Pop over to our facebook group and join it, if you haven't already
Want a bobbin identified?

• Take a photo of the bobbin you want identified
  • ​Make sure you take a full length photo of the bobbin
    
  • If you can, also take a close up photo of the head and tail of the bobbin.
    
• Post it on the facebook group with anything you know about the bobbin on your post (where you bought (country as well), when you bought it etc)

We also need your support to help identify unknown bobbins.  For now, keep an eye on our facebook group posts  and if you recognise a bobbin then follow the steps below:
Recognise a bobbin picture?

• Comment on the photo
• Share what you know
• If you have any bobbins by that maker then feel free to add in your photos

Once we identify a maker, we will either add them to an existing gallery or create a gallery for that maker to hold the photos for others to use for identification.

Or naming conventions with bobbins.

As you get into lacemaking and acquiring bobbin, you find that people refer to bobbins in one of three ways (or all of them at once, we don't care really)

1. ​Maker - Oh, that's my Archer bobbin!
2. Type of bobbin - That's a mother and baby bobbin
3. What the bobbin is made of - That's a bone bobbin

or all three - That's my bone, mother and baby Archer bobbin.  And in English, grammatically, descriptions go 3,2,1. 

So you would say; oh, they are my ebony, King Henry VIII, Chris Parsons bobbin.

Because whilst my Chris Parsons' Henry VIII ebony bobbin works (1,2,3), it does not work as well as the other way round, because it implies that the bobbin belongs to Chris where as 3,2,1 says that it's my bobbin.

Why do we do that?  Well, it partly the grammar but also because it's how we've done it for as long as I can remember and that's since 1988.

As lacemakers we love bobbins, whether they are plain or fancy, we adore them.  It's like a mechanic having a really got set of well balanced spanners or an oven that keeps perfect temperature for a baker.

These are the tools of our trade.

Lace Bobbins - Find the Maker (FTM) is born out of our innate need to know who made that bobbin we bought or were given.

But what happens when we don't know the maker?

Both Christine and David Springett, in their book Success to the Lace Pillow and Brian Lemin on his website suffered from this because they were identifying bobbins that were made way before they were born.  So, bobbins makers became known by features of their bobbins.

The Bitted Man was one such person.  He produced bobbins that were bitted and so he became known as the Bitted Man.

So, drippy bottoms.  In Diane Miler's painting we discovered that she used a bobbin maker who produced a distinctive style of bobbin. 

These bobbins tails are rounded with what looks like a water drop coming from them.

Unable to find a maker for these bobbins, they became known in our house as the Drippy Bottom Bobbins.  A nice piece of alliteration.  And when these bobbins were shared on FTM, the name was used and stuck

When we eventually find the name of this turner, it's likely that the drippy bottom will remain and they will become Turner X's drippy bottoms or these are my bone, Diane Miller, Drippy bottoms.

Liz writes:
This project came around because Jo and I were saying how there were excellent resources for identifying antique bobbins but nothing exisited to cover the revival of English Lacemaking from the 70s onwards.

In my blog, on my personal website; Adult Education and why it was more than just learning to make lace, I looked at how access to adult education offered people the opportunity to access craft skills that previously they had not had the chance to.

Adult Education, in the UK, was at it's pinacle in the 70s and 80s and because classes were starting up, people who wanted to make lace needed access to lace equipment.

One lady that I taught had tried to learn in the 70s and her bobbins were all 'old' as she said to me.  In fact, when she got them out to show me, she had a fantastic collection of antique bobbins that she had bought as a job lot from a dealer in Bedford.  At the time, you sent them a cheque for a few pounds and they send you a mix bag of 'old bobbins' that they were buying for a pitance from the descendents of the East Midlands lacemakers.

During lockdown, I had been approached by a number of families where their mothers and aunts had died during lockdown and they had no idea what to do with their lace equipment.  I have a number of students and so took on their equipment and distributed it to anyone who was interested in learning.  Hubby and I would drive out, put the equipment on people's doorsteps, ring their door bells, and run off to a safe 6ft plus distance and wave.  Then dive back into the car and dash to the next lacemaker.  People would open their door to find a pile of books, pillows and bobbins along with two sniggering idiots lurking in their shurbery.

Just as we were loosing the generation who had started their lacemaking in the 70s, we were also loosing the bobbin turners and painters who had joined them in their journey.  As many of these were active prior to the millenium, we realised that they didn't have websites to check and we were reliant on people's memories and a few paper brochures that had been squirreled away by friends and acquantances.

Well, we use the standard timeline above for bobbin age which is based on that used by Antique Dealers in the UK.

As with any project, we stand on the shoulders of giant and have based how we work on that of Christine & David Spingett and their seminal book; Success to the lace pillow which cover antique english bobbins throughly.  

We also pay a grateful nod to the online work of Brian Lemin on antique bobbins too.

Because of this, we felt that antique bobbins were more than covered in exisiting works with Vintage bobbins being exceptionally rare as there was little or no bobbin production prior to that big resurgance in the 70s.

​And so began our journey to create an online resource that captured the love and history of the people who supported the resurgance of English lacemaking in the UK during the later half of the 20th Century.

Jo writes:

• Heads: Most turners have distinctively shaped heads, which is my go to starting place. But beware some turners use more than one head shape (e.g. the thistle shape on Alison Tolson’s bobbins, which are turned by Stuart Johnson, which is very different to his normal head shape).
• Tails: Most turners have distinctive tail shapes, or a small range of tail shapes.
• Overall bobbin: Look at the shape of the shank and the overall size (for example, AR Archer bobbins are shorter in length than Acorn bobbins).
• Painting: Many painters include their initials somewhere on the bobbin, so keep a look out for initials!
• Painted bobbins: Some painters use multiple bobbin turners.

If you are sharing photos, an overall shot of the bobbin, plus a close up of the head and the tail helps enormously.

For the head in particular make sure you don’t take the photograph at an angle - hold the lens of your camera/phone as parallel to the bobbin as possible.

Try to have good, diffuse light (I find outside on a bright, but not sunny day gives the best results and the least amount of shadow).

Do browse the albums - we have over 150 on facebook and over 25 on this website now!

Liz writes:
We've included this image below to help people understand what we mean by the different part names of a bobbin.

I follow Brian Lemin's convention where each of the elements of the top of the body have different names, whilst Jo follows Christine and David Springett's naming convention in Success to the Lace Pillow where parts 1,2&3 are referred to as the head.

Either way, we all know that when we talk about the head of a bobbin, we mean the top part.

For bobbins that do not have a spangle such as continental or honiton bobbins, the terms are applied as well with just spangle being omitted.