By lacemakers for lacemakers

Around 4 years ago, Jo Buckberry and I were talking about how the late 20th Century lacemaking revival in the UK had sparked so many great bobbin makers. We were looking at how we could capture information on what were now becoming vintage bobbins and make sure that the oral history of these bobbin makers was not lost.

Our initial idea was to start a facebook group and get people to post photos of their bobbins into albums for each maker or painter.

We thought that if we were lucky, we might get, if push came to shove, about 50 like minded lacemakers willing to share pictures of their bobbins and notes on their memories of different bobbin makers.

Well, over Easter we hit 2021 members.

In the past year, we have had 73k views of our posts. Yep, you read that right, Seventy Three Thousand views.

That's about 200 views a day. And over 156 posts. You'd think that by now, we'd have run out of things to say about bobbins but no, it seems that we tidying up our attics and cupboards and finding brochures and notes from different bobbin turners and painters.

In fact, we now have 159 people identified and in our albums. Yes, most are from the UK, but we have a few from other countries. It looks like I'm going to be very busy transferring all of these to the website at some point.

​Liz Baker - webmistress