Accumulator Seriali Spinoff Series - Needle Keepers and a mystery tool

Last Saturday my daughter Kaija, the original Accumulator, showed her vintage pins and needles here. I don't have a single old package of needles, they have all gone straight to her, but I have quite many old and new needle keepers. So many that I can call it an accumulation, as I have not tried to collect them.

 The first one is a stitched little thing from my mother's side of the family.

On the left is a little pocket, and there are two pieces of felt for different needles.

The two holders at the top are traditional crafted items from Lapland, with an engraved reindeer pulling a Sami man in a sleigh. I would think they are souvenirs, maybe for my Grandmother and her younger sister, my great auntie Saima. Needles are fastened in a little piece of red felt sewn on the leather that goes from the bone ring through the hollow piece of reindeer bone, ending in the twisted loop used to hang the needle keeper on one's belt or on a hook.

The three small ones hold the needles loose inside. The wooden caps are just pushed on, but the tiny bone thing has a twisted on cap. The middle one has a text Gütermann's Nähseide, so it advertises popular sewing threads.

These three are my modern needle books, all from a very dear friend. I'm sorry I have misplaced the pink needlebook Kaija made for me when she was a little schoolgirl.

With the heart needlebook above at the bottom came also this pincushion I couldn't find when I showed you my pincushions here.

Which brings me to the other pincushions missing from that post:

On the left, the red dressmaker's pincushion and the felt flower were my mother's. The small round one with an elastic band is one that Kaija made for me at school. The red and greed one with an edelweiss is from my mother-in-law. The big acorn in felt and the little angel with a back pocket for scissors are by Melanie. I remember how my mother made the felt flower pincushions, I had one of my own as well. They were made for a craft fair to raise money for our school. The Women's Committee did an amazing job as money raisers and provided all kinds of useful things for the school, like a language laboratory which at that time was a rare treat. It took much more than some pincushions to reach their goals.

Finding all the needle things I came across this mysterious tool, two of them in fact:

The shaft is hollow, and there is a hole for some kind of yarn or thread. Any idea about the use?

Accumulator Seriali Spinoff Series - Herbarium

This week my collection is a real one, or actually two. When I was a schoolkid, our Summer vacation was a whole three months period, but it was not just for play and rest. We had to collect plants and learn their names. The collection was called a Herbarium, and mine looks like this:

Each year we had to collect 40 plants, press them, find out their Finnish and Latin names, attach the flowers on white papers and write the labels in ink. Here is my Alsike clover, Trifolium hybridum. (I was surprised to notice just now that the Alsike part of the name is the same as in Finnish, so it must be someone's name.)

Back to school in September, the biology teacher would check all the collections, and then we had a test. She would show any plant in our own Herbarium, and cover the label, and we would say the Finnish and Latin name of the plant and its genus.

No mistakes were allowed. In the picture above I have a pressed red clover, Trifolium pratense, but the fresh sample I picked today is the Trifolium medium. It has a red flower as well, but notice how the three green leaflets are more pointed and narrower than those of the red clover.

It took me about five minutes to collect the little bunch of wild flowers, more than ten species. I wonder why collecting 40 during a Summer felt sometimes like a burden? Well, it was really 40 new ones each year, three Summers in a row. One could naturally begin in May and find the last ones in September. Sometimes one just was too late there:

The Geum rivale, water avens, was past bloom today.

My specimen was from June 1962, so I knew when to pick this one.

The Chamerion angustifolium has different names in Britain and in America. I'm surprised how well the colour has kept.

Before the time of colour pictures one had to look at the details of the flower more carefully and compare them with the drawings of the guide book.

When we were just married, Mr K. and I started our own Herbarium and collected about a hundred flowers in it. The last picture is from this new collection. I managed to find the right kind of labels for them. Still sometimes when I see a wild flower, the Latin name just comes to my mind. Maybe not very useful, but fun anyway.

The original Accumulator Seriali posts are on my daughter's blog, Paperiaarre. Her blog is on a new website worth visiting.

Accumulator Seriali Spinoff Series

In March I thought I could post about my collected/accumulated treasures every Saturday like my daughter Kaija does under the title Accumulator Seriali on her blog Paperiaarre. Well, as my treasures are not real collections but spread all around the house, I didn't come to making the necessary photos (and the weather was cloudy etc.). Now that I found out she is making today's post about jigsaw puzzles, I decided to show mine on the very same day. I'm using old photos I took in 2013 (and 2008) when I had a period of puzzle making, so some of these may have already changed owner and appear on my daughter's blog too. In my childhood the puzzles were a lovely, quiet way to spend rainy Summer afternoons indoors.

These puzzles all come from my mother's family, from the first decades of the 20th century. They originally came in hand made folded boxes made of strong paper, but when those fell apart, small chocolate boxes were used to keep the pieces safe.

I made a lot of new boxes after the original pattern and copied the hand painted logo to be glued on the lid.

I bet you want to see a hand-made jigsaw puzzle from almost one hundred years ago. Here is a typical one, a landscape picture from a magazine, glued on thick cardboard.

A more exotic looking one, with a tip of one piece fallen off. We used to write on the box bottom if pieces were missing, or tips.

Favourite themes were art reproductions, like The Gleaners by Millet (I had two of these and gave Kaija the other one)

or  this Shepherd Boy from Paanajärvi by the Finnish painter Akseli Gallén-Kallela.

Some jigsaws look like illustrations to romantic stories from a ladies' magazine

or this one, The Diva,

and some other are more on the domestic side.

There are unusual shapes, like oval pictures

and unusual shapes of the individual pieces, like in this one:

They were almost impossible to hold in place until a larger area was finished, but the result was this charming picture:

Very few of the pictures are from Finland (the Shepherd boy painting and the gingerbread baking), but at least this one showing people on their way to Christmas church has all the elements of an old fashioned Christmas card.

My mother was not a little child by the time she started building these jigsaw puzzles so there are no children's puzzles here. Four Little Pals would have pleased a child as well, but putting it together is no child's play. My mother used to lift a finished puzzle like this one from one corner, and it would hold together. But it had to be finished, and no pieces missing.

This is the only picture that looks like an illustration from a children's book,and even the sawing is easier than in the other puzzles, where the maker has intentionally chosen tricky lines along a shape in the picture.

I leave you with this dark picture of a young girl. The saw lines remind me of free motion quilting.

More antique jigsaw pleasures on Kaija's blog right now!