Darning eggs, balls, & mushrooms

darning egg elm — Darning egg made from elm. Photo by HomeThingsPast

A hundred years ago could anyone imagine that darning tools would now be unrecognisable except to antiques or crafts enthusiasts? There always used to be a steady supply of darning in the family mending bag. A woman sitting darning was a common sight, and so was a darning egg. Inside a stocking or sock with a hole in, the “egg” or darner made it easier to stitch a neat repair: not too tight, not too slack.

The simplest old darners are rounded pieces of hardwood – boxwood, maple, apple, elm – with a lovely smooth surface. Edward Pinto, the treen expert, thought the egg was the oldest shape in common use. They were also called darning balls.

sock with darning ball inside — A darning ball inside this sock makes mending easier. Photo by Lisa Dusseault.

Other names and other shapes include darning mushrooms, darners, lasts and wooden “gourds”. Real gourds or cowrie shells could be used, and special 19th century darners might be coloured glass, pottery, or ivory, or have silver handles.*

Darning eggs that open to reveal neatly-stowed sewing accessories are attractive pieces of treen (woodware), appealing to collectors who would never actually use them. There’s something about a clever design with small things unexpectedly tucked inside a well-crafted piece of hardwood. (See pictures near the bottom of the page.) Desirable antiques now, these used to be bought as gifts. Hollow olivewood eggs with needle and thimble inside were exported to England from Southern Europe. You may also come across darners with a detachable handle doubling as a needle case.

In France, every village woodturner had his own style of egg, as you see in this well-illustrated post, and it was once a common present for a bride. Handles were less common than in the UK or USA.

A darning-egg or ball, held in the left hand, is slipped under the hole, with the stocking stretched smoothly, but not tightly, over it.
The Dressmaker, 1916

Glove Darners

Darning eggs painted wood — Classic shape for darning eggs with turned handles - plus paint. Is that a yawn at the thought of more darning? Photo by knitting iris.

When a glove needed darning, little darning eggs were pushed into the fingers. Some glove darners had different-sized balls on each end of a handle. With big sock darners, the handle itself could sometimes be used for glove repairs. Not all glove darners had a handle. Some were simple egg shapes dropped into the finger. The handle-free type was usual in France, as with the sock darning eggs.

All these curved darners were best suited to mending small pieces of knitted clothing. They were not meant to be used for “flat darning” of woven cloth.

*See Old-Time Tools & Toys of Needlework by Gertrude Whiting. Pinto’s Treen and other Wooden Bygones: an Encyclopaedia and Social History and Thompson’s Sewing Tools And Trinkets: Collector’s Identification & Value Guide, Vol. 2 are other sources of information.

Darning eggs with sewing kit inside — Darning egg designs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pincushions, needles, thimbles were often found in hollow darning eggs. The middle one also holds a glove darner, scissors, yarn, and an emery bag for polishing pins and needles.

Pictures

Photographers credited in captions. Links to originals here: striped sock, mushroom, painted mushroom, painted eggs. More picture info here
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Butter tubs can be beautiful

carved butter tub norway — Norwegian butter tub with lid acting as butter stamp or mould. Made from wooden staves with the two longest fitting into the lid. Photo by Rolf Steinar Bergli.

Wooden tubs with fine carving inside the lid were traditional containers for a few pounds of butter in parts of Norway and other Scandinavian countries. Some were beautifully finished on the outside too, and could be used to take butter to festive gatherings and serve it attractively.

Because the interior carving gave the top of the butter an attractive design, these were called butter moulds by the treen (woodware) expert Edward Pinto. Obviously they did shape and mould the butter, but English-speaking antiques experts today tend to call them butter tubs.

Decoration on the outside was carved or painted or burnt, or all three. Tubs were constructed in the traditional cooper’s way. Made in the same way as barrels or buckets, with upright staves braced by bands around them, these tubs had two pieces of wood longer than the rest. They slotted into the lid and had a hole for the pin that fixed top and bottom together. Loose joins were sealed with rushes.

Size, shape, date

norwegian butter tub — Norwegian butter carrier, classic shape, burnt pokerwork design on lid. Photo by Rolf Steinar Bergli

Other tubs have a neater finish than the first one pictured here, with wood curving smoothly round the whole surface, using techniques like Swedish svepask. They all tend to follow the classic form: round, on three little legs, a characteristic handle on top integrated with the side fastenings. They are often about 20cm (8in) high and wide. Pinto says a typical container holds 4 to 6 pounds (2-3 kilos) of butter, though some might carry more.

