My thread collection

Vintage Thread Labels (available in my etsy shop)

My mother's mother, Grandma Magda, was a wonderful seamstress. She made a lot of my clothes when I was growing up.  Grandma tried to teach me to sew, and when I was young I really did try to learn, but it just didn't stick. I can still sew on Boy Scout patches, or turn an old pair of stockings into a rag doll, but I never mastered clothes.

Vintage Thread Spools (available in my etsy shop)

My father's mother, Grandma Mary, preferred crochet. She made huge afghans of brown squares topped with brightly colored flowers. They would be super fashionable now, in an Anthropologie sort of style, but in the 1980s when I was a teenager, they were painfully out of date, and I didn't keep any.

Getting slowly to the point, when my grandmothers died and we cleaned out their things, I took their workbaskets. I kept them intact on a shelf for a long time, as if something of them was preserved there. Last year I finally took everything out and mixed it in with my own things. Thread is thread, after all, and there's no sense leaving it shut up in a box. Now Grandma Mary's pincushion holds a mix of needles from three generations, and I sew on my son's patches with thread that was spooled in the 1940s.  I love the worn feel of the old wooden spools, and the wonderful typography on the old labels.

Wait 'til you see "our" button collection!