Which items from the past do you still use?

[01debbie]

Having recently been re-acquainted with a good old fashioned hot water bottle, (& wondering how I've ever coped without it!!!)  I was wondering which other items from the past are still used reguarly by Rootschatters?

Debbie 

[annieoburns]

My favourite oldies are fountain pens. 
Anne

[kooky]

Some recipes, from my mother,and those the children [they are both over 30!]
used to enjoy.
Also a letter opener my father was given in the fifties.
Kooky

oh and a glass bell bauble and an angel doll both older than me, that will be on my Christmas tree next week!

[stoney]

My Gran's knitting needle guage (even if it is in Imperial measurement!)

[karenlee]

My great grandmother's dining table and chairs, some of her cutlery and lots of her recipes

Karenlee

[Christine in Portugal]

 Still use my grandmother's Christmas cake and Christmas pudding recipes.
I still have some 1lb loaf bread tins too that were grandmother's and they are a lot stronger than the ones you can buy today.

Christine

[dennford]

I was still using a "Thornto Pickard" plate camera untill a few years ago, I had to make my own photographic emulsion to coat the plates with. I finally gave up using it because of those messy procedures and it now sits on my desk.

I also still use an old wooden jack plane like the ones we used at school woodwork - it is far more useful than an electric plane.

But of course when on the farm over in the Philipines we use many olden day impements including a single blade plough pulled by water buffalo, a well for water and hand tools for harvesting rice. It's so strange to see these implements being used alongside laptops and mobile phones.


Denn

[aghadowey]

My mother-in-law's wooden spoons, rolling pin, potato masher, cutlery (and still have a few un-used canteens that she got as wedding gifts), her sewing things (and until recently her treadle sewing machine), dining room chairs that belonged to husband's great-grandfather, Queen cake recipe that husband's mother got from her grandmother, other family recipes, my grandmother's sugar shell which always sat in the sugar bowl on her kitchen table, and lots of old Christmas ornaments (oldest from 1901).

[XPhile2868]

I don't use anything fom the past myself, but my dad still has a lot of stuff from when he was a kid in the 1960s and we also have this little booklet from when my  grandad did national service in Malta and what is now Yemen (he was a driver in the RAF).

Stephen