| Bobbin lace | U3AC talk - Lace bobbin making |
"U3AC" is Cambridge University of the Third Age. I have held this talk during the summer.
For more examples of stitches and patterns, click here.
All bobbin lace starts with a pattern. You stick the pins through the pattern to make the effects. Before starting, you prick the holes, to make it easier (push a needle partly into the hole). Then you pin it on the pillow (see below).
It is called bobbin lace, so bobbins are important! Bobbins come in different shapes and different materials, but they all have one purpose, to hold the thread which makes the lace. They are swapped over to make the weaving that makes up the lace.
The beads are called spangles. Not all bobbin traditions use them. They allow the bobbin to lie flat on the pillow without rolling, and they also help to identify what you're doing. And they are pretty!
Traditionally, the thread was flax, but now any sewing thread can be used, or indeed anything which doesn't stretch, and is the right width (and that depends on the size of the pattern, which can be altered).
The thread is wound onto a pair of bobbins, which are then hung from a pin at the start of the pattern. When all bobbins are wound, we can begin making lace!
We use ordinary pins (without glass heads!) And we use a lot of them! The threads are woven and twisted, but it's the pins that keep the different threads apart, to make the holes essential for the pattern to appear. We reuse pins in a pattern, taking a pin from the back to use in the front.
Pins are so important for making lace that the old Dutch name for a lacemaker was a pin worker.
You fasten the pattern onto the pillow, stick pins in it, and lay bobbins on it. It is so important, that an old name for bobbin lace was pillow lace.
A modern pillow is usually just a piece of expanded polysterene. It's covered with cloth to make it more comfortable.
A common pillow in the past was a bolster pillow - a cylindrical bab stuffed with straw. Here you can pin the pattern round the cylinder to make long pieces of lace. The bobbins do tend to roll together!
This type of pillow has a small roller where the lace is actually made, but the bobbins lie on the main pillow. So you can make long pieces of lace, but without the bobbins rolling together.
First, you get a pattern, prick it and pin it to the pillow.
Then you wind the necessary number of bobbins. These are wound in pairs.
Then you work the pattern, starting from the top and basically working downwards, although some bits get worked before others.
Working involves lifting one bobbin over its neighbour (which makes one thread cross over another). You work "stitches" with two pairs of bobbins, and these can be broken down into a "cross" (bobbin 2 lifted over bobbin 3) and "twist" (bobbin 2 lifted over bobbin 2 and bobbin 4 over bobbin 3). The combination of these means you end up with a weave. If you follow a single thread, it always travels under, over, under, over, from the start of the thread to the end. However, it sometimes travels to its left and sometimes to its right, so it's not a conventional weave. The cross and twist are built up into stitches, and these are built up further, into grounds and other elements. Learning these is the basis of bobbin lacemaking.
At certain points, the pattern tells you to put a pin. This holds the threads apart from each other, and makes the holes. The pin may go in the middle of a stitch, or at the end, or at the end of several stitches.
Here are two examples of lace stitches:
This crosses one pair other another.
A ground is a more open part of a piece of lace, with holes in. Each lace tradition has its own ground. This is Torchon ground.
Lace is often worked as a strip, which has two edges. The frilly, decorative edge is called a headside. Each lace tradition has its own styles.
The straight edge is called the footside. This isn't decorative, but it is strong, because this is sewn onto material.
There are many theories about how bobbin lace started, but the documented evidence starts with two pattern books. They definitely show bobbin lace patterns, and one of them has a picture of a bobbin laceworker. I had a go at doing a pattern from each!
Le Pompe - 1559 - Italian
Pattern from this book:
My attempt:
Nuw Modelbuch (New pattern book) - 1561 - Swiss
Pattern from this book "Rose pattern and squares with 40" (bobbins not pairs). We still call it rose ground to this day.
My attempt:
William Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night around 1601-02, and its first recorded performance is in 1602. In this play, Duke Orsino says:
O, fellow, come, the song we had last night.
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chant it: it is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the old age.
This is an early reference to bobbin lace: weave their thread with bones. Small bones used to be used as bobbins, to wind the thread round. Even today, bobbins are sometimes made of bone. Bobbin lace is essentially weaving, with the pins creating gaps to form the patterns.
Don Quixote was written by Miguel de Cervantes, in Spanish, of course. It was published in two volumes, in 1605 and 1615. It contains early references to what seems, from the context, to be a common activity. This is from Chapter 6
"By the God that gives me life," said Don Quixote, "if thou wert not my full niece, being daughter of my own sister, I would inflict a chastisement upon thee for the blasphemy thou hast uttered that all the world should ring with. What! can it be that a young hussy that hardly knows how to handle a dozen lace-bobbins dares to wag her tongue and criticise the histories of knights-errant?"
