31 August 26
The Era of DIY Sewing Kits
It’s been a long while since I’ve traveled so I was scrambling when packing for our Catalunya trip and didn’t know what to put my clothes in. I was looking for a dark blue bag I thought I had, but didn’t find it, but eventually unearthed the bag shown at left. It is a little small, but we were traveling to a very warm place during summer and wouldn’t need heavy clothes, so the bag would work.
This bag was sewn by my mother around 1980 or thereabouts from a kit made by Altra Sewing Kits. The 1970s through the early 1980s were an era when several companies in the United States such as Altra and Frostline were manufacturing kits for DIYers to sew their own outdoors gear, enclosing the needed precut pieces of fabric, zippers, straps, and so on. My mother liked to sew from these kits and she made a number of pieces of gear for me included several jackets (one made with down), this piece of soft luggage, a rain poncho, and bike panniers.
Towards the end of the 1980s the economics turned against the market for these sorts of kits and these companies went out of business. I do not know of any equivalent kits being made for outdoors gear today. Here is a retrospective about Altra Sewing Kits compiled by somebody who studies the cultural resonances of Boulder, Colorado, where Altra and Frostline were based.
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