Clark's O.N.T. Thread Cabinet

The studio is my new house is almost finished, and it is looking very adorable! (I still have to paint some trim and decorative shelves; can't figure out why Charlie doesn't want to do that for me.)

I recently traded with a friend who had a Clark's O.N.T. Spool Cotton cabinet stored in her old house. After a little cleaning and finishing, it was as good as new, when it might have resided in the sewing corner of a small town general store somewhere. (Like H. D. Reynolds General Merchandise, the store we depended on growing up in Cheshire, Massachusetts.)

Here is the Clark's O.N.T. (what did that stand for? - click here) cabinet as you walk in the front, double French doors of my studio. Beyond the thread cabinet is my always messy work table, so the cabinet has a dual function of covering up my messy work space, as least from the front door.

The top of the cabinet lifts up to reveal a shallow storage space. I wonder what this space was used for -- patterns? advertising? I used the space to dispay some of my collection of antique sewing notions. Carolyn gave me the cute little Hoover vacuum measuring tape!

It's so nice not to have my thread stored in several cigar boxes, by color. It was a pain to thread up the sewing machine when I had to dig around for threads and matching bobbins. Now they are all in one place, what a luxury! I have already used my sewing machine two times!

In fact, there is so much room in these long drawers that my threads only took up space in three of them. So I put more antique notions in the one empty drawer.