About

Welcome to Mary Frances explained!

Since I was young, I've had a passion for the Mary Frances stories written by Jane Eayre Fryer. I liked to make the things that girls were making 100 years ago, and pretend I was living back then, too. But I encountered many problems on the way- terminology has changed for many specific things, like needle sizes when knitting, or the names of certain weights of yarn, or oven temperatures.

 Through trial and error and lots of Googling, I managed to figure most things out on my own, but websites and blogs which thoroughly look at patterns and recipes from the early 1900s are hard to come by! There are lots of sources which may look at their way of life, but few which give modern day alternatives to a specific type of yarn or fabric mentioned in the Mary Frances books. Some things I could never figure out and I gave up on them.

I am creating this blog to document the process I go through to replicate as close as possible the recipes, patterns, and methods in the Mary Frances series from the original books in hope that it may help someone else who wants to follow the same process that the author originally intended.

One of the best websites which provides quality replicas of things relating to the Mary Frances series is Lacis, I highly recommend them. There is also a set of 100th anniversary edition Mary Frances books which are available to purchase on Amazon, which are slightly edited paperback versions of the originals with modern instructions. These would have been so helpful when I was younger! The only disadvantages of these books is that they are all in black and white, they are softcover, and the patterns in the knitting and crochet book and the sewing book are tailored to 18 inch tall American Girl dolls rather than the originally intended 16 inch dolls. But the content interpretation has been fantastically done, good on you Linda Wright!