From the Midden

The things that I drew today all came from various middens.  At top left and just below are two drawings of an odd little buckle-like thing that F found in a dumpster at a construction site in her neighborhood.  Since she and I are always on the lookout for good reusable repurposable material, she brought home several of the little metal things and many of the woven plastic straps that the metal things were used on.  The intriguing thing about these buckle or clamp things is that they're made out of a single twist of heavy wire;  by threading the straps through the clamps as in 5100, you can make an adjustable strap.  Elegant!

The other objects came from our family's portable junk drawer or kitchen midden:  our junk basket.  There is no way the diaper pin at bottom left would have survived the 36 years since it was purchased-- two cross-country moves, and then two cross-town moves.  It is paleolithic in our family history-- the last surviving diaper pin from the 1970s, when cloth diapers reigned and the only way to hold them on the baby was to pin them with one of these.  I always tried to find this particular blue duck variety at the grocery store.  You had to run it through your hair to pick up a little oil in order to slide the pin through the many heavy layers of cloth while the baby was writhing and rolling over in his attempts to escape.

The straight pin and the safety pin came from someone else's midden, a bottom drawer of one of my antique sewing machine cabinets.  And the silver stick pin with its really pretty calla lily was tossed in with about a thousand old buttons in a button collection someone gave F and me to use on our wallets and bags.

The rectangular object at top right is a Cuisinaire rod from the late 70s.  Do they even use Cuisinaire rods in kindergartens these days?  This one survived in the junk basket, it's yellow wooden surface just a little bit dingy.  I remember stepping on Cuisinaire rods in the dark, sort of like stepping on Legos these days.