The Unremarkable Spray Paint Can Exhibit

A paint salesman named Ed Seymour in Sycamore, Illinois wanted to demonstrate an aluminum paint he had created for painting steam radiators. His wife, Bonnie, suggested using a spray gun, similar to the ones used in deodorizers. Thus, the spray paint can was born in 1949 and the patent was awarded in 1951.

Museum Open House a Success!

After years of dreaming and planning, the Museum of Unremarkable Objects is now a reality. Friends and neighbors joined us for an open house and ribbon cutting the weekend of July 10th.

The museum is open year round-- during daylight hours. Located right next to the Sleepy Hollow Stump, a neighborhood are project.

The Unremarkable Sewing Pattern

Paper patterns were first manufactured in the middle of the 19th century. The first paper patterns were designed by Ellen Curtis Demorest. Ellen began the home sewing pattern industry in 1860 by holding fashion shows in her home and selling the patterns through her magazine, Mme. Demorest’s Mirror of Fashion. The American tailor Ebeneezer Butterick was the first to create a graded sewing pattern in 1863. It was his idea to use tissue paper for the mass production and sale of sewing patterns. The Butterick Publishing Co. was also the first company to introduce an enlarged and detailed instruction sheet, which they called a “Deltor”. James McCall, a Scottish tailor, established the McCall Pattern Company in 1870 in New York City. Patterns were blank tissue until 1919, when they started printing information directly onto the pattern pieces. In the 1920s, selected patterns had full color illustrations on their pattern envelopes. In 1932 they started printing full color illustrations on all pattern envelopes. McCall usually printed the date of release on their envelopes (the only company which consistently did so before mid-century), which makes it easy to date their patterns. Multi-sized patterns (with more than one size graded and appearing on a single tissue pattern) debuted in the 1970s. Fitzpatterns.com began offering downloadable sewing patterns in 2004. These consist of full-size patterns to be printed at a copyshop on a large format printer and or in a tiled version that can be printed on an A4 or letter sized printer and taped together. The traditional view is that home dressmaking was a cheap alternative to ready-made which was becoming increasingly available but was still the more expensive option, as was seeing a dressmaker. However, later research shows that this wasn’t always the case. In a groundbreaking book on home dressmaking, one oral history study showed that many practitioners believed that making clothing at home provided a quality of fit and finish that wasn’t available in shop-bought ‘shoddy’ clothing. Also the variations that could be created from paper patterns (at least 2 or 3 different options were given from each pattern) allowed the sewer an individuality of style that wasn’t available with ‘conformist’ ready-made clothes. It is this creativity that people value today, with home dressmaking on the rise for the first time in decades.