I once found a rare and precious treasure at a baby shower.
The shower was for my former sister-in-law Violet, wife of Wingding's brother Pete. They were good people, solid and smart and kind, and the imminent birth of their first child was a cause for celebration. I'd made a baby quilt, other guests had brought diapers and bottles and clothes and toys, and the older women were more than happy to share their stories and advice with the mother-to-be.
The hostess, a family friend, had made sure that there was plenty of food, drink, and party favors for one and all. We played games, chatted, ate and drank, and generally had a good time. Violet herself was in good health and good spirits, and joined in the good-natured ribbing about how her next pregnancy should emulate Bobbi McCaughey, mother of the first surviving septuplets. I know it's a cliche, but truly, a good time was had by all.
The gifts had been opened and the party was winding down when I wandered over to the dining room table for a last nibble or two. I was trying to decide between healthy (veggies and dip!) or tasty (sweets and carbs!) when I noticed a basket full of soft pastel washcloths that had been shaped and tied to resemble cute little animals.
Each of these treasures, which the hostess called "boo boo bunnies," included a cavity where one could slip an ice cube, which would then be applied to a bruise to ease the pain and swelling. There was even a little poem about how the bunny would ease the boo boo, which would have been just fine if any of the guests (except Violet) had had young children, known young children, or been a young children. As the average age of the partygoers was around thirty-five to forty, not so much.
I'm not sure what happened to the boo boo bunny I acquired that day - Wingding found it amusing, I found it bewildering, and the felinoids ignored it once they realized it did not contain catnip - but I'm pretty sure it disappeared in the same limbo that contains mismatched socks and old wire coathangers. I do know that I never had the slightest desire to own another one, or to learn how to make my own for fun, profit, and the bewilderment of my friends and relatives. I have more than enough ways to spend what I laughingly call "free time," and adding "making cute stuff to sell on the cheap at swap meets" would be the thing that sent me over the edge into incoherent gibbering.
Needless to say, my taste in crafting tends to run to the beautiful, the useful, and the non-cute. I do have some oddities in my house - I happen to hold with Miss Manners that it is necessary to own at least one magnificently vulgar piece of kitsch to have a house in good taste - and Wingding did own a piece of headgear made entirely of beer cans, which certainly qualified - but my general taste tends towards the less inventively weird; I knit things like sweaters and hats and wrist warmers, illuminate scrolls for the SCA, and piece quilts for warm bedding, not to make the Last Homely Shack even stranger than it already is. Turning otherwise ordinary household items, or outright trash, into crafty knick knacks is a skill I've never acquired, and if my mother made pine cone wreaths for the holidays, well, at least she didn't dye, perfume, gild, or paint the pine cones to look like choo-choo trains, horsies, or nutcrackers.
Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for you, I seem to be in the minority on this. The shelves at the average craft or fabric store groans with books explaining the least likely of crafts (toilet paper cozies that look like sushi! hats knitted from dog hair! paper clip jewelry!) and supplies to make them. Paper, feathers, googly eyes, acrylic yarn, plastic canvas, ribbons, artificial flowers, stencils, stamps, ink, paint...crafting is big, big, business, and the more inventive the better. It's at the point where those of us who prefer traditional forms (raises hand) have to resort to specialty yarn and fabric shops to get anything that isn't cutesy, crafty, or even made of natural fibers if we want to avoid making Handicrafts So Bad They're Good.
Tonight I bring you only one book, a true rarity that cannot be duplicated in the present day. A visionary work of recycling, an artifact of its time, and a splendid example of why so few designers have drawn upon the 1970's for inspiration, this one has it all, and then some:
Pop Topping! by "Pop Top Terp" (Gonzalo Chavez) and Kenneth Patton - way back in 1970 or thereabouts, a man had tickets to a Tom Jones concert. This may sound like the height of kitsch today, but kindly recall that back then, Sir Thomas Jones Woodward, the pride of Pontypridd, was one of the biggest pop music stars in the world. Women threw their panties at him, men envied, and a lot of people just plain liked his music.
Such was the case with Gonzalo Chavez, a humble florist from Greenwich Village. He liked Tom Jones' singing, enough that he and a buddy had scored tickets to a big concert for a night of listening to Glamorgan's gift to the entertainment world crooning "It's Not Unusual," "Thunderball," "What's New, Pussycat?" and other mellow, soothing selections. Being young, and ready for fun, Gonzalo and his buddy wanted to look stylish - it was a Tom Jones concert, after all, and who knows, maybe some of the other concertgoers would settle for them once it became obvious that Jones only had so much time to sort through the mounds of unmentionables flung by eager admirers. Alas, neither of them had much money - Tom Jones tickets weren't cheap - so designer clothing was out of the question. What could they do?
