How to make Bobbin Lace

Bobbin Lace. This is one of the reasons why I started this channel in the first place. Historically one of the most well-known, fashionably popular, and easy to identify laces, it is surprising to me that it has fallen so far into obscurity. Second only to perhaps jewelry, bobbin lace has been a defining characteristic of wealth, status, and fashion for the better part of the last 500 years. From stiffened ruffs to soft flounces, embellishments on everything from underwear to parasols, with each pattern and width and style and material telling a story or making a specific statement to anyone who knows how to read it. Original handmade lace has a story to tell. It has many stories to tell. From its creation each piece represents someone's time, a segment of someone's life, because lace is not a quick and easy thing to create. I see so much humanity invested in the fragile threads, delicate flowers, and intricate shapes. Each piece is special and has a history born with patience and time and care. Modern machine-made lace has no depth to its story. Lace, especially to a historical sewing enthusiast, shouldn't be an afterthought. Historical clothing tells its own story and the lace used to embellish it needs to complement or add to that story. That's why I believe that recreating lace, the patterns, the techniques, is supremely important. Not to mention the fact that lace making as a hobby is meditative and extremely rewarding and it can be as modern or historical as you design it to be. You can get in touch with your ancestors and the handcrafts of centuries ago or you can express your personal individualistic creativity all with the same medium. So this is not going to be an entire history of bobbin lace nor is it going to be an everything you never wanted to know about bobbin lace video. Instead this is just going to be a quick overview of the tools and materials you'll need along with a very brief description of what in the world bobbin lace is in the first place. So let's start with the origin story. Crafty type things are pretty much never invented completely fully formed. So because we have references of bobbin lace in the early early 1500s fully formed it had to come from somewhere. So some sources say that it was invented to be a type of embroidery that you could remove and put on something else. Which is valid. Other people say that it was braids and trims or like edgings and things that got more and more and more elaborate. Also valid. What I think the actual story is is that it has the same roots as weaving. If you start playing around with the warp and weft strings and creating patterns in your weaving then you're pretty much doing bobbin lace. So personally I would say that weaving and bobbin lace have the same history. Bobbin lace has been around in a very primitive form as long as weaving has. So anyway that's my two cents. Bobbin lace got really big in the 1500s. We see a lot of portraits with really crazy bobbin lace all over them. Going through the 1500s into the 1600s you had the ruffs and you had all that kind of stuff. You also had kind of interesting political things happen where you had needle lace in France and bobbin lace in England and it was a form of patriotism to wear only your country's type of lace even your region's type of lace. That's a whole other interesting aspect of lace to get into is the politics and the patriotism and the like nationality of wearing one's own lace or not wearing someone else's lace. That was happening during the renaissance and shortly after. Lace kind of fell out of favor after the French Revolution when you get into the Georgian style and everything kind of simplified. You still had lace but it was very very thin and sweet and soft and we also see the rise of tatting at that point. So instead of having big crazy intricate mounts of lace we go into very thin pieces of lace and as such the lace industry was having a really hard time economically. You had a lot of lace makers that couldn't sell their patterns and their wares and all that kind of stuff anymore. Queen Victoria tried to bolster that and that's why we see a lot of lace in the Victorian era. As a strategical economic move she brought lace back into fashion and started wearing it and making it cool again which is an amazing feat because it worked and we do know the Victorian era as being a very lacy era. Then once you had the Art Nouveau period happen it kind of went down again and we were not Victorian therefore we were not lacy and it got back into more heavy embroideries and more simplified things. Then more modernly in um you know arts and crafts periods and stuff like that bobbin lace has come back a little bit. It's never really disappeared completely it's just a question of when or when it was or was not in or out of fashion. Believe it or not that's the short version. So here's my layer cake of pillows. I have made all these pillows myself. The bottom three are roller pillows. The top is a cookie pillow. This one I have small for kind of traveling with. This is one of my first ones and then this is my most recent one. The easiest way to get a pillow is well the easiest way to get what you need for any hobby is to throw money at it. So you can get a roller pillow for between I don't know a hundred to five hundred dollars depending on the size and who's made it. You can get a cookie pillow for much less because there's not a whole lot going on there it's just kind of a prickable disc. Those you can get anywhere from twenty or thirty dollars depending on what it's made of to about a hundred dollars. I'll link a couple really good supply places in the description. Offhand Ben Skyver bobbin lace is my favorite place to get bobbins, pillows, threads, anything. Another really good one is Lacy's in