Last night I was paging through one of Kim Diehl’s quilting books. The books feature her quilts amid lots of old-timey country antiques. In one of the pictures was a tool that I had never seen before.
It was small, maybe six inches long, maybe as many as eight. It consisted of a pale blue handle, made of ceramic? bakelite? heavily painted wood?. The handle had three triangular blades coming out of it. Their points were stuck in the handle. The three blades intersected each other, so that if you held the tool by the handle and pressed it down, it would make an imprint of three intersecting lines. A six-pointed star, sort of. Or an asterisk. The figure it stamps would be about 3" across, maybe less.
My mom had a tool that sort of looked like a branding iron. If I undertood her correctly, you dipped the bottom into a batter and deep fried some kind of cookie-ish thing into the shape of the bottom.
Scroll down a little. There’s the picture of the book front and then a picture of a large quilt hanging on the wall. Below that are two pictures right next to each other. It’s the one on the right, with the little bowl of grape tomatoes. The mystery tool is sitting next to it.
This isn’t necessarily a quilting tool. Antiques of all kinds are pictured.
It’s possibly a nut or dried fruit chopper for use in a bowl. It could be used for making bread and cracker crumbs. It may also be some type mincing tool for general cooking.
