Tiny Tuesday: Traditional & Modern

We like to use an old-fashioned weighing machine in the kitchen, rather than the spring-balance type. We've had a set of imperial weights for a long time but more and more recipes work in grams these days, so to avoid having to do mental arithmetic we recently got a set of metric weights too.

The imperial weights are the traditional shape, whereas the metric ones are a more modern shape - they call them "churn" weights, I guess because of their similarity to milk churns (which, strangely, are an old tradition!).

As I mooched around looking for my blip, my Editor kindly suggested the tiniest weights from each set, which I thought was a nice idea. Interestingly, if you put them on opposite ends of the scale they balance each other almost exactly, although strictly speaking 1/4 oz equals 7.088g.

The problem was that the old weights were very tarnished indeed, so I decided to polish the little 1/4 oz weight before photographing it. Needless to say it was a bit fiddly but it came up nicely in the end (although my fingers are now rather black - it was tricky to do such a small item while wearing gloves).

(Warning: If you decide to polish one item in a set, your spouse/partner/Editor may decide that you should then go ahead and polish the rest...!!)


Many thanks to wrperry for hosting Tiny Tuesday this month.