Museum Monday

Green Wool Baby Shoes 958.2017.04

 This weeks Museum Monday is a cutie patutie pair of green wool baby booties....I mean, these things are Ka~UTE!  If you have ever studied or admired the early 1840-50 folkart child portraits of the time, these look like they could have just jumped straight off of a canvas with their vivid bright colors and decorative stitchings.

  They are fully lined in a cream figured silk taffeta~ a scrap of  Pappa's waistcoat most likely...and are the usual construction of upper joined with the sole via bound edges of each whipped together.

  They are side lacing, which makes them a bit unique, and retain their original multi color braided lacings with poms at the ends. One could speculate that they could be doll shoes, from their nice condition and small size~ indeed its quite hard to tell period doll clothing from childrens~ but as I was unstuffing these after I bought them, there was a *surprise* tucked tight down into the toe of one of them~

 Kind of a bittersweet surprise....first I found the little curl of chestnut brown hair, and then tucked carefully to the side, was a folded paper~ I was SO hoping for a name, but alas, upon opening it up, it is a carefully cut piece of advertisement that reads, 'Winchester's Hypophosphite of Lime and Soda'. I thought this quite odd....why would someone cut out those words, and place them in the shoes along with a tiny lock of hair?  I looked up Winchester's Hypophosphite and found that it was introduced in 1858, about the same era in time of our little shoes here, and that it was a tonic used to treat pulmonary consumption & lung disorders... One cannot help to assume, that the little angel who once wore these precious little shoes was fatally afflicted~