It’s another ‘under the floorboards’ item today, once again found at renovation work at 21 Church Street. There’s no doubt as to what this is. It is a thimble.
Thimble found at 21 Church Street, Market Lavington
Clearly it is a little battered and misshapen but there is no doubt as to its purpose. This was worn on a finger and used to push a needle through fabric when sewing.
It has no maker’s mark – in fact nothing really to help date it at all.
What is not clear in the photos above is that this thimble is the tiniest little one you ever saw. Here it is perched on our curator’s little finger.
This thimble is tiny
This thimble has an opening diameter of just about a centimetre. It is less than 2 centimetres tall.
Clearly it was intended for use by a child, and in the sexist days of the past, that means a girl. We think it would have been really quite a young girl.
Do we have a thimble expert who could tell us any more?
Tags: childhood, thimble, under the floorboards
Market Lavington Museum 
January 23, 2016 at 6:55 pm |
Thimbles come in all shapes and sizes from the medieval ring thimbles to the later beehive type we find many while detecting the
Fields . after the harvest the corn was put into sacks and some poor
Soul would have the job of stitching up the sacks for storage in the tithe barn
The one you have is machine made and I would think it could date from around mid 1800s
As you say it is a child’s thimble but in Georgian..and Victorian times and indeed long before that it was the norm to instruct young
Girls in the art of sewing and embroidery from an early age with no
Television or computers there was not much else to do
I managed to get out with the detecter today and found two one of
Them was an engraved silver thimble one for the P.A.S.scheme
And a brass one
Thimbles are like buttons they can tell you such a lot about the
Usage of a field in times gone by
January 23, 2016 at 7:15 pm |
We like thimbles for what they tell us. Thanks for the extra information. It is always good to learn more.
February 19, 2016 at 5:30 am |
[…] that thimbles came in a variety of sizes to suit any finger. None of these are as tiny as the one featured recently which was found ‘under the floorboards’ at 21 Church […]