Sunday 16 February 2014

Time Travel

This post was written a while ago, but I couldn't publish it as my mum reads my blog, and it's about a present for her.

A *very* long time ago ( 1918) her grandfather bought her father a postcard, and posted it - it didn't arrive until somewhere round about 1925, but that was to be expected.

The sale of the postcard, and others like it, was to raise money for the Roald Amundsen's North Pole polar drift expedition that was planned to depart in a ship called Fram in 1918.  The money would help pay for the trip and the postcards would be carried on the voyage, " . . . across the Polar Sea and afterwards conveyed by post to the addressee".

Although Amunsen originally planned to use Fram, it became clear that the Fram was no longer suitable for an arctic expedition, so Amundsen decided to use a new ship called the Maud.  The Fram postcards and the subsequently printed Maud postcards all made the journey with Amundsen.

My grandfather's was one of the first batch; with details of the Fram ship:

(sorry, just cannot get it turned the right way)

I guess my great granddad was confident that they wouldn't move in the following seven years!

My mum had the postcard for many years, but then passed it on to my brother.  I got him to send me a photo, and I then did a bit of playing at Spoonflower (do you know the site? you can get almost anything printed onto all sorts of fabrics) and then clicked on the [place order] button.

A few weeks later this arrived:



 And all I had to do was cut the images apart, and hem them,



and I had four of these:


One has been given to mum, another is being posted to Australia to my brother, I have kept one, and the last one will probably go to my Great Aunt in Norway - Although at least one of her 4 brothers obviously had a postcard, (and the other three probably did too,) I don't suppose she had one, as she wasn't born until 1919!


9 comments:

  1. Excellent idea for a pressie, both in the original story and now!

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  2. What a wonderful gift and a great story :)

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  3. Hooray for hitting the 'place order' button on spoonflower.
    What a great way to commemorate a family historical event.

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  4. Lovely story Benta and what a great idea to recreate the postcard as fabric.

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  5. How utterly fabulous! Brilliant story and brilliant idea to re0create it in fabric form!

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  6. What lovely thoughtful thing to do.

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  7. Oh that's a brilliant story and and lovely pressies (even though you won the race!) x

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  8. Lovely idea! I'd love to know where your pieces will be in 100 years time too.

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