My Museum

The always adorable & very generous Beth at Love Laugh Quilt is hosting a link-up. The purpose of the link-up: to show our beloved, collected & hoarded old sewing things. Anyone who has stopped by my blog more than once would, I think, not be at all surprised that *I* have lots of beloved, collected & hoarded old sewing things.
I am from a long line of sewing women, sewing women who never got rid of anything -- because that is what you did then, you saved & scrimped, mended & made do. Many of those things have ended up with me. Some I use, some I decorate with, some I just pull out from time to time to look at & love.

So what is in my museum?
This is the top of my fabric cabinets. There on the left is the sewing basket -- mine in yellow -- like Beth's blue one, a stellar pincushion/oddity that I found at a thrift shop, Mom's jars of wooden spools, my toy sewing machine & iron, Mom's toy iron.

On my sewing room wall is this funny little shelf. It must have been built to hold spools -- there are little pegs on the tiny shelves. And so I filled the pegs with old, handed-down spools & added some cards of buttons & a needle book.

 

On my sewing table, not so much sewing accessories, as re-purposed sewing accessories. Grandma's depression glass cookie jar filled with spools of thread. Mom's odd flower frog holding pencils, seam ripper, etc. Great-great grandmother's compote dish holding bobbins & sewing machine feet. And a goofus glass bowl filled with cut fabric ready to sew.

Another re-purposed sewing accessory is my old metal dollhouse. I anguished over whether or not to keep it -- where would I put it? what would I do with it? Then the perfect use came to me!

Lastly, one drawer of the cabinet of my Grandma's treadle sewing machine. In it, along with spools of thread & the spindle-like bobbins that fit the machine were buttons, pennies, crayons, chalk, pill bottles filled with snaps & hooks & eyes, those little stocking holders snipped from girdles -- & string. Quite a lot of string. All carefully wound around bits of cardboard, old envelopes & labeled: Short Pieces, Long Pieces, Longer Pieces. I find them so very touching. I will never get rid of them.

Thanks for the idea, Beth.
It is always to fun to share a trip down Memory Lane!