None of the tubs illustrated here is dated but I guess they are 19th century. I’ve seen one from 1837 and the overall style fits in with these. This extra special one is from the 1830s.

Containers of this type were also used for carrying stews, porridge and other semi-liquid food. I’d like to know if carving inside the lid is a decisive clue to their purpose. Or was one container used for both purposes? This would break with the usual rule that dairy utensils are kept separate and scrupulously clean to avoid souring the butter.

Wooden porringers

swedish painted wood tub — Wooden tub or porringer, from Småland, Sweden. Painted decoration.

The Swedish container in the black and white picture is called a porringer (cooked food container) in a book by Charles Holme, who travelled to many parts of Europe to study, photograph, and write about “Peasant Art” – what we would call folk art now. It’s hard to know how much information he gathered about the everyday use of the items he studied. He was an art journal editor whose main interest was design.

As far as I can tell without knowing the language, the Norwegian name smøramber for these is closer to butter tub than to butter mould. Smør means butter. Amber doesn’t seem to be a common word in Norwegian. Interestingly, in medieval England an amber was a “vessel with one handle”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and also a measure of liquid and dry weight. And while we’re looking at words, the dictionary says a porringer is a “a small bowl or basin, typically with a handle, used for soup, stews, or similar dishes.”

Photos

Photographers credited in captions. Links to originals: Colour photos by Rolf Steinar Bergli here and here. More picture info here

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Love tokens and betrothal gifts carved from wood

carved wooden love spoon — Lovespoon from Wales carved with hearts and initials. Photo from Museum of Wales

I keep coming across nicely carved antiques that were made to be useful, while the decoration shows they were designed as courtship, engagement or marriage gifts. The idea of handmade love tokens is still alive today: especially the tradition of carving love spoons. Craftspeople who make them often use longstanding folk art designs that evolved over time.

Love and commitment gifts developed in pre-industrial communities when craft skills were widespread. Men could work with wood. Women understood textiles and thread. Girls often prepared for marriage by sewing for their beloved, as well as weaving and stitching linens for their future home. Young men made something wooden that would be of value in a woman’s adult life: for instance, a knitting sheath, mangle board, or distaff.

Originally I wanted to make a list of as many different European and North American betrothal or love gift traditions as possible, but even if you limit it to Europe and European immigrant communities in the USA, and limit it to home-made carved wood, or treen, the task is still huge. Still, I’ve made a start below and would enjoy hearing more in the comments.

Lithuanian spinning board and needle — Elaborately carved board with pin is a kind of distaff holding unspun fibre: a characteristic Lithuanian spinning wheel attachment called prieverpste.

Spoons

Spoons have to come first: not only Welsh lovespoons like the one in the picture, but Scottish ladles and pairs of spoons linked by a carved chain, and many other regional types. Chained pairs of spoons are still known as a marriage “ritual” object in Germany. Scoops and spoons sometimes incorporated a freely-moving “caged ball” in the design. Another way of showing off the carver’s skill was to carve all the links from one piece of wood. The single piece of wood may symbolise the marriage union.

Textile tools

Knitting, spinning, and needlework aids which were carved and decorated by loving young men include knitting sheaths, famous in the Yorkshire Dales, lace bobbins, distaffs, and spinning wheel parts like the Lithuanian distaff board in the picture. Pincushions inside a carved box were made by some lovers.

Laundry tools

The Baltic countries, Russia, and parts of eastern Europe have very strong traditions of fine wood carving on the humblest domestic items. This allowed for a wide range of pre-marriage gifts even including decorative washing bats, not very well suited to modern ideas of romance since they’re only ever used for arduous, repetitive routine work. A slightly more glamorous laundry item was the classic Scandinavian engagement gift: a mangle board.

Culinary equipment

gingerbread mold — Gingerbread mould from Silesia, Poland. Photo by praccus.

Gingerbread or cookie moulds give lots of scope for personalised carving which will look good twice over: once as an ornament on a shelf and also on home baking at future meals and social gatherings. German springerle moulds are an example. Some butter stamps were carved as love gifts. Other food-related opportunities for betrothal gifts with initials and hearts and anything else you want include rolling pins, salt boxes, and bread boards.

