On the odd occasion a real treasure comes to light. Whilst visiting my cousin in New Zealand she decided some of the items saved for a rainy day were no longer relevant to her lifestyle ... in other words she had many articles that would forever remain UFO's; tapestries bought two decades ago, felt pieces left over from projects but which might come in handy one day. That day was not coming! A lovely length of tartan wool fabric lay at the bottom of a box and if tartan could speak it begged for a home. I rescued the tartan [at the moment it is winging its way across the Tasman as my suitcase overflowed seriously risking a 'Heavy load' sticker being slapped on its exterior], I also rescued a length of ribbon, the felt pieces along with a small item that sent me down memory lane.
When I attended Primary School, and that was not yesterday, many wool orientated crazes swept the playground. We made pom-poms utilising the cardboard milk bottle tops whose holes were the exact perfect size for pom-pom construction. We persuaded our fathers to bang four small nails into the tops of wooden cotton reels to enable us to 'knit' enormous lengths of narrow knitting which could be, if our mothers could be persuaded, fashioned into table mats. Oh yes, we should have spent the extra hour or two and sewn those multi-coloured lengths into table mats ourselves ... we didn't.
What did I rescue and bring home? Not a wooden cotton reel with four nails, though today wooden cotton reels are museum pieces with the advent of plastic, but a painted French Knitting utensil. She is rather beautiful, a little like a RussianMatryoshka maiden, apart from the four nails protruding from her head. Of course there is every chance this little maiden will spend much of her life reclining in my work box ... but ... perhaps one day I will need to use it. A table mat? Well, maybe not, but then again ...
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