Note the reference to only using "a dozen lace-bobbins", a small number by modern standards.
A play Frik in 't Veurhuis by M. G. Tengnagel, published in Amsterdam in 1642, mentions the trade of spelderwerkster or bobbin lacemaker (literally 'pin worker').
Grietje, a seamtress, teaches lacemaking to children. She complains about a pupil whose work is loose and dirty: "How can you work so dirtily, as if it was the coldest part of the winter? What's to stop you from working as white as anyone else? Just look at Elsje's work: that's as white as hail and yours is as yellow as tan. Work a bit more tightly too: it looks as if it's all muddled." We hear about parchments (patterns) being given out, work cut off a pillow and a new parchment being set up. Grietje scolds a lazy pupil, saying that the doll's pattern only has 18 bobbins, so she ought to be able to do a sixteenth of an ell in an hour, but she has only done one tiny scallop. A sixteenth of an ell is about 4.3 cms or 1.7 inches. 18 bobbins or 9 pairs will only make a narrow width of lace. The number seems very few compared to modern ideas, but contemporary paintings bear this out.
In 1651, Jacob v. Eyck, a Flemish poet, sang the praises of lace-making in Latin verse:
"Of many arts one surpasses all; the threads woven by the strange power of the hand, threads which the dropping spider would in vain attempt to imitate, and which Pallas would confess she had never known; For the maiden, seated at her work, plies her fingers rapidly, and flashes the smooth balls and thousand threads into the circle, Often she fastens with her hand the innumerable needles, to bring out the various figures of the pattern; often again, she unfastens them; and from this, her amusement makes as much profit as a man earns by the sweat of his brow; and no maiden ever complains at even of the length of the day. The issue is a fine web, open to the air with many an aperture, which feeds the pride of the whole globe; which surrounds with its fine border cloaks and tuckers, and shows grandly round the throats and hands of kings; and, what is more surprising, this web is of the lightness of a feather, which in its price is too heavy for our purses. Go, ye men, inflamed with desire of the Golden Fleece, endure so many dangers by land, so many at sea, whilst the woman, remaining in her Brabantine home, prepares Phrygian fleeces by peaceful assiduity."
A little glossing: Pallas Athene was the Greek goddess of domestic crafts. Jason and the Argonauts were Greek heros who sailed to find the Golden or Phrygian Fleece. Brabant was a duchy in 1651, including the city of Brussels, which was famous for bobbin lace. When he says needles, he means pins, and the 'balls' are the bobbins, which had balls at the ends.
The description of making lace is wonderful. The 'thousand threads' are exaggerated, but with the 'innumerable needles' it shows that we are talking about a serious width of lace. The 'circle' may be the pillow, although the later 'globe' is the world. It describes the movement of the bobbins, and putting in and taking out pins. It also describes how it's used, to trim cloaks and tuckers, and provide collars and cuffs for kings. I like the comparison of the lightness of the lace and the 'heaviness' of the price!
These are two famous paintings - by Caspar Netscher, painted in 1662, on the left, and by Vermeer, painted around 1669-1671. They are both Flemish (Dutch). The lacemakers are both putting in a pin.
William Cowper lived in Olney in Buckinghamshire, one of the main lace producing areas of England. He wrote a poem called Truth in 1782. In this poem, he obviously disapproves of the French writer Voltaire, and compares him to:
Yon cottager, who weaves at her own door,
Pillow and bobbins all her little store;
Content though mean, and cheerful if not gay,
Shuffling her threads about the live-long day,
Just earns a scanty pittance, and at night
Lies down secure, her heart and pocket light;
She, for her humble sphere by nature fit,
Has little understanding, and no wit,
Receives no praise; but though her lot be such
(Toilsome and indigent), she renders much;
Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true
However by 1770 the industry went into decline and in 1780, William Cowper wrote "I am an eye-witness to their poverty, and do know that hundreds in this little town are upon the point of starving, and that the most unremitting industry is but barely sufficient to keep them from it. There are nearly one thousand and two hundred lace makers in this beggarly town."
Lacemaking tended to fluctuate in prosperity. Lace styles went in and out of fashion, and lacemakers tended to work in a single style, and use existing patterns. However, there were other factors. It was associated with luxury clothes, and so with aristocracy. After the French Revoltion, Britain was frightened that the ideas would spread, and people started wearing less ostentatious clothes. Lace went out of fashion.
