Antique Hand-Punched Thimble, Lappet Border, Size 9, c. 1830–1890

The Piece

A small sewing thimble with a deeply domed crown, worked overall in punched indentations that run from the apex down across the shoulder and body. The pits are not uniform. They vary in size and depth, the rows wander out of parallel, and the crown carries a spiral that drifts and doubles back on itself rather than the true concentric rings a rolling die leaves. This is hand work, punched round the dome one strike at a time.

Below the working surface runs a plain polished band, stamped 9 for the size. Beneath that sits a border of stylized leaf tips, each one a narrow pointed lappet rising from a chased groundline, and below that a thickened rim that flares very slightly and has worn bright from decades of being pushed onto a finger.

The surface carries a deep gray patina with green verdigris held in the punched pits and along the ornament. The interior of the crown holds a hardened pale deposit. Nothing here has been polished away, which is the right condition for a piece of this age and the reason the hand work is still legible.

History & Provenance

Thimble making moved from the bench to the machine over the middle of the nineteenth century. Before that shift the indentations were punched by hand, which is why no two rows ever quite line up and why the spacing opens and closes as the maker worked round the curve. Rolled and die-struck thimbles that followed give a perfectly regular lattice every time. The irregularity on this one is not a flaw in manufacture. It is the signature of the earlier method.

The numeral on the band belongs to the sizing conventions that standardized around the same period. American sizes run roughly 6 to 12 and British sizes 1 to 17, so a 9 sits inside the American range. The maker's mark on a thimble is struck on this same plain band, and the face of the band recorded here carries only the size, which places any mark on the side turned away.

Verdigris is copper corroding. It forms on high copper alloys readily and it also forms on silver, which is alloyed with copper for hardness and grows the same green in crevices after long storage somewhere humid. The green on this piece records where it has sat rather than what it is made of, and the metal is recorded below as unconfirmed rather than guessed at.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A thimble is the smallest object in a house that still shows you exactly how it was made. Hold this one to the light and the maker's hand is right there in the uneven rows, the spiral that wanders, the pits that go deeper where the strike landed harder. Factory thimbles cannot do that, and there are a great many factory thimbles.

It belongs in a cabinet of small things, on a tray beside a pincushion and a pair of steel scissors, or in a sewing box kept for the pleasure of opening it. For a dealer it is the kind of piece that stops a browser, because almost nobody expects a thimble to repay close looking and this one does.