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Friday Slide Show: Sewing Thimbles
22 November 2024
We're no digitabulists, of thimble collector, but we did inherit a few with our grandmother's sewing cabinet. They are no, we're pretty sure, collectibles but ordinary sewing thimbles used for decades to push sewing needles through fabric.
That, in fact, is what makes them special to us. That they're real and were used by Gram in an era when you had to know how to thread a needle and hammer a nail.
The first two in the slide show are bright colored plastic, the next two are metal (aluminum and brass, we suspect, but again we're no expert). The last porcelain and likely a gift.
We thought we'd stage them on a black pillow case a niece made for us some time ago, sewing our age into it with a few hearts using a quilt-like fabric.
They were used in an era when you had to know how to thread a needle and hammer a nail.
We used the iPhone 15 Pro Max's 5x lens to get in close but without a tripod. So we had to do a little composing in Lightroom to center and straighten them. Which, frankly, we always enjoy.
We dropped the exposure on all of them, increased the Dehazing and minded the highlights. The iPhone has its own mind about exposure and is happy to go off into the weeds if you let it. But there was enough information in the HEIF files for us to match the images to what we saw.
Wikipedia, which is raising funds at the moment, has a lot to say about the use of thimbles (other than sewing).
We were just happy to see the article mention rubber fingers. We went through quite a few of those picking up signatures* on the gathering table to put together the weekly magazine we worked for.
"They are considered disposable and sold in boxes," it says. Indeed. Ours were brown and we coated them in glycerine to make them sticky enough to lift a corner of the four- or eight-page signature so we could slip a hand into the center fold and slide the lifted signature into the next signature, building a 28-page magazine (that once in a while climbed to 96 pages).
None of those survived.
But Gram's thimbles are still here and we plan to use them. Buttons these days seem to be sewn to shirts using artificial intelligence, which leaves something to be desired. Loosened, they do not hang around long.
But we happen to have inherited a store of buttons, too.
