I decided during the lock down in San Francisco I would learn bobbin lace. Little did I know that this is a very complex craft. Over 20 years ago I observed a lady demostrating bobbin lace at an art festival. I had always wanted to learn more about how to make bobbin lace and now seemed a good time. The library was open only for e-books. This meant that I would need to use older e-books and online videos to learn. I was not sure if Bobbin Lace was for me. So, I made inexpensive toos to try out the craftt. Now I find that I really enjoy my diy tools.
For the pillow I went to the local dollar store and brought a couple sheets of form core. I cut the foam core to a smaller size. One piece was laid on top of the other to allowe the pins to go a little deeper into the 'pillow'. Next, a layer of pading was placed on top of the pieces. The padding I used was cotton quilt batting I had on hand. All of this was covered with a piece of muslin cloth. This was pinned at the edges to keep it in place.
For the bobbins I cut some skews into 4.5 inch lengths. I cut out two different long strips of paper about 2.5 inches long and a quarter of an inch long. These were wrapped about the two ends of the skewers. The 'bobbins' were then either painted with arcylic paint or wrapped with some of my handmade paper. After the bobbins were completed I noticed that they tended to roll around on my flat 'pillow'. I stopped the rolling by attaching a small piece of fabric or ribbon to the end of the bobbin with a little flap hanging out.
The thread I used was size 20 crochet thread that I had left over from tatting projects.
Regular straight pins were used to hold the thread.
Now, all I needed was a book to learn about bobbin lace. The library did not have any introductory ebooks on bobbin lace. I found a useful bobbin lace e-book on Amazon. I would not recommend learning bobbin lace from an ebook because the scale of the pricking patterns might be difficult to figure out or reproduce. I had to determine how to enlarge the patterns using graph paper. Most authors of bobbin lace ebooks do not tell one what size of graph paper is needed to redraw the pattern so I proceeded with trail and error. These problems also occur with most videos on bobbin lace weaving. Your may need to set asside extra time to figure out how to scale prickings and pattern design.
At first I thought that all forms of bobbin lace were torchin lace. There are many different techniques to produce bobbin lace. Future posts of bobbin lace will discuss the schools of bobbin lace I found most interesting.