Not everyday can you go into a museum and be given the opportunity to touch and hold items on display. On Saturday, however, the Humboldt and District Museum allowed for just that.

The museum held an artifacts showing during the afternoon, giving you the chance to see how items such as cameras, washboards, and china felt.

"One thing that people would be really familiar with would be the washboard. A lot of people have seen them around, they're quite common in museums in Saskatchewan," said Program Coordinator Jean Price. "One of the things I really like about them is how the scrubbing surface feels, and that's not always something you can tell just by looking."

With each artifact typically comes a story, and with most items in the museum coming locally, that's exactly what they are looking for when new antiques come in.

"Pretty much everything we have in the museum has been donated by people connected to Humboldt and the surrounding community. Some of them are from our extension collection, which means we have duplicates of them, or these aren't necessarily in as good shape as the ones we put on display. Some of the items, especially the china, are quite fragile."

"We're not just interested in 'this is a cup from this year', we're interested in the stories behind things. We like to collect the stories as well when people come and donate artifacts, and we keep that on record so the artifact has a bit more context, a bit more provenance."

Price cited one of the plates with two birds (pictured below) relating to a Chinese love story that was made up for marketing purposes as a story they are interested in having when an item is brought in.

If you have items the museum may be interested in, you can visit them Tuesday through Saturday from 1 to 5pm.

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Hear more from Price in an interview below.