workboxes

They went and sat down with their workboxes by the waterside under the arbour.

Madame Bovary

For ladies got smoking caps, and cigar-cases; while gentlemen received workboxes, thimbles, and tatting-needles.

Isabel Leicester A Romance by Maude Alma

These sons sent her the money upon which she lived and out of which she made her little charities, and they wrote her fine brave letters, and every year they came home to see her, bearing beautiful presents from foreign lands, ivory toys and shining silks (which she always gave to some bride) and workboxes of sweet-scented wood richly carved -- to show how much they loved her.

The Faery Tales of Weir

Indeed, I devoted the sole article the Yankees let fall from my two workboxes - a bunch of soutache - to the work.

A Confederate girl's diary,

In the same collection there are workboxes overlaid with straw work in geometrical patterns relieved by colour.

Chats on Household Curios

The workboxes, so rich in gilding and relief, came from Italy, when, as early as the year 1400, caskets were covered with a species of lime which was moulded, the gesso, as it was called, on a gilt ground of white compo, giving it a very rich effect.

Chats on Household Curios

Leather was used with good effect, too, for the ornamentation of workboxes, red morocco being much favoured in England early in the nineteenth century.

Chats on Household Curios

They were permitted to relieve the tedium of their confinement by manufacturing and selling toys; workboxes, brooches, and carved work of different kinds.

James Nasmyth: Engineer, An Autobiography.

The parcels when opened produced a wonderful array of cheap workboxes, needle-cases, pin-trays, ornamental pens, boxes full of bon-bons, penny whistles, twopenny flutes, a Jew's-harp or two; in short, a medley of every kind of heterogeneous presents which could be produced with the modest sum of from a penny to twopence halfpenny.

Good Luck

Amongst her things were two workboxes very much alike.

Desperate Remedies