Wednesday, April 21, 2010

The Sewing Box

I’m happy  to say that my parent’s move is over and that they are now settling into their new home.  The downsizing that we had to do was a fairly huge task, but we managed to have some fun along the way.

One of the things that turned up was this vintage sewing box:
Sewing box
It belonged to my great aunt Florence who passed away over 30 years ago.  When I opened it up, I found lots of fun old buttons.  There was a collection of metallics:
metallic
and an assortment of cloth covered ones:
Cloth covered
There was an entire set of 6 large and 6 small silver buttons that were probably intended for a jacket.  These babies were surprisingly heavy for buttons.
Silver
  There were little fancies:
Fancies
And lots of buttons that were obviously cut from previous garments.  Great Aunt Florence was way ahead of the game with recycling.  ;-)
recycled
Don’t these pink plastic buttons just scream 1960’s?
1960 Pink
Of course, there were the usual bits and bobs that find themselves in the button collection:
assortment
There were also a few travel sewing kits.  We’ve all seen the ones that hotels give out to guests, right?  It’s good advertising.
hotel sewing kits
But, I can’t imagine what the connection was between this advertiser and sewing:
Seagrams sewing kit 
If you’ve had a little Seagram’s VO, I suggest you step away from sharp objects.

The box also had a few complimentary tape measures from various sources:
measuring tapes
Oddly enough, the red one with the tape wrapped around and held with an elastic because it no longer would retract had this slogan:
DSCF3768
In case you can’t see it, it says “proven reliability”.  Ummmmm, no.

Last but not least were some wooden spools of thread.  Apparently it was very important for thread to be “boil fast” back in the day.  That’s what it says on the top of each spool.
Boil fast
I had to admire my aunt’s frugality.  The brown and purple spools had less than a yard of thread left on them. barely even enough to sew on a button.
Thread
I plan on keeping the spools in a glass container somewhere in my sewing room where I can see them, but the buttons are going to be joining up with all the other buttons I already have in my own collection.  I imagine that one day  my own descendents can look at them and decide what to do with them.

3 comments:

  1. What beautiful buttons .I've seen those wooden spools used for door pulls in a sewing room ,I collected a number of them with that intent but still haven't gotten around to using them .

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  2. Love that sewing box! So pretty!

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  3. What a wonderful treasure you've found!

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