Simply Thimbles

If there is one thing that I like better than buying a thimble, it's finding out more about it. Where it was made, what it was made from, has it got signs of use.  The history behind every thimble is just fascinating. A few weeks ago I was contacted by a lady who was keen to find out about a thimble that she had inherited. The thimble had been passed down through the female line for at least three generations. There wasn't too much to go on, but using the little bits that she had sent through and my trusty research tool, the internet, I was able to track down the thimble's origins. The thimble was from Taxco in Mexico and very similar to the one shown here.  Now, up until that point I hadn't heard of Taxco so researching the information for her was an absolute joy. It opened up a whole new world of thimbles that I didn't know existed. Back in the 1920s an American called William Spratling moved to Taxco de Alarcon in Mexico.  He found out that the area had

  There have been lots of different ways of advertising products or services over the years.  These days the most powerful methods are probably the television and the internet. Both tend to get taken for granted and its hard for us living in a technology driven world to imagine what life was like before the internet or even the good old Telly. The first electronically transmitted television pictures were sent in 1926 but it wasn't until much later, probably the 1950s/1960s when most households would be able to get a TV.  The world wide web has only been in public use since the 1990s.  Now advertising has been around a lot longer than that, so what did people use? Newspapers?  Radio?  Well, why not pop your product on a thimble? This thimble is brass and has the wording "Use Hudson's Soaps" right around the base.  The vertical lines surrounding the wording, could indicate that this was possibly made by Charles Iles of Birmingham, a thimble maker who specialised i