X
THE
OLD
WORKBOX
CHAPTER X
THE OLD WORKBOX
Spinning wheels—Materials and work—Little accessories—Cutlery—Quaint woodwork—The needlewoman—Old samplers.
Under the generic term of "workbox" the curios of the household associated with the industrial handiwork of former days may well be reviewed. There is no record of when receptacles for ladies' work were first introduced, although, no doubt, in very early days small oak boxes, carved, and bearing the owner's initials, and other indications of ownership, would be the chosen receptacles for the numerous oddments which are required in the practice and pursuit of every home handicraft, and especially those connected with plying the needle. There was a time, however, when the fabrics used in the making up of clothing were home-made, when the seamstress and the needleworker stitched and embroidered upon cloths spun if not actually woven by the housewife and her handmaidens. In the barrows containing remains of people of the Stone Age, and the peoples of the early Bronze Age, among the few ornaments and personal adornments buried with them were spinning whorls—the curiosities which remain to us of the earliest known form of textile craftsmanship.
Spinning Wheels.
In old pictures and woodblock engravings some curious illustrations are met with showing Englishwomen using the distaff. St. Distaff's Day was formerly the 7th of January, for it was then that the women resumed work after the Christmas festivities were over. The distaff and the spindle belonged to an age little understood now, and the occupations of the women of that date are almost forgotten. The spinning wheel was the outcome of the simpler distaff and spindle, and although the spinning wheels we find among the most interesting of household relics look primitive indeed compared with the complex machinery seen in the spinning mills to-day, those dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries must have been considered ingenious contrivances when compared with the older models, just as the latest types of sewing machines show a wonderful advance from the early machines invented in the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Very clever indeed were many women in manipulating the spinning wheel, and there seems to have been some competitive contests for notoriety among country women, who found a pleasing though perhaps at times tedious occupation in spinning the wool for the local weaver who wove the home-made cloth. It is recorded that in 1745 a woman at East Dereham spun a single pound of wool into a thread of 84,000 yards. She was far outdistanced, however, a few years later, when a young lady at Norwich out of a pound of combed wool produced a thread computed to measure 168,000 yards.