Coats and Clark's Contemporary Crochet Throughout the Home 1955

This booklet starts out with this little blurb, 
"Today 'Do It Yourself' is the watchword with American homemakers. Furniture is assembled, sanded and stained; walls are coated with pre-pasted paper, or painted with a roller; floors and walls are covered with specially prepared tile. Every room in the house benefits by the spare-time effort of the owners. Keeping pace with this trend, crochet has expanded from the purely decorative class into the more basic aspects of home furnishing. Thousands of American women, who formerly enjoyed this delightful art only as a hobby, now find that their leisure hours with hook and thread can result in attractive, inexpensive decorator fabrics."

Many of the designs in the booklet are displayed in rooms like the one on the cover. The cover has one of the lampshades, some placemats, and chair cushions. Those chair backs look very uncomfortable. They should have made a cushion for those.​

It's filled with stitch patterns to make crochet fabrics like these, along with ideas on what to use the patterns for.

They even tell you where some of the items in the room came from. In the photo below, the Aristo-Bilt storage unit is by Salmanson & Co, New York. The cushion foam is Koylon Foam by United States Rubber Company. The lamp and accessories are by Richards Morgenthau & Co, New York. The lamp shade and cushion cover are patterns in the booklet along with the chair cover, the rug, the bedspread, the placemat on the table and the one she's crocheting.

This room doesn't have the furniture makers listed but it does have a very vintage feel with the blue crocheted bedspread, more lampshades, another cushion cover and a rug. I'm not sure about the very shiny curtains and pink walls but the rest is cute.

​We've had a dining room and two bedrooms; now we're moving on to the bathroom. The wallpaper is by Pageant, New York, but making the towel edging, lampshade, rug, wastebasket cover, toilet seat cover, and cushion cover are all up to the crocheter.

Don't forget the living room featuring wood paneling! The booklet has the patterns for the lampshade, pillows, blanket, doily, and rug shown here.

They've included many motifs, stitch patterns, edgings, and even fringes that you can use to decorate your midcentury home. I chose not to make anything in this booklet, though I did consider the Sparking Jewel Doily in the photo above. Here's a close-up of the pattern. It uses metallic Knit-Cro-Sheen. I may eventually use one of the edgings for a chair slip-cover that doesn't quite make it to the bottom of a chair. If I do, I'll share it.

Next week I'll be back to some mid 1950s Workbasket Magazines.