have wool, will travel

One of the things I struggle with is the best way to package and display our farm's products. Some people seem to have a natural flair for this. I copy those people.

Case in point: Robin's vintage suitcases, which she uses to carry and display her handspun yarn. She totes it into a show, opens it up, and voila! Perfect display, which she claims she ripped off from someone else.

Ever since I saw it, I have been on the hunt for a similar suitcase to use for my little bags of felted wool. A shop in town had two perfect ones, but I dithered too long and they were gone the next time I stopped in. A few weeks later, she let me know that she had more.

Of course they weren't quite as neat as the originals. They never are. Only one was possibly suitable.

Possibly. It is vintage in the way that anything colored harvest gold is vintage, which is not quite as cool and retro as anything from the fifties. With Maryland breathing down my neck, beggars couldn't be choosers.

The shop owner knocked down the price because she hadn't had a chance to clean it up yet. I finally got to it today, because: Maryland. Three days. As soon as I started, the only word that came to mind was, well, manky. Call the Midwife is in season. I am channelling my inner Brit at the moment.

A scrub with Fantastic and a Magic Eraser sponge and it was a spot better. (I wasn't kidding about the inner Brit.)

The inside still needed some work.

Actually, it just needed to have all the fabric bits removed, along with the stray bobby pins. More Fantastic, more Magic Eraser (love those things), a heck of a lot of vacuuming.

The bottom is a wooden piece, but it had broken in half. After aligning the pieces together, I put another piece on top to strengthen it and hopefully hold the broken pieces in place. If you are wondering why I am not using clamps to keep it together while the wood glue dries, it is because my sons have completely wrecked my husband's workbench and I could only find this too-small one, so I was forced to use it as a weight instead.

I have been keeping back this mega-heavy-duty cardboard box for several weeks with this project in mind. It's a wonder my husband puts up with my hoarding ways. A little cutting, a little glueing of burlap fabric to cover the cardboard, some sorting of wool, and now I have my own voila!

Unfortunately I miscounted how many colors I had already dyed, so I am scrambling a bit to fill those last two slots. One has been filled since I took the picture; the other is in the dyepot. I do have three whole days until Maryland.