As we identify more and more makers and add them to the website you can see that we have moved from our original remit of cataloguing any UK makers to including world wide.

If you have any bobbins that you would like to add to the website, especially any makers that we don't have then you can add them in one of two ways.  Either go to our contact form and send over your details or join our facebook group and submit your bobbins there.

Liz writes:
From our origins as a small group on FaceBook, back in 2020, we have grown to a group of over 2.3k members as of today.

We started as a small project to collect information on modern bobbin lace turners and painters with our remit starting with the UK and from 1970 onwards.  

Why the 1970s?  Well that was when adult education classes took off in the UK and so budding lacemakers had two options: buy second hand or find someone to make new bobbins.  I wrote a blog on how Adult Education played an important roled in the educational development of women in the latter 20th Century which you can read here.

Jo had a spreadsheet with a number of bobbin turners and painters that she had collated from different sources and we hoped to gather a few together photos of the bobbins we had and a short bio piece, where possible.  

Fast forward to Easter this year and we launch this website as the culmination of all that work.

Lace Bobbins - Find the Maker (FTM) website stands on the shoulders of our FaceBook group.  In the past four months we have gained another another 200 members.  That's people who have actually joined the goup.  You only have to be a member to post or comment in the group. Anyone can view the posts.

Which is why in the year to date to today (July 2023 - July 2024) we have had over eightyfive thousand, ninehundred and eighty six visits to the Facebook group.  Yes, you read that right; 85,986 views.  Just 14 short of 90k this past year.

That is an average of 235 views a day this past year, up from an average of 200 views a day at Easter

What about our website?
Well the website has gone from zero to hero in a just 90 days.

We have 779 unique users over the past 90 days with people spending an average of just under 90 seconds on the site.  Time enough to find the page, read the info and move on.  Which is exactly what we designed the site to do.

Most people come to the website from FaceBook (organic social) but we are getting a good number come to us from Organic Search, in other words, they Googled and came to us.

So, why is it good that people are finding us on Google?
This is because we have active turners and painters on our site. And us being found on Google will help them.  This is ofcourse my day job so I set up FTM the way I would a multi-national blue chip company website.

Here is how SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) works.

• Google looks and millions of websites and picks out key words that appear on those sites.
• It then matches those key words to the search terms that you put into your search browser.
• Google then surfaces up the sites, on the results page, and orders them by how 'kosher' or trustworthy and relevant they are to your search
• At the top of the serach results will be sponsored links but then it's the 'kosher' sites.
• You become trustworthy by having good content, making sure your pictures have descriptions, use good key words that are in your content naturally and by linking to other trustworthy sites.

When we set this site up I was able to put links between it and some of my other sites such as Rothwell Bobbins and The Lace Bee.  Those sites have been around for a while and Google likes them.  They get good traffic, keywords are well chosen and they get found in organic searches (as opposed to paid adverts you click on).

This has given FTM a great reputation and site score for Google and when we link out to active turners and painters on our site it helps to add extra points to their scores which makes them easier to find when searching.  

So, the more we add to the site, the more you visit the site and the more people search for the site, the more our active turners and painters benefit from it.

A win all round.

Gradually we had enough photos by some makers that we created albums to collate them in.  We would research the maker and add in a short bio.  Using the wayback machine, we'd look at the few websites that exisited at the turn of the century (most bobbin makers were still using paper catalogues) and augment our bios from there.

​​So, one year after Jo and I started, we choose a website url, I registered it on 12th April 2022 and created the outline website.  I initially copied the format of my own bobbin blog, on my personal website, and brought over the key makers that I'd started with, adding photos of our supporters bobins from the FTM album.

Creating a simply id page was more challenging.  The website that we host the collection on didn't offer the ability to create a table and add in images of the heads and tails so I was faced with hard coding the html to do this.  Initially not a big problem as I do predate the invention of the worldwide-web and my first sites were all hard coded, but as we realised the project was growing so big, it was unsustainable.

Now I hold the ID summary on a web based spreadsheet that I can update from anywhere and it automatically renders onto the website, in real time. (for the techies out there I used an iframe to surface it and set the parameters so it will work as well as we can for such a large amount of data on mobiles).

This makes our project a living breathing thing that just goes on and on with more data (photos) being added and reminisences about makers who have gone before us.

So, bear with us as we carefully migrate the data over to this site from our fb albums.  We are double checking each photo and bio info.  It only gets posted here after it's been QA'd.

For me, I feel that this project is in the spirit of Brenda Paternoster's seminal work; Threads of Lace.  That started as a slim volume covering the best known threads and grew into 7 editions and a hefty book by the end.