This week was the roll top desk and more of the craft room. I will confess that pretty much zero progress on anything was made Monday and Tuesday of this past week due to how crazy hot it was those days. Thankfully, by Wednesday it had cooled off and I could get some stuff done. Susan really wants to find the deed and believes it is in the little office area outside the downstairs bathroom. So we started going through that little room. I also continued my efforts of organizing the craft room.

Roll-Top Desk

This desk was and is an adventure. It was (if I am remembering correctly) Ben’s great great grandfathers, William M. Morrissey. And Emily used it as her office while she lived here. There was and is a great deal of paperwork that is a result of owning a home and living your life. That all belonged to her and resides in the desk.

We did find a folder labeled deeds and it had some copies but not the original. We also found a folder labeled lot maps which were interesting. There is a whole drawer full of rulers, protractors, and other measuring tools. There was a few collapsible shot glasses, a jar FULL of hobby knife blades, several boxes of razor blades, boxes of ink pen nibs, and TONS of pencils, pens, and their like.

My absolute favorite find so far from the desk has to be the contents of a little change purse that I found in one of the little drawers on the top. Upon opening said little change purse, I found some little red cardboard feeling coins. The “coins” were stamped with OPA 1 Red Point. I did the only sensible thing and google image searched a photo of said “coins”. I learned that these little “coins” were used as change for ration tickets during WWII. Ration tickets were worth 10 points and red tokens were for meat and fats. More information can be found here and here. There was also an oriental coin of some sort that will require further research to figure out which country it is from.

Craft Room

So the updated photos of the room definitely make it look like I made the room messier. But I am a firm believer that organizing things properly involves making them messier before they are cleaner.

I started going through some of the tubs that we had previously just shoved into the closet to be able to move some stuff around. There were some fun finds in here as well. I found a tub labeled Florence’s Quilt. It contained a variety of different quilt blocks and strips. It will be a fun project to pull it all out and see if I can figure out what the plan was.

Not only was there the tub labeled Florence’s Quilt but there was another tub with this rather ingenious method of making hexagonal quilt blocks. Someone (I presume Emily), was using cardboard hexagon cut outs to shape squares for the hexagons.

Inside yet another tub was tapestry yarn and needlepoint works. Most of the needlepoint projects were finished or almost finished. But they are gorgeous! And perhaps worth learning a new craft to finish them and make them into something.

So far I have only come across two tubs of stamps and a few loose stamps. I will have to get into and/or begin learning about stamps because there are so many here. Clarence “Doc” Ropp collected stamps, hence why there are so many.

There is so far at least one box of patterns. I also have spent a decent chunk of time this week going through thread and weeding out the thread that was unusable and cutting it from the spools. I spent time cutting the thread from the spools because a good amount of them were wooden spools. And I bet there is some way to repurpose the wooden spools.

Other Finds

My slightly more random find was actually not so random. I found it in the craft room with some loose stamps. I am assuming because the stamp was clearly removed from the envelope. It is dated Nov 4. 1908 and addressed to Mrs. Martha Ambrose. The contents of said letter are not super interesting. There was a line that made me chuckle. “Mother said tell you Mr. and Mrs. Rogers are still fighting.” I theorize that this was written by Clarence’s sister to their Aunt. The mother being referred to is Clarence’s mother.

Thanks for continuing on this journey with us,

Lots of Love,

The McMullins