The Tiptree Jam Museum has been mentioned briefly on the Post, but deserves fuller recognition for its excellent displays and explanation of "how the art of preserve-making has advanced over the years at Tiptree". It covers local history, the train which stopped at Tiptree to deliver fresh Essex fruit, "jar evolution", and jam ephemera. A visit to the museum goes well with a scone and jam in the tea room.

Hobkirk's Sewing Machine Museum is on the premises of Hobkirk Sewing Machines  (est.1903) in Blackburn. A visit could be combined with a look at the town where Dorothy Whipple grew up (there is a blue plaque on the house where she was born on Edgeware Rd). It also partly inspired the setting for High Wages in which Jane's shop selling ready-made garments steals a march on the local drapers and seamstresses using the types of sewing machine on display here. 

The Forge Mill Needle Museum has an incredible number and variety of needles displayed in highly creative and decorative arrangements in its small rooms. It is housed in a former polishing mill on the outskirts of Redditch which was the world's centre of needle production in the nineteenth century. Many familiar brands such as Milward and John James originate here, even if they are now made elsewhere. 

Our attention has been brought to the marvellous Antique Breadboard Museum in Putney, and we wonder how we could have ever missed this lovely collection of one of the most everyday yet meaningful domestic objects. So this week have small museums with subjects and collections that have too often been overlooked due to their ordinariness.

Ultimately, though, Yevonde is celebrated for her use of "jubilant and uplifting" colour, as Laura Cumming says in her review of the new-look National Portrait Gallery and this "wittily brilliant exhibition". Here we have 'A Day in the Life of a Debutante: An hour's serious reading' from a 1932 series featuring Betty Cowell. (As Elizabeth Cowell she was the first female announcer on the BBC in 1936). It would be nice to think she has at least one Persephone title such as Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930) in her piles of books. 

Yevonde's career lasted well into the 1960s. As well as the Vivex colour process she had used black and white film in the 1930s (all six Mitford sisters were photographed this way), and after the war when there was a shortage of colour film, she returned to working with black and white. This marvellous portrait of playwright Shelagh Delaney (1939-2011) was taken in 1962, not long after she had enjoyed huge success with A Taste of Honey (1958).

Several actresses, including Vivien Leigh, were regular sitters for Yevonde in the 1930s. She produced what are now regarded as classic studio shots which would have been distributed to fans and printed in popular magazines, images of flawless beauty, poise and glamour in deep, intense colours. This is Joan Maude (1908-98) in 1932, soon after her appearance in Hobson's Choice (1931). She later played the Chief Recorder in the 1946 Powell and Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death.