Mama's Sewing Box

I guess it's sort of a shared childhood memory among people my age for mom's to have used an old cookie tin to store sewing supplies.  Seems that lots of us remember anticipating a cookie and opening the tin to find needles and thread and such.  This is the top my mom's sewing supply tin... a tradition I've chosen to keep alive.  Around the sides it's got the lines of a poem:

Monday's child is fair of face.

Tuesday's child is full of grace.

Wednesday's child is full of woe.

Thursday's child has far to go.

Friday's child is loving and giving.

Saturday's child works hard for a living.

The child that is born on the Sabbath Day,

Is bonny, blythe, good and gay.

Inside there are the treasures...

Many of the smaller items are inside little tins of their own.  There are old tins that once held tea bags.  Some plastic containers that might have been filled with pins.  Even some tiny pieces of tupperware.  And there are at least a dozen pair of scissors that, guessing from their different sizes and shapes, were manufactured for different purposes.

The one tea tin contains the plastic circles used to make pompoms that are even and perfectly round.  Lot's of them!  More, actually, than it looks like in the picture...

And from way back in the day before plastic eggs were widely available at Easter, there are a couple of metal ones.  One of them is home to an assortment of needle threaders.

I've always thought this was the neatest little measuring tape!  Isn't the detail on the case pretty?

Some of the other containers contain pins and needles.  Some of the needles have eyes that are so small I can't even see them and some are so large you could easily thread rug yarn.  And there are pins so tiny I don't even know what they're for and others that have what looks like a glass bead on the top and still more than are heavy and long to hold fabric on the frames for quilting.

In the years it's been mine, I've added some of my own things to the collection like the little embroidery hoop you can see in a couple of the pictures.  I think it was old when I found it in a thrift store 25 years ago because it's made differently than the wooden hoops of today.  It doesn't have the little screw like piece on the outer ring but utilizes a spring to hold your fabric tight between that and the inner ring.

And I've added my collection of surgical implements.  I'm not even sure exactly what names belong to all of them anymore but have found them handy things to have every now and again.  The hemostats (is that what those scissor-shaped pieces that pinch are?) do a great job pulling a needle through a heavy quilt or doll face when it gets stuck and nearly impossible to handle with just my fingers!  And those long tweezer-like things have been great to pick out tiny stitches on a cross-stitch more than once.  Those 3 pieces came from a suture kit once when I needed to have my hand sewn up after a knife slip in the kitchen.  The one farthest right is a staple remover our vet recently gave me when I thought I'd give it a try to remove the staples from Lightning's leg.  Couldn't get Derek to hold him still for me so I didn't do it, but that was the original plan.