Friday, October 18, 2019
Finally I can Finnish my search. When I was really little, in our first house on Canterbury Road, we had a huge framed canvas print of a primary-school class wearing old-fashioned-looking clothes. It was on the wall in the tiny back room that was used as my brother's bedroom when he was a baby.
I loved the outfits and was super into the pinafores with the puff-sleeve blouses. At the time I didn't think of this as an especially 'European' look but one of my favourite dresses was a Tyrolean-themed ballet costume made by my mother, which had a white mock blouse and black pinafore (but it was all one piece) decorated with coloured rickrack. I think somewhere there is a pic of me in about grade 1 wearing the dress and dancing around a maypole at school. Hmmm, why did I love Midsommar so much?
I have thought about this print so often over the years. I don't know what happened to the actual object but we moved house when I was in maybe grade 2 and I don't remember it being at the new place. Anyway, every so often I'd try to Google it using words like "1970s retro children class picture illustration". Today I struck gold!
It's 'Luokkakuva', a textile designed by Katrina Rissanen Viljamaa in 1978 for the Finnish design firm Finlayson. It came in several colourways – I think we might have had the blue one.
I loved the outfits and was super into the pinafores with the puff-sleeve blouses. At the time I didn't think of this as an especially 'European' look but one of my favourite dresses was a Tyrolean-themed ballet costume made by my mother, which had a white mock blouse and black pinafore (but it was all one piece) decorated with coloured rickrack. I think somewhere there is a pic of me in about grade 1 wearing the dress and dancing around a maypole at school. Hmmm, why did I love Midsommar so much?
I have thought about this print so often over the years. I don't know what happened to the actual object but we moved house when I was in maybe grade 2 and I don't remember it being at the new place. Anyway, every so often I'd try to Google it using words like "1970s retro children class picture illustration". Today I struck gold!
It's 'Luokkakuva', a textile designed by Katrina Rissanen Viljamaa in 1978 for the Finnish design firm Finlayson. It came in several colourways – I think we might have had the blue one.
