I found the Keepsake Transfer Collection, "The Big Book," over 1,000 iron-on designs in one volume, and my first thought wasn't "great find for the shop." It was "what price could possibly make this worth not having on hand."
I sat with that for a minute. I keep craft supplies I never use, plenty of them. I don't need everything that comes through here. There's enough of this stuff in the world that when I actually need a pattern like this again, another one will turn up. So the Big Book is going up for sale, at $25 (free shipping!) for over a thousand designs, and I'm at peace with that.
But it did send me down a real rabbit hole into transfer patterns generally. Here's what else I've turned up recently.
The days-of-the-week Sunbonnet Sue
A Sunbonnet Sue Days of the Week rub-on pattern, seven little bonneted figures, one doing a different chore for each day. This is the kind of pattern that used to show up on kitchen towels by the dozen, and I actually have proof of that: a set of four vintage Sunbonnet Sue tea towels that somebody stitched from a pattern almost exactly like this one, decades ago, spots and all.
Sunbonnet Sue herself goes back further than I expected. She started as an illustration by Bertha Corbett in Minneapolis around 1900, published in a book called The Sun-Bonnet Babies, and by the 1930s she was everywhere, especially on quilts and towels made from scrap fabric and feed sacks during the Depression. A figure with her face hidden by a bonnet turned out to be easy to embroider well, which is probably half of why she never really went away.
The groovy one
McCall's Pattern #2965, "Groovy Animals," for embroidery or applique. Still uncut. The name alone tells you the decade, and the animals live up to it.
A rub-on booklet with range
The Trans-Art Transferable Designs booklet is at least 33 pages deep, all rub-on rather than iron-on, which was its own separate technology at the time: no heat required, just pressure and a burnishing tool. Booklets like this tended to cover a lot of ground in one purchase, alphabets, borders, novelty motifs, so one booklet could outfit a whole season of projects.
Campbell's Kids
A Campbell's Kids transfer pattern from Vogart Crafts, pattern #4102, unused. Branded character patterns like this are a specific category of their own. Companies licensed familiar faces, the Campbell's Kids, comic strip characters, cartoon mascots, so home sewists could put something recognizable on a pillowcase or apron instead of a generic floral. It's advertising and embroidery pattern in one object.
Birds of the United States
Also from Vogart, a quilt blocks pattern called Birds of the United States. Educational needlework was its own whole genre: state birds, state flowers, alphabets with a little picture for each letter. Somebody working through a set like this came out the other side with both a quilt top and something close to a field guide.
What all of this adds up to
None of these individually are rare in a museum sense. But taken together, they're a pretty good cross-section of how transfer patterns actually worked as a category: iron-on versus rub-on, generic versus branded, decorative versus educational, sold as a single sheet or bound into a booklet with three dozen options inside. It's a whole quiet industry that existed just to get a design out of someone's head and onto fabric without them having to draw it freehand.
I keep saying some version of this every time I write one of these posts, but it holds up: the more of this stuff passes through my hands, the more I actually understand what I'm looking at. A book like the Big Book almost didn't leave my house. Most of what's listed here will, and that's fine. There's more where it came from.
