Hey Bernice!

I have always loved the way things were organised and stored in the ‘olden days’. When you browse through an antique store there are so many  storage apparatus with multiple compartments, thin draws, small pigeon holes, sections, levels….

If you ask the store owner what they were used for, you will get a myriad of interesting responses… ‘storing letters for the printing press’, ‘keeping buttons’, ‘architectural drawings’, ‘filing’.. to think we now store most of these things on a server!

I had been looking around for one of these wooden pigeon holey things for a while –  there are several floating around in antique shops (prices and quality vary greatly).

I ended up finding this one at the Mill Markets just outside of Geelong in Victoria – a great place to kill an afternoon.

http://www.millmarkets.com.au/

Once acquired I didn’t know what to put in the pigeon holes? It looked unfinished hanging on the wall, like carrying around a handbag with nothing in it – pointless.

So the hunt began.

There weren’t many options because the compartments were so small (2.5″ height and width) until I stumbled across these great little bottles.

Max Watts Industria in Fitzroy is an amazing place to travel back in time – in particular to the school science lab. There are bunsen burners, tripods, beakers, test tubes, microscopes, biological posters of the anatomy, and my tiny bottles.

Thanks to Industria memories of science teachers also came flooding back to me: Mrs Murphy who would wear her hair in a distinct square, folded bun every day without fail, and Miss Rome who we all loved dearly; she couldn’t say her R’s, so biology for us was all about ‘Wabbits’, ‘Weproduction’ and the ‘Perweodic Table’.

I couldn’t believe my luck – there were hundreds of these little bottles at $1 each, they were a bargain. Mission complete.
Bernice