This small wooden lidded dish is ornamented with an incised woodburned motif of cherries and leaves. The maker is unknown, but the inscription on the underside of the dish suggests it was handmade as a Christmas gift.
History
Women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used covered dishes like this one, known as hair receivers, to save the hair they collected from their hairbrushes, which they used to stuff pincushions and pillows and to create ratts to add volume to large hairstyles.
Woodburning, also known as pyrography, was a popular hobby in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hobbyists could learn the craft from instruction manuals such as Frank Goodwin Sanford's Art Crafts for Beginners (1906), which devoted a chapter to pyrography tools and suggested patterns.
Sources
More information is available in the catalog entry for a hair receiver in the collection of Heritage Branch, Province of New Brunswick (object # NB 982.7.802 A), available online in the Virtual Museum of Canada (accessed December 12, 2008): http://tinyurl.com/6bv9pt; Frank Goodwin Sanford, The Art Crafts for Beginners (Hutchinson & Co., 1906) (available online via Google Books; accessed December 12, 2008): http://www.google.com/books?id=pQUTAAAAIAAJ; Kathleen Menendez, "Antique Pyrography" Woodcarver Ezine 2, no. 1 (1998) (accessed December 30, 2008): http://carverscompanion.com/Ezine/Vol2Issue1/Menendez/Antiquep1.html
