This I'm told is a button hook, used for buttoning a particular style of Nineteenth-Century boots. But why the awl...?
I get the impression that this wasn't intended to help you reach your boots if you had difficulty bending (or reaching round your enormous wire-framed assemblage of skirt and petticoats) but to speed up the process of getting a row of many tiny fumbleworthy buttons into their loops.
Sheffield steel; probably late 19th Century.
Another old box opened.
The things you find in the neuks and crannies of your thoughts...
Some experiments with modelling clay that didn’t really work. (Too fragile.)
Spirits of place, or potentially gaming pieces sort of idea, like 1980s versions of the #UigChessMen | #FirThàilisgLeòdhais .
That’s all this packet of #banknotes then. What have we learned? There’s a personal interest thing in that these are mostly mementos of travels to different parts, some of them I was present on, some of them a generation or two earlier. And there’s wider historical interest, and notably a study of past attitudes. But also – I’m newly aware of how massively contingent monetary systems are.
#money #numismatics #loftFinds
1/
Box of books, mislabelled as power cords, which I had more or less forgotten about. Where does the memory go?
Finally, finally found my Amstrad #PCW .
I never gave up faith it was there, but must admit to some troubled moments, worrying that the past was even more illusory than I’d like it to have been. This bodes well for the other things I have doubted.
The PCW will acclimatise in its wrapping for a few days, but here’s an old pic that helped.
Excavations will continue until further notice.
Another find. A pair of brass trivets I haven’t seen in thirty years, apparently from a #dubiousAntique shop in Glasgow; origin uncertain, maybe Indian? One of them broke a leg later and sports a superb pristine example of combined palæolithic and modern #repair techniques.
(“Dubious-antique” is definitely a distinct shopping category imo.)
Fediverse, your eyes, if I may.
Found this. It’s a dispenser for a kind of green wax, slightly greasier to the touch than beeswax, not so greasy as boot polish. It does not fluoresce, nor smell. It’s maybe 40 years old, and would probably have been either automotive or agricultural use but we can’t tell which. Less than 1cm of it has been used and I don’t know if anyone would want it if I knew what it was for, but I doubt I can use it.
Any thoughts?
Electropict