
Imagine, you are a mother living in the late 1800s. You have so much work to do around the house, looking after the children, washing, mending, cooking, cleaning, that it is important to have things sorted neatly and easy to find. It is easy to waste time looking for a pot, or a knife or a pin or a needle if you don't keep them in just the right place. That is why you are making this pin cushion. You had a lovely one, but it has become worn and you decided it needed to be replaced before your pins and needles fell out of it and went missing!

When I took this pin cushion to show the children, they were really very funny. They assumed it would be something exotic and fancy, some sort of brooch, or perhaps even something which, when 'soaked in water, turned into something else'. I think they were almost disappointed to discover it was something as mundane as a pin cushion! They were intrigued to see the 'bug eggs' which were falling out of the cushion though. They assumed the little brown grains must be some sort of bug egg, because they resembled the eggs of moths found in old cereal, and were stunned to realise that it was actually sawdust - the stuffing of choice in the late 1800s.

Today, pins and needles are cheap and easy to purchase, and when we lose them we simply buy a new packet. Our only concern about losing a pin or needle is whether we might later find it when we sit down, or have bare feet. In times gone by though, pins and needles, particularly metal ones, were very expensive and hard to even find! It was important that, if you had pins and needles, you had some way of keeping them safe and from going rusty. In the 1300s containers started to be made to look after them and to enable people to carry them around. These containers were often made of wood, ivory or silver, and were as much a display of wealth as a way to keep pins safe!

In the 1700s, people started to use pin-pillows to look after their pins and needles. These 'pillows' were usually made of expensive fabrics like satin, velvet or linen and before too long, they pillow itself became part of a more elaborate sculptural piece. Often a base of silver, porcelain or wood would be created and then the pillow would fit inside. These pin-pillows were more decorative than functional, and sometimes the pins themselves were part of the decoration, making the quills on hedgehogs, or themselves decorated. Later, pin cushions began to take on a more functional role, and some even had little clamps which could be used to hold fabric in place against a table. The pin cushion I showed the children probably dates to the 1800s and, though beautiful, is very simple. It was clearly made as a functional pin cusion, not as an elaborate decorative piece, though it is beautifully decorated with beads and very carefully made. Roy will have a go at recreating the design at some stage.