I would like to get a bigger desk with enough space on top to accommodate my ability to both spread out and create piles, and enough space underneath for me to cross my legs without jamming them, but I’m reluctant to do so because I’d lose my sewing drawer.
I love this little drawer. It opens to my right and enables me to find all the small things I need when sewing on the machine: thread (mostly variations on a navy-blue theme, I see), needles, bobbins, corner turners without having to get up or rummage elsewhere or further clutter up my desk top.
I also have stuff in a beautiful old wooden writing box, a Quality Street tin, more boxes, old golden syrup tins, mugs from Sweden and Stockport, and as many pins as possible in little ceramic bowls made by Phoebe. But still, there is nothing like reaching to the right and selecting what I need almost without looking. It makes me feel streamlined and professional, even when I’ve just attached parts of a coat lining inside out or put a collar on back to front. Deep breaths, pick out the seam ripper, let rip.
[memorial to a local needlewoman inFakenham Parish Church]
I don’t actually have a purpose-made sewing basket or box, but I do have happy memories of my Mum’s box. It was one of those classic versions in woven yellow and white plastic, and lined with the most sumptuous daffodil-yellow satin fabric with a particularly lovely padded lid. I loved sorting it out, detangling everything, lining up the needles in the lid, stacking up the wooden reels, sorting out the name tapes and buttons, despite knowing it was all going to look like a haberdashery version of tumbleweed as soon as it was used.
[‘The Thimble’, Brita Granström]
A sewing box or basket or tin or whatever is used, is one of the most personal of household items. They may seem retro to some these days, but they were incredibly important to many women in centuries gone by who were responsible for making and maintaining clothes and bedlinen and curtains and upholstery and carpets, not mention all the fancier work such as lace, embroidery, needlepoint, and quilts they did.
For professional seamstresses, they were the female equivalent of Jude the Obscure’s stone-mason’s kit, “his little chisels clinking faintly against the larger ones in his [tool-]basket”. To this day, they are often still called work boxes, and for good reason. This late-C19 workcase which is in the V&A even looks like a mini-briefcase, and the amount and range of items, including specialist tools for netting, tambouring, and tatting, are fantastic. Nice brown satin lining, too.
[‘Woman Sewing’ (c1908) by Harold Gilman)
But sewing boxes or baskets don’t have to be fancy. David Copperfield’s beloved Peggotty, whose forefinger has been “roughened by needlework, like a pocket nutmeg-grater” (one of my all-time favourite images), has a variety of storage places for her needlework kit. David looks “as she sat at work; at the little bit of wax-candle she kept for her thread…at the little house with a thatched roof, where the yard-measure lived; at her work-box with a sliding lid, with a view of St. Paul’s Cathedral (with a pink dome) painted on the top; at the brass thimble on her finger; at herself, whom I thought lovely.” Who needs inlaid boxes when you can have a biscuit tin?
Much more serious is George Eliot’s own velvet-lined reticule, above. It’s wonderful that the sewing kits of so many famous female writers and figures have survived; they highlight the tension between what was expected of women and what they actually wanted to do. I wonder if perhaps Eliot had a second reticule which looked like a sewing kit but was actually a writing kit, just to fool everyone. This elegant set above included a buttonhook, file, penknife, crochet hook, thimble, a bodkin and a pair of scissors. Maybe there was a secret compartment for a quill. Or perhaps the penknife, like a Swiss Army knife, had a nib as well as a tool for removing stones from horses’ hooves. Just thinking aloud here.
[tablecloth in Carlyle’s House, one of many good C19 textiles held there]
Perhaps George Eliot enjoyed needlework. Jane Carlyle, on the other hand, professed to hate it - she had a thimble inscribed ‘Ah, me!” - yet was forever making amazing clothes and hats such as a “bonnet with black silk and ermine and little feathers”. What she really disliked was making and mending her husband’s clothes, and I’m with her on that one, given what I’ve read about and by Thomas Carlyle. (The Carlyles at Home is a fascinating but also somewhat uncomfortable account/psychodrama of their rather difficult domestic life which never ran smoothly.)