Fortunately for posterity, American crafts, and the wilds of Badbookistan, Gonzalo Chavez had an idea. For reasons that are not clear, he had amassed a collection of the old-fashioned pull tabs from soda and beer cans. These predecessors to modern pull tabs, which were also known as pop tops, consisted of a vaguely triangular patch of aluminum that was removed via a ring:
They were popular, convenient, and had become something of a hazard, since people would either a) rip them off the soda/beer can, drop them into the beverage itself, and then choke on them (not good), or rip them off the soda/beer can, drop them on the ground, and pollute the environment (also not good). Some people collected them to recycle, but most ended up in landfills, parking lots, or the collections of emergency room physicians who had to extract them from the gullets of consumers who'd accidentally swallowed them.
As I said, not good.
Regardless of why or how he'd acquired them, Gonzalo had a fine collection of pop tops. Being a clever and inventive, yet impecunious, man who wanted to look stylin' for his big night out, he cast about for a way to satisfy his craving for fashion and compensate for his lack of funds...and then he noticed the pop tops. A few hours later Gonzalo had two elegant and ecologically sound aluminum pop top vests for himself and his buddy. They threw them on over their regular clothes and bopped off to the concert, secure in the knowledge that no one else would duplicate their unique style.
Gonzalo later claimed that their vests, which had a vaguely medieval look, were such a sensation that concertgoers ignored Tom Jones to ogle the aluminum. This is probably not true, nor is Gonzalo's claim that a woman in a balcony was so mesmerized by the sight of his pop top vest that she leaned over too far and her wig fell off all that likely. However, the vests were such a hit that Gonzalo soon quit his job, moved to San Juan for cheap labor and a ready supply of pop tops, and changed his name to "Pop Top Terp."
Yes. Really.
Most of us would probably not be all that confident in the skills of someone whose name resembled a breakfast pastry, but such was not the case with Pop Top Terp. His clothing line soon included everything from vests and dresses, to hats, to fashions for Fido and the lady of the crash pad.
There were even instructions for home decor, including an oh-so-chic-and-groovy lampshade thingy, and a set of placemats that would make a great gift for your brother-in-law who'd just joined the SCA and wanted to use your freon tank for a helmet.
Recycling, fashion, funk - what's not to like?
As close as some of this looks to those old chains children used to make out of carefully folded chewing gum wrappers, pop topping was soon popular enough that the creator of these unique garments felt compelled to write a book detailing why he made them, how he made them, and how you, too, could use your pop tops to spice up your wardrobe. The book, which was dedicated to "Mother Earth," seemingly because dressing and decorating in pop tops was ecologically correct, was more than just patterns. Along the way Terp also shared his advice on just which pop tops to use for various projects, told his life story, and even claimed that pop topping might be an effective way to mentor the disaffected youth of America:
"One man is a very special case, and I consider him to be my star pupil. Lester Morris, age 21, is a student at the Contemporary Guidance School in New York City. he had taken little interest in anything at all...Through poptopping, Lester had not only archived a sense of accomplishment, but had actually come to the point where he could effectively supervise younger boys, and I am thrilled that I had a hand in that!"
Is it any wonder that the author's photo in
Pop Topping! has a vaguely messianic feel?
Alas for Pop Top Terp and his disciples, detachable pop tops were replaced by the current smaller, non-ringed type seen today. Although some crafters swear that the techniques detailed in Pop Topping! are still of use when working with chainmaille and other forms of fine mesh, pop topping itself is no longer possible unless one has a large collection of unrecycled vintage aluminum pop tops. As Jane and Michael Stern so aptly put it in The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, pop topping is a vanished American craft, like scrimshaw.
As for Pop Top Terp himself, I have been unable to learn what happened to him after beverage manufacturers cruelly changed their containers to deprive him of his livelihood. It is doubtful, however, that he continued to call himself "Pop Top."
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Did you ever try to make crafts from pop tops? Do you even know what a pop top is? Did you own a hat made from beer cans? Pop tops? Did you change your name and go into Witness Protection because you did? The statute of limitations is long expired, so gather 'round the hand-tiled chiminea shaped like Dr. Doom and share....
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