Why don't you have any antique bobbins on here?

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.

So, just what do we mean by Modern Lace Bobbins?

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.