We’ve been continuing to clear my MIL’s house, and sorting through what is no longer needed. It was the home that MOH spent his teenage years in, and holds many memories for the whole family, and it also has plenty of stuff, as family homes do. A fair amount of that has come back with us, and that includes some craft stuff which, as you can see, needs sorting.
What’s strange though is that now this untangling is soothing. Previously I’d not had the patience for it, and my dad and even MOH would help sort out tangles in wool, but over the past few years I’ve found the patience - and the satisfaction - of untangling reassuringly mindful.
A while back I bought a large bag of vintage threads, where thankfully the embroidery threads were neatly organised and wound around strips of cardboard. Remembering this I dug them out to add this jumble of threads to those.
And before long, they were unravelled and some new cardboard strips with notches cut out held the once tangled threads. Not all of the threads survived it, but a large proportion did, and they are much more usable like this.
I noticed though that the two strips of cardboard I’d added to, had much more character than my saved birthday cards. Or they do now, maybe my birthday cards will hold the same attraction in years to come, who knows.
The blues above are wound onto a card that once held ‘washing and boiling elastic’ and which ‘outlasts any garment never needs replacing’ - the mind boggles doesn’t it. The greens and yellows I added to the 'knicker elastic’ card which once held ‘the latest Improved Rubber Thread.’
Aren’t they a find? And I wonder if any of the packaging around today will seem as dated in the not too distant future!