#bobbin lace

[mesterspets]

New piece! Am calling her “Skör” (fragile in Swedish).

Assembled from strips of lace, a doily, and some fiddly needle lace and crochet for the teeth. Starched with diluted wood glue.

Perfect in time for Halloween!

[bobbinlacebliss]

you guys remember olney handkerchief, right? I confess I sometimes forget about our olney handkerchief for months at a time...

anyway.

since my last update on this project (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) I have actually made some progress. today I even moved the lace up another notch - which incidentally meant it was time to free the first bit of lace from the last few of its pins! I do love unpinning. I try not to fiddle with the lace too much after it's free - must keep it clean - but... just a little won't hurt...

so cool right?

[speedwagons-glorious-mane]

PSA for all the people who have a pet Fibre Artist, whether you have a Knitter, a Crocheter or perhaps one of the more rare breeds like Spinners and Lace-Makers, make sure that they take frequent breaks from their craft by playing with them and taking them on walks since Fibre Artists are prone to giving themselves RSIs and Carpal Tunnel when left to their own devices for too long!

[intermittentstitcher]

Reblog for a bigger sample size

[noxx-notions]

Sometimes, ya just gotta make do with what you have

I decided I wanted to give bobbin lace a try but didn't want to invest a ton of money in case I didn't like it so here has been my solution. I've drawn all the patterns by hand on regular notebook paper, and am pinning into my laptop case. The only money I've spent was on one pack of pencils for $1 (which I'll use anyway), an enormous spool of yarn $5 (bought at a thrift shop), and one pack of pins $6 (which I'll also use anyway).

I'm enjoying it so far, but still undecided if I want to spend more money on it. Real bobbins and a pillow would be soooo helpful though. But its been encouraging how much I've been able to learn already with just these materials!

Edit: Forgot to add, pattern: Simple mat edge (theedkins.co.uk)

[mareliini]

decided to sit down and make lace all day. I know I'm just barely past halfway, but feels GREAT to see the other end of the lace hahaaahh

[futurebird]

I don't understand how lace is made, but looking at the bobbins and pins and patterns … listen buddy I know math when I see it. This is A Math Thing. Obviously.

Right away I want to know:

Can I encode information in lace?

How much of an expert must one be to make your own patterns?

What about the creation of surfaces?

Knitting is more accessible, and people have been exploring math with knitting forever.

But what possibilities does lace offer?

What is the theory of lace?

An excerpt from Mathematics Magazine Vol. 91, No. 4 (October 2018), pp. 307-309

Shows I'm hardly the first person to muse about this. Need to get my hands on the rest of this article, obviously.

[nostalgicstitchcraft]

I barely had free time to make any significant progress yesterday, but today's more fruitful. What I don't like about autumn is that days become shorter and shorter, and it's almost always either raining or snowing, so now I have to use two lamps and glasses to actually see what I'm doing 😿

[calendae-creations]

Sales have been agonizingly slow lately, and I am very poor. I do, however, have a vast amount of inventory in my shop! Jewelry, bookmarks, knitting patterns, hats, neckwarmers, kippot, home decor, and more! I also take commissions -- i have customizable order forms available for a lot of my more commonly requested items, but if there's something you want but aren't seeing, please let me know as I am always delighted to bring people's textile dreams to life!

Shipping outside the USA is not currently available through the store, but I can and do ship internationally – just message me about it and pay me directly through paypal once I can get you a shipping estimate!

Any order of 2 or more items comes with a free watercolour bookmark!

Reblogs help me so, so much! If you like my art but can't afford to (or just don't want to) buy anything, reblogging my sales posts is free, and gets more eyes on my work!

[iplaywithstring]

Achievement unlocked:

Hand made lace trim applied to garment

When I started doing bobbin lace, this is one of the things I had in mind - making lace to apply to pieces. At the time, I thought I'd be giving it to a friend who sews, but when your kid asks for a historically inspired prom dress, what's a mom to do?

Simple fan trim sized up and worked in 8/2 weaving cotton, because I've got a lot of that. I made 1.3m and it's going on the leg cuffs of her split drawers.

No one will see it (aside from when she shows it off) but we k ow it's there and all the time and love that went into it.

[insatiable-hungey]

You know what I want to see more of?

Ankh Morpork Souveniers

SPECIFICALLY

Lace bobbins

So, info dump time, round world historical lace bobbins are made from wood or bone, specifically horse or cow shin bones, and they can be plain or decorated. English midland style bobbins have beads called spangles to weigh them down and keep them flat.

