Hearts and Flowers, Buttons and Bows, Old Lace…but no arsenic. I hope.

We had my ma and pa over for a nice meal a few weeks back, to celebrate their SIXTIETH wedding anniversary.  SIXTY!!

She arrived [as usual] with various carrier bags of stuff- a load of net curtains for me to shorten, a bag of clothes to go to the charity shop, and a large carrier bag full of ‘lace and things’ for me to forage from.  My decidedly NOT crafty mum used to make those horseshoes that we all used to carry at our weddings- remember them?

Instead of the ubiquitous plastic ones you could buy, my great aunt had worked out how to make personalised ones, using a cardboard template, covered in silver foil.  She then knitted  a lacy sleeve for it, and trimmed it with ribbon threaded through the slots, and little fake flowers and things attached.  They then used to sell them, probably for peanuts knowing my mum who still makes and sells extremely rich Dundee cakes to family and friends for barely the cost of the ingredients.

Here’s me in 1980, aged 19 at wedding #1 carrying the monster horseshoe great-auntie made for me [and which mum INSISTED that I carry so as not to offend her!]

Anyway.  Mum long since stopped making the beasts, and recently unearthed the bagful of bits she used for them…and of course dumped it onto me.  I will probably keep about half of it, as I find lace oddments are useful for all sorts of internal jiggery pokery on garments, and ribbon oddments are great for shoulder reinforcement etc.  the rest will be donated to the school art department, including those odd little tatty red hearts-on-wires.

In amongst all this, I found this little bit of history, which I vaguely remember playing with as a child-  a teensy, tattered and battered little sewing kit [I think they used to be called ‘etuis?].  the cap is a thimble of course, and inside there’s a little metal rod with tiny spools of black and white threads.  The end of THAT comes off, to show where you can store a few needles.  Worth nothing, but I’ll undoubtedly tuck it away and forget about it [throwing it away seems cruel lol]  No idea why one of the pics got that weird line across it.  Meh.

There were also a couple of safety pins, and ONE button.  This prompted me to do another organisational task that I’ve been postponing for ages- sorting the button box.  My chat with the head of art informed me that they are happy to take any number of buttons off me that the kids use for various mixed media projects, so I planned to fill a jar or two and get rid of them.  Not a moment too soon, as the really useful box I keep my buttons in was having difficulty staying closed, and I have no idea why so many have accumulated…

Here’s the result.

the jar is going to the art department

Better!