Beaker Button

A new shop called Beaker Button has opened up near me - at The Fairground Craft and Design Centre at Weyhill.  You get a lovely welcome and Jen who runs it stocks some very nice yarn, with more coming in all the time.  I went to get Christmas presents and shouldn't have been looking at wool shops at all, but hey-ho.  What can I say?  

Absolutely scrummy mossy green 4 ply

Also in stock are kits for making Dorset buttons and some cards of buttons already made up.  I have always been fascinated by this craft which once provided a livelihood for many in the west country who would proudly say when asked, 'I do buttony'.  Sadly, the advent of machine made buttons took away their livelihood and they fell on hard times. 

Jen does workshops and here is her website.
Beakerbutton

Another Dorset connection is that Weyhill is the site of the famous Weyhill fair where thousands upon thousands of sheep were brought by drovers from all over the South of England.  Itinerant workers would go as well, to sell their labour or their expertise and it was at one of the Weyhill fairs that the Dorset novelist Thomas Hardy had the future Mayor of Casterbridge sell his wife.

I haven't read The Mayor of Casterbridge.  Thomas Hardy always makes me a bit depressed and having got through Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D'urbervilles, The Woodlanders  (the last two are extremely sad), I'd need to be feeling particularly bouyant to tackle the Mayor of Casterbridge.