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.
0 Comments
3/5/2024 0 Comments Tips for identifying bobbinsJo writes:
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.
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. Jo Buckberry writes: As we are getting a lot of questions about this I’m posting this as an announcement, with comments turned off. I buy most of my bobbins at lace fairs and lace days. Keep an eye out for events, and try to attend - there are fewer and fewer of these due to decreased footfall, please support them! You can buy bobbins online - Lace Suppliers Spotlight (mostly new from suppliers) and Bobbin Lace Market (mostly second hand) on Facebook are great groups. If you look our ID Summary page we've marked if they are currentyly active and we have included their website, Etsy shop or email address as appropriate. You can also get second hand bobbins (and books and pillows) from the Lace Guild.
I’ve not seen bobbins for sale in a shop in 15+ years, but you might get lucky. Hope this helps 26/4/2024 0 Comments By lacemakers for lacemakersAround 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 |
Archives |
Privacy & Cookie Policy
This site was designed and built by the Liz Baker FIDM
© Rothwell Bobbins & thelacebee 2021 Onwards
This site was designed and built by the Liz Baker FIDM
© Rothwell Bobbins & thelacebee 2021 Onwards