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cimoreneThe cigarette case we found that became my sewing kit is 9.5 cm tall. The one Wax already has is smaller, but fortunately her granny already used it for sewing so it already contains a pair of scissors small enough to fit, around 8 cm. Normally I would buy Fiskars scissors (or knives etc), but their smallest scissors are 10 cm, so I ended up getting some DMC-brand Hardanger scissors from one of my go-to Finnish yarn stores that also caters to embroiderers. (I did wonder why a French brand named scissors after a town in Norway, but it turns out it's a style of embroidery too).
Wax had found a storage box full of her mom's sewing stuff when she went through the library shelves; so we sorted through that, stocking the sewing kit with pins and needles, marveling at the ancient, tiny scraps of saved elastic and salvaged zippers and the like, and then while we were at it we went through the sewing table (inherited years earlier from her granny, still mostly stocked with granny's stuff), which folds out into five separate little drawers. One of the drawers is completely full of spools of thread, a good third of which date from before the spools were made of plastic. Some of the wooden spools are miniature, and they are adorable. We made little cardboard dividers and sorted them by color, wound up all the bits of elastic, sorted the buttons from the snaps and hooks and eyes. One of the top compartments is now full of needles, and it really is almost full. There are probably twenty opened cards of needles in there, if not more.
I was feeling inspired, so I googled and finally learned after over ten years why my pincushion is inferior! My mother had multiples of the store bought pin cushions, the tomato with a strawberry and the bigger sort of carousel with little dolls around the edges. Wax didn't have one when I moved here, so I made one - a crochet prinsesstårta - but it's never been satisfactory. Too squishy. Thanks to Google I know now that the traditional stuffings for a pincushion would be crushed walnut shells, or sand, or sawdust, or very fine steel wool wrapped in batting. Just polyester stuffing makes the whole thing too light and fluffy. On the other hand, I don't really know how to easily get hold of those other fillings, so my problem remains. (Store-bought sand can contain chemicals apparently, and that would've been easiest, although it requires extra care to stop it from leaking out the seams.) Her mom and granny apparently didn't use them, which is baffling.
Wax had found a storage box full of her mom's sewing stuff when she went through the library shelves; so we sorted through that, stocking the sewing kit with pins and needles, marveling at the ancient, tiny scraps of saved elastic and salvaged zippers and the like, and then while we were at it we went through the sewing table (inherited years earlier from her granny, still mostly stocked with granny's stuff), which folds out into five separate little drawers. One of the drawers is completely full of spools of thread, a good third of which date from before the spools were made of plastic. Some of the wooden spools are miniature, and they are adorable. We made little cardboard dividers and sorted them by color, wound up all the bits of elastic, sorted the buttons from the snaps and hooks and eyes. One of the top compartments is now full of needles, and it really is almost full. There are probably twenty opened cards of needles in there, if not more.
I was feeling inspired, so I googled and finally learned after over ten years why my pincushion is inferior! My mother had multiples of the store bought pin cushions, the tomato with a strawberry and the bigger sort of carousel with little dolls around the edges. Wax didn't have one when I moved here, so I made one - a crochet prinsesstårta - but it's never been satisfactory. Too squishy. Thanks to Google I know now that the traditional stuffings for a pincushion would be crushed walnut shells, or sand, or sawdust, or very fine steel wool wrapped in batting. Just polyester stuffing makes the whole thing too light and fluffy. On the other hand, I don't really know how to easily get hold of those other fillings, so my problem remains. (Store-bought sand can contain chemicals apparently, and that would've been easiest, although it requires extra care to stop it from leaking out the seams.) Her mom and granny apparently didn't use them, which is baffling.
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