Grandma\'s soap, and great-grandma\'s household advice
This is a true family heirloom - grandma's Sunlight soap! Granny bought a whole box of Sunlight soap in 1945, to wash diapers with it. Sunlight is pretty much pure soap, so I guess it didn't irritate the skin if diapers were washed with this. Anyway, she bought such a big box, and these soap cubes hold up for so long... that my mother is still left with eleven cubes - after every woman in our family has been using this soap over the years. Me too, of course. We don't use it for "normal" washing, but it's a good stain remover, and I also use it to wash vintage doll clothes.
Mom brought me two new cubes today - though mine that I've had since I moved to my first apartment 9 years ago is still not quite finished. I love the colorful packaging - and the slogan! It says "Extra soapy"! The writing is in German and French of course :cul:.
The books were made by the Sunlight factory too - I found them at flea markets. They're a bit older though - 1920s. But this was a super marketing tool! At the time, you could collect the bottoms of the boxes of all their soap products, and for 12 of those, you got one of the small booklets, that could be put into the "book". The bottoms of the big boxes counted double, but still you had to buy a lot of their soap, bleach and cleaning products to collect all the booklets!
The book on the right is the first one, the left one is kind of the addendum.
Each booklet contains a "lesson" in household advice - so in the end you had a book full of advice on everything: how to decorate your home, how to care for a baby, recipes, how to mend clothes, how to knit, how change old clothes into something new, how to grow veggies, how to clean and so on...
This page explains how this scheme to collect these booklets worked. On the left is the Sunlight cube. Often the last page of the booklet had an ad for one of their products:
What surprises me, that at the time, even in German they used the english words "Jumper" and "Shawl". Very interesting! Lux was the product to wash silks and other delicate fabrics with.
Here's advice on how to make a chic jacket-dress out of an old jacket.
Karin
This is a true family heirloom - grandma's Sunlight soap! Granny bought a whole box of Sunlight soap in 1945, to wash diapers with it. Sunlight is pretty much pure soap, so I guess it didn't irritate the skin if diapers were washed with this. Anyway, she bought such a big box, and these soap cubes hold up for so long... that my mother is still left with eleven cubes - after every woman in our family has been using this soap over the years. Me too, of course. We don't use it for "normal" washing, but it's a good stain remover, and I also use it to wash vintage doll clothes.
Mom brought me two new cubes today - though mine that I've had since I moved to my first apartment 9 years ago is still not quite finished. I love the colorful packaging - and the slogan! It says "Extra soapy"! The writing is in German and French of course :cul:.
The books were made by the Sunlight factory too - I found them at flea markets. They're a bit older though - 1920s. But this was a super marketing tool! At the time, you could collect the bottoms of the boxes of all their soap products, and for 12 of those, you got one of the small booklets, that could be put into the "book". The bottoms of the big boxes counted double, but still you had to buy a lot of their soap, bleach and cleaning products to collect all the booklets!
The book on the right is the first one, the left one is kind of the addendum.
Each booklet contains a "lesson" in household advice - so in the end you had a book full of advice on everything: how to decorate your home, how to care for a baby, recipes, how to mend clothes, how to knit, how change old clothes into something new, how to grow veggies, how to clean and so on...
This page explains how this scheme to collect these booklets worked. On the left is the Sunlight cube. Often the last page of the booklet had an ad for one of their products:
What surprises me, that at the time, even in German they used the english words "Jumper" and "Shawl". Very interesting! Lux was the product to wash silks and other delicate fabrics with.
Here's advice on how to make a chic jacket-dress out of an old jacket.
Karin
