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I've been busy making flowers, both with my Crazy Daisy Winder and my trusty Knifty Knitter flower loom. It's funny that I needed to find another flower loom–the Crazy Daisy–to realize I already owned one. So far, I'm doing fine with the wrapping, using yarn or embroidery floss (more on that later) but the stitching of the middle is a bit tough. I'm getting there, however, and have big plans for my flowers. You can see I'm using different wraps. On the Knifty Knitter loom, I wrap the pegs between two to four times, but the little Daisy loom only takes once or twice to make a full flower.

This week, I decided to buy some embroidery thread for the Daisy loom. The yarn I was using just wasn't fine enough, plus I thought the bright colors and smooth texture of floss would make for some pretty flowers. One night I stopped at the only store that's on the drive home–Walmart–and found they no longer carry floss! I was just a little shocked. The next night, we stopped to browse in a local thrift/discount store in town and I was thrilled to find a big tin of embroidery floss for about $9.00. Once I got home, I started looking through the stash and realized it was even more special than I first thought.

The floss is old, but the colors are still vivid. Many of them are marked two cents ($.02) but most are priced at eight cents ($.08). When was the last time embroidery floss sold for two cents?? I realized that this was a very old collection, put together by someone who really loved to embroider. Most of the collection was carefully stored in plastic bags, but there was a bunch tangled together. Somewhere from within that colorful nest I found a few needles, a strand of pefectly teeny tiny red beads (can you imagine the care it would take to embroider beads that size?!), and a big clue to the time/place of the collector: an ad from a Wisconsin newspaper with the date of 1932 on the bottom.

Many of the embroidery threads are marked from J.C. Penney, but most say France. I've been carefully selecting some accent colors from this tin to highlight my flowers. I have a feeling it will last a long time, and I'm so pleased to have found it.