Historically you had a large portion of poor and working class women making lace (because it's tedious, repetitive, and was worth a fair amount compared to other home crafts of the time) and they would often sit in their front gardens/on the street/in their doorways making lace because they needed good light.

Now, people would wander by and see what people were working on/what could be purchased, so one way people would promote things, say an election candidate, a moral bible message or an event (like a hanging) would be with engraved bobbins.

Bobbins, the free pens of the semi- literate world

They would also be given as gifts to the lacemaker from family members or sweethearts, sometimes with names or messages etched into them (theres a saucely one with 'kis me quick my mome is comin' etched into it in the Cowper & Newton Museum)

Now back to the Disc.

Thanks to Guards Guards we know that there is lacemaking on the Disc because Vetinari is reading a book on it in prison.

Ergo, there are lace makers*

Lacemakers who would go head over heels to be brought a tiny dwarf battle bread shaped bobbin by their friend who visited Koom Valley, or be gifted an antique troll bone bobbin that sparkles with tiny diamond flecks (new troll bone products since been outlawed everywhere but Uberwald much like the round world's ivory laws)

But most of all

I want to see hanging bobbins.

You know with absolute certainty that CMOT dibbler is hawking badly made bobbins, made from the finest (rat) bones yessir, to watchers of the seasons hangings.

Which means after the events of going postal...

There are ALBERT SPANGLER commemorative SPANGLED BOBBINS

VETINARI PROBABLY COMMISSIONED THEM

I AM LOSING MY MIND over moist von lipwig having to deal with the shipping hassle of every lacemaker and their aunt sending a bobbin to their far distant friends COMMEMORATING HIS OWN DEATH

I'M TOTALLY NORMAL ABOUT THIS I SWEAR

*Vetinari would 100% enjoy lacemaking**, as it is all about following the strings and making sure they are heading where they need to go to complete the pattern.

**He would attend the Thursday morning club because lace ladies are incorrigible gossips and know everything about everyone

EDIT:

Ohmygod I forgot about the potential of souvenier PINS

[lupes-hat]

bobbin lace loon i made earlier this year :)

[bobbinlacebliss]

Finished project: Rosemary

I was scrolling through my own blog today (as one does) and realized I never did a proper round-up post for Rosemary. So this is a bit of a retrospective I suppose! Click through for my notes on the project if you're interested - otherwise, I hope you like the pictures!

This is certainly one of my favorite pieces that I've done. I think it really turned out beautifully! But, it also stands out in my mind for having a foul, foul, truly foul number of broken threads that had to be replaced in the middle of the work. I think at least 6? The ideal number of course being zero. At the time, this sucked. I had no idea what I was doing - you can see in one of the pictures that I was referencing three different books at one point trying to figure out how the heck to fix the dang things. But in hindsight, it was valuable experience! I got a lot of practice splicing in new threads, and I also stopped being so afraid of it happening. (Though of course one still likes to avoid it...)

I am not sure why so many threads decided to part company with their fellows, but I have some theories. I'm fairly sure it's not because of putting too much tension on the thread, because it didn't snap under pressure so much as just kinda fray and drift apart. My prime suspect is the bobbins - something about this style of bobbin makes it really hard (for me, at least) to prevent them rolling wildly all over the pillow during the work, which runs the risk of untwisting the thread. This is very sad for me because I love these bobbins. But I haven't given up hope that I can still make them work. They seem to roll less on my box pillow, so maybe they can just be reserved for that pillow. Also, I'm on that "it was a bad batch of thread" copium 😅

This was also the first time I tried mounting the finished lace onto fabric, which I was very worried about screwing up but it wound up not being so bad! Sewing is definitely not my strong suit, but I got through it and am pleased with the result.

Technical Notes

Pattern: "Rosemary" from A Visual Introduction to Bucks Point Lace by Geraldine Stott

Thread: Egyptian cotton 80/2 in bright white

Gimps: 8 ply of the base thread

Pins: .5 mm pins for the picots and motifs; .8mm pins for the ground and footside

Picots: 5 twists

Started: September 14, 2020

Completed: August 11, 2021

(If you've made it this far and you somehow haven't heard enough about this project, you can check out the "rosemary" tag on my blog to see my other posts about it.)

[sparklingspangles]

Four finished fishies!

pattern by BonitoCrafts

[ihopethemoonislistening]

Never posted this old lace project of mine to tumblr, but maybe its time now. "Kronan", a pattern for a bridal crown.