Back Then Part Two

Back with more pics of what I found in my thrifted time capsule handmade sewing box. This matchbox was filled with straight pins and tiny buttons, also something my grandmother used to do with hers. It makes me wonder if the box could date back to the forties, and was inherited by the next generation.

I found fine steel crochet hooks (one was a double-0 with a cap for the hook, which I've never seen before) and a very slender, slightly bent awl-type tool that may be a thread picker.

I've only seen reproduction wooden needle cases. This one is the real deal.

And it still had needles inside.

It's always fun to guess what the original owner did with their tools and notions. The box's contents were a bit disordered, but from everything I saw I think this was a working sewer's box, probably primarily used mostly for clothes making and mending (there was a pattern wheel tracer tool and a well-used bit of tailor's chalk in the box.) Yet she definitely crocheted, too.

There were some mysteries, too. I've never seen a razor knife like this. Could it be an ancient ancestor of the rotary cutter?

I reorganized everything as I went through it; here are all the spools of thread that came in the box. Some I recognize as coming from the seventies; others are wooden and quite old. I love finding spools with just a yard or two of thread saved on them. That always touches my frugal little heart, as I do the same. :)

Anyway, I will preserve this time capsule and hope that the next generation in my family finds it just as interesting.

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Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

Valerean

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