Browsing by Author "Pohjola, Tanja"

Thesis narrates a dressmaker's life in a small village called Itäkylä, located in Lappajärvi municipality in the late 1940s and in the early 1950s. This study is placed in the history of craft and craft culture. It is a narrative study; the literature and empiric data discusses with each other through the entire study. The aim was to understand the studied phenomenon, in this case the dressmaker's work and to describe and interpret it in the light of her time. How much the environment in which she grew up affected the dressmaker's career choice? What was Itäkylä's craft culture like during the Second World War and after it? What kind of craft traditions the dressmaker's childhood home offered and above all, what it was like to be a dressmaker in the 1940s and 1950s in a small rural village community? The perspective of this study is in micro-history and craft culture that surrounded the dressmaker. The study is a narrative and the empiric data consists of interviews with 83 years old informant. The aim was to collect her stories, and the transcribed data consists of sixty pages. The interview data was processed in a narrative way; a new story, the dressmaker's biography was created on the basis of it. The analysis is a data-oriented narrative content analysis. The data were divided in eight different themes, which reflected the study's chronology. During the dressmaker's childhood and youth, crafts were present in everyday life and they were associated with positive memories and encouragement. In the stories she told, the post-war countryside is coloured as a world that was dominated by women. Itäkylä was known for its linen fields. Crafts were villagers' daily life and an important economic activity. The dressmaker's work in the late 40s and early 50s seems to have been a busy but rewarding occupation, where the most stress was caused by the shortage of fabrics and materials. Due to the period of shortage, the dressmaker's ingenuity was under severe strain. She has, however, experienced herself as a self-confident seamstress. Patterns were not used in making clothes, which was typical in rural areas. The informant's home environment and surrounding craft culture seem to have been a good seedbed on her way to become a dressmaker.