Berkeley. They actually have a storefront that you can go into and a lace museum and so if you ever find yourself in Berkeley oh my god go to Lacy's. I'll link those down below and yeah if you have the money and you want to get started quickly then that would be the way to go for that. Another way to do it is to make your own. So I will do a video at some point where you can watch me make one if you are kind of of a maker's mind. Basically this one is just a large plywood disc from a hardware store that I built up with foam and cabbage and scraps of fabric. I put a little cardboard box and lined it with fabric. This is a very wide dowel with cork wound around it and then you know place the fabric over and sew it along the bottom edge. Glue that in and then I'll hold it in place with pins as I turn it. So that's how I made that one. The cookie pillow is easier. You can just get oh gosh I think people call it like etha foam or something like that which is like a styrofoam that's a self-healing styrofoam. I don't know I kind of like cork and wood better but to each his own. So what I did was this one has fabric. I pulled it around the plywood disc, staple gunned it down to the base, got a sheet of cork, cut it to the same size and then stuffed underneath it with like fabric scraps or stuffing or something like that and then put your fabric over the top and just stitch it down along that corner. And then you have a cookie pillow which gosh this has been maybe 15 years on this pillow and it's it still takes pins really well. It's not falling apart. It's heavy enough that you're not going to move it around every time you toss a around. It's it's a great pillow. So if you're going to make your own I would suggest starting with a cookie pillow because they are easier to make. You can do almost anything on them and then yeah if you're if you're up for it that if if describing how to make these pillows is like another language to you completely go ahead and save up and buy one because they're not that expensive. I think you can get started with a decent pillow and 12 to 24 bobbins for anywhere between like 50 and 150 dollars. So it's it's doable and you will have them forever. There's no reason why you would ever wear out a bobbin or a pillow you know. And of course this isn't every kind of pillow that there is. There's bolster pillows and block pillows. Actually block pillows are a good beginner pillow if you do want to make flat lengths of lace because it's like a cookie pillow but it's made up of sections. So you would work down your section and then you would pull out your block and you would swap it with the one behind it and that way you can keep making it indefinitely for as long as you need. There's also bolster pillows which are as its name suggests a like a really big roll pillow that usually sits on a basket or a little block or something and then you would work off of a giant roll instead of having a small roll and working off of a bigger pillow. So there are actually lots of different types of pillows and lots of different types of lace that you can make off of each pillow. The next step is bobbins. Bobbins are all pretty much the same. There are some that load on the bottom and have a wooden sheath that fit over them to keep the threads clean but for the most part um they're they're all going to be the same. They're all going to look like this. You wind the thread around the top then you work with the shank. You're and then they have a bottom to either keep them from rolling or to let you tug on them and keep your tension right. The classic British bobbin is this one here. You can see this one has a spangle on it. Some people collect antique bobbins and things and they have every single different type of bobbin you can imagine on the same pillow and some people are purists and they stick strictly with one type of bobbin. You're going to need pairs and you're going to need at least a dozen pairs if not six or seven dozen for a good pattern. If you get into really fine lace and really wide bobbin lace you can have hundreds on your pillow. I have them wound with the 80 weight tatting thread because I find it's an easy thread to work with. It's thin enough to make a nice lace but not so thin that you don't make any progress and you can't really see what you're doing. So you know I like the 80 weight tatting thread. Yeah so anyway those websites that I was talking about earlier also have lots of bobbins. You can find people make bobbins on Etsy. People use clothes pins as bobbins to start out with and I forgot to bring one. If you're just starting out and you want to see if you even like it before you invest time and money and everything else you can use clothes pins. So what you would do is you'd open it up wind your thread around one of the teeth and then pinch it shut and you have kind of a little bobbin. So then you would just grab it like this and do it like that and then in that case you can do it on a piece of cardboard or an ironing board would work because that's something you could probably stick pins into. Anything you kind of stick pins into and hang a little bit of tension onto that pin and not have it just fall out is what you would need just to see if you even like it in the first place. I don't think I've ever bought a pillow actually. I just use the ones that I've made but I do like buying bobbins. All right so that's the story about bobbins and pillows. Now pattern. So you either photocopy them out of a book you can hand draw them they're just going to fit on your roll like this and then you hang your bobbins up by pins and you're just going to follow this and as you get to the front you'll turn it the lace comes off the back and you just keep working around and around and around in a circle. You can actually make yardage off of