How this site works ... a work in progress

Liz writes:
So, Lace Bobbins - Find the Maker (FTM) is a work in progress.

As I mentioned in our first update, Jo and I started this off on facebook, four years ago.

We began by publishing some photos of our bobbins where we knew the maker / painter, told anyone we met online or off line, about what we were doing, and then began adding photos of bobbins that we didn't know the origins of

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.

I had previously been cataloguing my bobbin collection on own personal website but as our project grew, I moved to the book blog project where I wrote a review of all the lace books that I owned.  Over 250 books in, it's still growing.

We wanted to capture typical heads and tails of bobbins to make it easier to identify the maker.  This identificaiton system became the basis of our ID summary. ​​

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).

With over 150 makers / painters identified to date, this is a work in progress.  If I add one page a day, it will take me 6 months to complete and this is allowing that I have the time to do that.

But, I did complete the book blog, completely on my own in 2 years and FTM is an easier task because we are crowd sourcing our informaiton.  

​People post a bobbin and the hive mind will discuss and confirm an identification.  Then the image is added ot the albums ready to be migrated to the website.

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.