters with wax seals so I already had the materials and thought I might as well try and get some practice in before all those Roaring '20s parties start happening. I still need a lot of practice but it was fun to do. The book shows some very pretty, intricate examples. 

My attempt. I still need more practice!

The only advice I can give so far is that the harder, wax pellets that are melted in a spoon were giving me better results than the sticks with the wicks in them.

Advertisement from 1924

You can read the whole book here: Sealing Wax Art

If you try it out, I'd love to see photos of what you come up with!

The Ugly Girl Papers, 1870s Beauty Advice

I came across the depressingly titled “Ugly-Girl Papers” This seems like something my mother would have given an awkward, gangly, thirteen year old me if we lived in the 1870s. I assume this book would be given as a gift because I can’t see any girl picking this up in a bookshop and not feeling a rush of embarrassment. She would then keep it, not on a bookshelf but wrapped up in a rag, tucked under her bed or hidden in a pantry, only to sneak peaks at it when her family is out. Most of the recipes and suggestions in this book include toxic chemicals such as ammonia, nitrate of mercury, sulfurous acid (a chemical found in acid rain,) and borax.

As much as this book tries to reassure the “ugly reader” that there is hope for her, it perpetuates a lie that is all too familiar to us today: “you are ugly and need products to fix you.” Makeup is fun and that is all it ever should be- no one should feel that they are not able to leave the house without caking pounds of makeup on their face. It really is upsetting to read this book; you can imagine the ladies of low self-esteem who heard enough lies that they put numerous poisons on themselves.  

It reminds me of the poem by Marge Piercy entitled “A Work of Artifice":

“The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you

love to touch”





Some of excerpts from Ugly Girl Papers, some are sad to read, others are interesting to see how they used items: