As an avid collector of vintage fabric, buttons and anything that’s got to do with sewing; many people pass their unwanted crafting supplies over to me, resulting in never-enough-storage-space in my crafting room.
Sometimes people give me old sewing thread. Usually I give it the old “pull test”, and if it’s strong and does not snap easily, I keep it in my thread box.

But while reading a thread about vintage thread in the Etsy Forum recently, I realized that even if a vintage thread feels strong, it might disintegrate in the laundry, due to the chemical nature of older dyes and the harsh washing products we use today.

So, I decided to go through my box, and remove all my old threads. Well, it wasn’t hard to distinguish between the new and the old cotton, since the old cotton is wound on wood or carton reels and the new cotton is wound on plastic reels.

Well, that made me think of the way that reels have made in the past 100 years.

At the beginning, cotton was wound on wooden spools.

These spools were probably expensive to make and perhaps were recycled again for their original purpose. They also had many other uses, as kids’ toys, or around the house. They were used to make a baby’s rattle, wheels for a tin car, a knitting spool for a young girl or a Reel Tractor for a young boy.
Here is a beautiful drawing from Elsa Beskow’s Book “Pelle’s New Suit” which depicts turn of the century rural life in Sweden. This drawing Shows (at the bottom right corner) the baby’s play blanket on the floor, with it’s homemade toys: A rag doll, a wooden spoon, a pine cone, a tin cup and three wooden spools strung on a piece of string.

I have only one wooden reel. Today they are considered collectors items and are sold as such on eBay.
The next step in the evolution of reels was carton. These reels were cheap, not very useful when empty, but at least they were biodegradable.
I had a bunch of those, I now passed over to the children to play with.

Nowadays, all thread is wound on plastic reels, of different kinds. Some are cheep and some more robust. They can be used for crafts, but aren’t beautiful as the wooden ones, and I’d guess most of them end up in the dump.

It was sad for me to “discover” another area in our life that an object has evolved over time to become more wasteful and less biodegradable.