[Etui in Carlyle’s House collection]
Jane had a pretty and practical silver sewing-case which hung from her belt and held scissors, crochet-hook, bodkin, and the I-hate-sewing thimble, plus a rosewood workbox which was a needlewoman’s treasure chest. It had a tray that lifted out and compartments holding small, flower-painted boxes which in turn contained tapes, buttons, hooks, a red silk pin cushion, and a tiny mother-of-pearl reel with an emery board, and below were the silks and cottons. It sounds wonderful, and I bet Jane C’s workbox never looked like tumbleweed. (Just an extra thought: why does the National Trust call it Carlyle’s House when it was very much the Carlyles’ house?)
Sewing kits or ‘hussifs’ used by men away from home are just as good as well. Soldiers, sailors, and polar explorers all need to be able to mend clothes, sleeping bags, hammocks and sails. I may have mentioned this before, not sure (just kidding), but I love the domestic details of the early C20 Antarctic expeditions. This is Captain Scott’s ‘ditty’ which is in the at Polar Museum here in Cambridge; the fact that several needles are still threaded is heartbreaking.
The contents of sewing kits/baskets/boxes/drawers/bags/tins fascinate me too, as do proper haberdasheries which sell all the things you never knew you needed or indeed have no need for, but are nevertheless delighted to see on sale: bra fasteners, waistband linings, collar stays. (The best collection of haberdasheries with all sorts of arcane stuff is in Lisbon, above).
While sewing the other day, I made a list of my dream workbox contents from a dream haberdashery:
Sajou linen threads, a supersize bobbin of neon -pink thread from Mulberry Silks, all the Lucie Rie buttons in the Sainsbury Centre collection (above), John James gold-tipped sashiko, embroidery and tapestry needles, a few bodkins because I like the name, hundreds of Murano glass head pins in a range of beautiful colours, about five pairs of small scissors so I can always find a pair, three pairs of Fiskars fabric-cutting scissors, a pair of huge Sheffield shears, two Merchant and Mills pin magnets kept far apart so they don’t mate, a two-metre measuring tape which rolls up all by itself, two dozen sewing machine bobbins, a full range of magically self-untangling cotton threads, fifty sets of short, sharp bamboo knitting needles because I think my settee swallows them, a lovely sharp seam ripper inscribed “Ah, me!” and a booklet on calming techniques for dressmakers, a Merchant and Mills bamboo point turner because I never want to put a pencil through a quilt or garment corner again, brightly coloured tailor’s chalk or pencil which doesn’t blow or rub off at the slightest bit of friction or breath, and safety pins for when I start dressing like Vanessa Bell who, allegedly, held her home-made garments together with them. Plus a Twirl or two in a hidden compartment.
Never mind a larger desk, I also now need a larger sewing drawer.
Happy Sunday!
Lovely piece, Jane. My sewing box was made by my grandfather from cedar wood, and has an elaborate chrysanthemum carved on the lid. The lid lifts up to reveal a tray with two compartments and a pincushion between, upholstered in blue corduroy by my grandmother. This lifts out to reveal a deeper single compartment. It has a needle book made by my grandmother from offcuts of dress fabric and flannel leaves. And embroidery scissors shaped like a bird. A thimble to fit my 10yo hands (which doesn’t fit now). And a little tin of buttons that were on my grandmothers and fathers rompers when they were babies. Like you I like the feeling of having everything just where I can put my hand on it.
'The Button Box - Lifting the Lid of Women's Lives' by Lynn Knight is a good read on this subject. I am typing this in my home in a Devon village listening to the church bells ringing out for the Sunday morning service, the sun is shining, there are plants to planted in the newly dug flower beds. Could be worse.