MOP…

…a/k/a “stuff that falls in my lap.”

Many years ago I was contacted by a lady who was cleaning out her late father’s garage.  In it was a box she thought I would find interesting and useful.  Apparently back in The Depression he owned a factory/warehouse building and one of his tenants, a pearl button maker, simply disappeared, leaving behind all his inventory.  She said it was a box of pearl button blanks and offered it to me provided I pay for postage which I gladly covered.

I arranged for the shipping through  parcel delivery service and waited for the arrival of what I figured would be  shoe-box size of who knows what.  Much to my astonishment two weeks later a two-foot cube of a box arrived filled with a couple hundred thousand pieces of mother-of-pearl!

I sorted it into storage containers which now fill three drawers of my large map case.  I haven’t done much with it other than that and using it for the occasional inlay, but perhaps the time has come for me to inventory it more completely and offer it through the donsbarn.com store.  There’s no way I can use it all.