There was another, even more important, factor. Lacemaking machines started in the nineteenth century. They could make lace far cheaper so lacemaking started to decline.
Flora Thompson wrote a semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford in 1945. In the first part, dealing with Flora's childhood in the 1880's, she writes of Queenie, who "seemed very old to the children, for she was a little, wrinkled, yellow-faced old woman in a sunbonnet". Queenie was a lace-maker:
Queenie at her lace-making was a constant attraction to the children. They loved to see the bobbins tossed hither and thither, at random it seemed to them, every bobbin weighed with its bunch of bright beads and every bunch with its own story, which they had heard so many times that they knew by heart, how this bunch was been part of a blue bead necklace worn by her little sister who had died at five years old, and this other one had belonged to her mother, and that black one had been found, after she was dead, in a work-box belonging to a woman who was reputed to have been a witch.
There had been a time, it appeared, when lace-making was a regular industry in the hamlet. Queenie, in her childhood, had been 'brought up to the pillow', sitting among the women at eight years old and learning to fling her bobbins with the best of them. They would gather in one cottage in winter for warmth, she said, each one bringing her faggot or shovel of coal for the fire, and there they would sit all day, working, gossiping, singing old songs, and telling old tales till it was time to run home and put on the pots for their husbands' suppers. These were the older women and the young unmarried girls; the women with young children did what lace-making they could at home. In very cold weather the lace-makers would have a small earthen pot with a lid, called a 'pipkin'. containing hot embers, at which they warmed their hands and feet and sometimes sat upon.
In the summer they would sit in the shade behind one of the 'housen', and, as they gossiped, the bobbins flew and the lovely, delicate pattern lengthened until the piece was completed and wrapped in blue paper and stored away to await the great day when the year's work was taken to Banbury Fair and sold to the dealer.
'Them wer' the days!' she would sigh. 'Money to spend.' And she would tell of the bargains she had bought with her earnings. Good brown calico and linsey-woolsey, and a certain chocolate print sprigged with white, her favourite gown, of which she could still show a pattern in her big patchwork quilt. Then there was a fairing to be bought for those at home - pipes and packets of shag tobacco for the men, rag dolls and ginger-bread for the little 'uns', and snuff for the old grannies. And the homecoming, loaded with treasure, and the money in the pocket besides. Tripe. They always bought tripe; it was the only time in the year that they could get it, and it was soon heated up, with onions and a nice bit of thickening; and after supper there was hot, spiced elderberry wine, and so to bed, everybody happy.
Now, of course, things were different. She didn't know what the world was coming to. This nasty machine-made stuff had killed the lace-making; the dealer had not been to the Fair for the last ten years; nobody knew a bit of good stuff when they saw it. Said they liked the Nottingham lace better; it was wider and had more pattern to it! She still did a bit to keep her hand in. One or two old ladies still used it to trim their shifts, and it was handy to give as presents to such as the children's mother; but as for living by it, no; those days were over. So it emerged from her talk that there had been a second period in the hamlet more prosperous than the present. Perhaps the women's earnings at lace-making had helped to tide them over the Hungry 'Forties, for no-one seemed to remember that time of general hardship in country villages; but memories were short there, and it may have been that life had always been such a struggle they had noticed no difference in those lean years.
A piccadil is a large broad collar of cut-work lace that became fashionable in the late 16th century and early 17th century. The London street called Piccadilly sold these collars. Cut-work has holes cut in textile.
This picture is dated 1624. The man is wearing a splendid ruff, and lace decorating his cuffs. The ruff doesn't allow him to have very long hair. Ruffs were often made with needle lace (or needlepoint) which is stiff - see below. Also, the stiff lace at the cuffs sticks out.
This is 1633. There is now a collar rather than a ruff. This can use bobbin lace (see below) rather than needlepoint, as it is floppier (and cheaper to make!) Note that the lace goes backwards over the arm, rather than forwards over the hands. The hair is still fairly short, because he still wishes to show off all of his lace collar.
There is an unedged collar and cuffs, possibly because more severe clothes were following a Protestant ethic. There is still splendid fabric (and he seems very pleased with himself!) As the collar is very simple, it doesn't matter if it's covered with long hair!
Again, the hair is long (perhaps a wig), but he is wearing lace. This is just under the chin, as a cravat. There may be lace on the sleeves as well.
© Jo Edkins 2024 - Return to Lace website index