I was really pleased with the photographs of my old pegs that I posted a few weeks ago. Since then I’ve acquired even more. It is hard to believe that pegs could come in so many different styles, but the fact that they are all handmade by someone, once, and designed to do a necessary job makes them especially interesting to me. I don’t suppose they were ever considered as things to warrant attention.
The first set of pegs are quite large. They have been turned on a lathe as there are marks in the tops which show where they were attached for turning. I think they are oak but seem to have been stained to give them a rich woody colour.

The second set are again quite big, clumsy and chunky, hewn from untreated oak. The tops are square and have been thoughtfully bevelled at the corners, to make them more comfortable to handle when being pushed down onto the washing line.
The last set look like conventional dolly pegs but, though my photo doesn’t really convey it, they are child sized, each peg only 6cm long. They are like the first pegs given to me as a child by my Aunt Lily, who always gave the best presents and had an innate sense for what you’d want more than anything in the world. Whoever owned these little pegs hand stitched a flannel bag to keep them in. Small nimble fingers sewed on a press stud fastening to keep the pegs safe and tidy.

I thought you might like to see these old clothes pegs. With a company called The Laundry it was inevitable that I would acquire some interesting laundry related things over the years. I haven’t set out to collect these things avidly but chancing upon them, I have just picked them up along the way. Old wooden clothes pegs have such a lovely hand-crafted look about them and these ones would most certainly have been hewn out of British timbers, hard enough to stand the test of time and repeated use.

I discovered some of them in an old peg bag found at a car boot sale. You do sometimes find all different shaped pegs jumbled up together and if you are lucky there might be some special examples in amongst the bog-standard ones. The three big chunky pegs were sold to me as blanket pegs and one of them has a few woodworm holes.