Dress & grooming

Stay busks and combs were once well-liked betrothal or love gifts. Stay busks, worn close to the heart, were for shaping a corset. But they weren’t always wood. Whalebone or scrimshaw busks were carved by British sailors. Some of the most elaborate folk art carving styles in maritime regions developed on long sea voyages, it is often suggested.

The finest gifts

In some regions professional wood-carvers offered a service to young men who wanted to impress their sweetheart or her family. Is this a disappointment? If I had a wonderful heirloom with my ancestors’ initials on, I would like to think it was home-made, not purchased.

Some gifts chosen by wealthy lovers are obviously not made by amateurs. Spoons and lace bobbins, for example, can be so finely-crafted and elaborate that they stand out from homemade folk art and are clearly the work of expert craftsmen. Other love tokens often commissioned by the privileged classes included combs (in the Renaissance especially) and snuff boxes given to men by women.

Photos

Photographers credited in captions. Links to originals here: Welsh love spoon, gingerbread mould, or see more picture info here.

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Medieval and Renaissance combs

H-comb France 1500 — French boxwood comb made c1500. Letters say "por vog servir", "to help you". ("Pour vous servir" in modern French) Photo by Thomas Cowart.

The most beautiful combs owned by ladies in late medieval and Renaissance times were highly ornamented in between their two rows of teeth. They look special, and they are. Some of the best were given as love tokens, and the fine, lacy carving included mottos, hearts, dates or initials. Did the young ladies use their admirers’ gifts? Or did the real hairdressing get done with plainer combs? The simple comb in the 17th century painting below looks easier to hold than a really gorgeous piece of carved wood.

H comb for combing hair 1600s — Combing a young lady's hair in 1633. From a Jan Miense Molenaer painting with various titles: Woman at her Toilet, Vanity, or Lady World.

And would you use your romantic, artistic comb for everyday hair hygiene? Apologies to anyone who is squeamish about infestation, but the fine-toothed side of the comb helped people deal with nits and lice, which people used to take more for granted than today.

H-combs

The H-shaped structure framing the teeth means that some people call these H-combs. Archaeologists call them double-sided. In Northern Europe there were double-sided H-combs in the early medieval period, while in the Middle East they go back more than 2000 years.

In late medieval Europe, especially France and Italy, beautifully decorated combs were considered a desirable gift from a knight to his lady. They could be teamed with a matching mirror and hair parter, and fitted into a dressing case (trousse de toilette), typically made of leather. Boxwood, bone and ivory were the most common materials; in all of these the teeth needed to be cut along the grain for strength. Boxwood is probably the only European wood dense enough to allow a special saw (a stadda) to cut fine teeth into the comb. These saws had two blades set close together and could cut 32 teeth to the inch or even more.† There are numerous pictures from medieval times onward showing ladies using plain H-combs, like the one from the Luttrell Psalter below right. Yet I don’t know of any showing an elaborately carved and pierced comb being used.

Medieval lady hold H comb as maid helps with her hair — A lady and her comb, with a maid helping arrange her hair. Early 14th century.

The most decorative combs started to become less popular as love gifts around 1600, though opinions vary on exactly when the fashion faded away. Plainer wooden H-combs were handmade up to 1900 or so. In the later 17th century there was a fashion for engraved tortoiseshell combs of this shape in the West Indies. Incised patterns with white filler, and frequent use of tulip designs, suggest combs there were influenced by Dutch craftsmanship.

†Information about the saw and other historical details come from Edward Pinto’s Treen and other wooden bygones. He casts doubt on the idea that many surviving combs were “liturgical combs” for priests to use when preparing for church rituals. Some of these were undoubtedly secular combs, made for rich people, but not for the clergy, he believes.

A lover may freely accept from her beloved these things: a handkerchief, a hair band, a circlet of gold or silver, a brooch for the breast, a mirror, a belt, a purse, a lace for clothes, a comb [pecten], sleeves, gloves, a ring, a box, a keepsake of the lover, and, to speak more generally, a lady can accept from her love whatever small gift may be useful in the care of her person, or may look charming, or may remind her of her lover, providing, however, that in accepting the gift it is clear that she is acting quite without avarice. Capellanus, De Amore, Book 2, c1180

Pivoting carved comb from 16th century France — Comb with two flat sections that pivot into a cross shape, from 16th century France. Photo by Kotomi Yamamura

boxwood comb 16th century French — French boxwood comb, 16th century. Photo by Kotomi Yamamura

Photos

Photographers credited in captions. Links to originals here: First comb, Other combs, More picture info here

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