This is the drawer of my antique barograph. It measures barometric pressure. During my seagoing career these instruments were standard equipment on the bridge of a ship.
David
Mementoes
I love this drawer because it contains stuff from my parents – my dad’s college tie and one of his clerical collars, and a comedy bow tie my best friend made me for a charity bike ride.
Naomi
Journeying Together
My husband was a collector of ‘old things’ from being a child and so when we were married he already had a brass bedstead, a wooden cradle, and this small chest of drawers from a Victorian haberdashery shop. The contents we first placed inside have travelled with us and altered ever so slightly over the 34 years we’ve shared together.
Laura
Church ‘knick-knacks’!
A drawer in the church hall at St. Cuthbert’s Roman Catholic church. Just a random selection of knick knacks. Nothing you need but nobody dares clear it out either!
Winter Scarves
I made the two pink and plum felted scarves, and the green and plum woven one. The scarf under the pink and plum was bought for me by my daughter when she went to clog dance in Oman.
Sandra
Turban (dastaar) drawer
This is one of my turban drawers.
For Sikhs, the turban (dastaar) is not just an item of clothing used to cover the hair. It is an important part of our religious identity, and also marks us out as individuals who will endeavour to carry out good deeds and help others. We treat our turbans with great respect and we wear them with pride, like kings and queens wearing their crowns.
There are various different styles of turbans, all of which require different colours, lengths and thicknesses of material. I choose to stick to the colours that hold special significance in the Sikh tradition, which are blue, orange/yellow and white. The turbans in this drawer are all my “outer” turbans and are roughly 12 metres long. I tie a smaller turban (roughly 6 metres) underneath. This means that my full turban is made up of roughly 60 feet of material, which is rather a lot by most standards!
The idea behind my turban drawers is to keep my turbans well organised and easily accessible, but this doesn’t stop me from regularly losing track of them and forgetting which lengths and colours I have!
Amrit Kaur
A drawer full of love.
Last May I replaced my 22 year old childhood wardrobes. When I opened the bottom drawer I found this treasure trove of childhood memories and family ties. Two pieces of cot bedding from different sets, other pieces passed on to my brothers and sisters (my niece and nephew both used the matching blanket for the colourful lion piece). My christening dress – hard to believe I was once small enough to fit in it. A vintage teddy bear cardigan and Henry’s Cat jumper hand knitted by my mum (my brother had a matching one in blue) – both kept and worn, first by me, then my sister, and then by my eldest daughter, before she outgrew them and they were carefully packed away. Perhaps my grandchildren will wear them one day? And in a small plastic pot, off to one side, the end of a Hickman line. It looks nothing much – a small plastic piece of broken medical paraphernalia – but it saved my life when I was 13, carrying chemotherapy drugs, antibiotics, blood transfusions, platelets, and the bone marrow my oldest brother gave to me.
I gave the wardrobes away. But I packed the contents of the drawer carefully into a box, waiting for their time to be passed on. It was a drawer full of love. These are the ties that bind.
Julie
Family Threads
This is my sewing drawer. It represents a collection of sewing stuff – thread, cottons, elastic, buttons, fasteners, and bits and bobs, from women in my family. It’s all gathered from my Grandma, my Mum, and my Mother in Law, and has lots of my own things in there too.
I’m not such a competent sewer as the women who went before me in my family – perhaps these days the need to sew is not so pressing. Maybe it was cheaper to sew your own clothes than buy them, back then, and certainly more people mended things than they do these days. My own sewing practice is more ‘freestyle’ (what would my Mum say?!) and definitely more on and off, but I do enjoy it, and come back to it as a relaxing hobby now and again. Most of all I like it because it makes me think of my Grandma. I especially enjoy having this drawer which brings together all the threads of our families, and my own journey from buying sewing materials in Bradford as a teenager, to buying them in my local haberdashery in Greater London!
Trudi
Garden Drawers
I like reusing bits and bobs for the garden to make cheap and interesting containers for growing flowers and vegetables. When my housemate’s wardrobe fell to bits last year we used the drawers to plant some of our favourite plants. There are bulbs in there too which are meant to look like clothes spilling out of drawers when they come out next spring!
Lizzie
Extraordinary Drawers 