a cookie pillow as well. What you would do is have your pattern in a circle so like trace this out into a circle and then work around and as you get to the front again take the pins out and let the lace just kind of fall off the back. When you're done when you hold it up it would have like a rippling effect in it which can be really beautiful and much softer and more graceful than an actual ruffled piece of lace. Or it can just be hand drawn or a series of motifs and then you're going to turn it as you work. Okay so pillows, bobbins, patterns, thread, pins. Personally I like to use glass round-headed pins because they're easier to pull out as you move on and make sure they have a ball point so that you don't run the risk of accidentally cutting the threads as you stick them in. The next stop is books. I was taught hands-on but I also learned from this book. The Encyclopedia of Needlework by Therese de Dilmont which I'm sure I'm not pronouncing correctly and I I think she's the same family that came from the DMC Threads and Stuff line. I'm not sure but I think that that's what it is. Anyway this is an amazing book. It's got everything from crocheting and embroidery to darning I think and basic hand sewing, macrame, tatting, open work, embroidered laces, needle made laces, pillow laces. I know all of these patterns very well because I just sat and pored over them for so long. It's just kind of cute little memories. So yeah tassel making like like all sorts of stuff. So this is an antique however it has been reprinted many times and you can still find it for relatively cheap. I don't know if you can get it on Amazon but I know eBay has lots of copies especially if you're not looking for one of the antique versions but you're looking for one of the reprint versions which is actually kind of nice because it's bigger so it's kind of easier to see what's going on when you're focused on your own lace and your book is kind of far away or if you're afraid like I am of working out of antiques. I love having antiques but with all the kids around I am always afraid that the antique is going to die with me basically and it's going to have juice spilled on it or get a page torn out of it and this poor thing that has lasted like 100 years or 200 years is going to end its life in my watch and that is just awful. So I do like reproductions and reprints and things for that reason if you're actually working out of something to use a reproduction. Anyway so they're around and that is an amazing book to have. Some other books. The Torsion Lace Workbook is a good basic beginner's book. The Technique of Bobbin Lace by Pamela Nottingham is one I've used this one a lot to kind of grow past what my mom had taught me. Bobbin Lace Manual is a good one. Practical Skills in Bobbin Lace. Definitely when you're making up your own patterns and things it's more of a technique and stitches book. How to join things, how to do different styles of picots. These different all the different types of braiding. This is an invaluable book for getting yourself into the making your own patterns or reconstructing like antique pieces of lace where you don't know exactly how something would have been done without getting a magnifying glass and looking and then you're like okay so that's really crazy what and I'm not sure how to recreate what I'm looking at. More often than not you're going to be able to find how to recreate these kind of different stitches in this book. Or if you're making your own patterns and you know you have a vision in mind maybe you've drawn it out and you're like okay so this is kind of what I want to look like but I don't know how to get from here to here or I don't know what kind of stitches I really want to use for that or I have 10 pairs of bobbins that are all going to converge on the same spot and I want it to look a certain way this will show you lots of different ways to recreate those types of things. So this is a really invaluable book once you get kind of past the beginner stage and into the more advanced stage making your own stuff. This is not specifically a bobbin lace book but the Identification of Lace by Pattern Shaw is a wonderful book and it's not a how-to book it's more of a historian's guide or a extant garments guide to identifying what it is that you're looking at. So if you're looking at a piece of lace and you don't know if it's embroidered lace or motif bobbin lace this will show you some of the subtleties and the differences within those types of lace. So this is another great book to have. So it's kind of a small basics about books the ones that I think are probably the most beneficial at least they were to me. You can get them amazon maybe ebay maybe alibris maybe yeah basically if you look at bobbin lace books a lot of these will show up pretty often. So there's books. All right so I think that wraps it up for my supposedly brief introduction to bobbin lace and the tools you're going to need and the materials you're going to need and kind of what goes into it. I will do how to make a lace pillow at some point but that's probably not going to be my next video because like I said there are ways to get around not having the full spread to get started. So from here I'll show you how to wind your bobbins how to set up for a pattern some basic stitches and then we'll go into making your own patterns making patterns off of the extant garments some of the more advanced stitches and then also things like adding and removing bobbins uh what else tying off work um undoing mistakes all that kind of stuff so yeah so um I'm looking forward to it I hope you are too and I will see you in the next video. Bye! All right so I think that'll wrap okay so let's see all right so I think that about does it for this video. Hey little redhead. Hello. Hello. Bye!