Getting Started

 

But the Beaver went on making lace,
and displayed no interest in the concern.

From The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll

How many times have you started a creative project, only to stall at the outset? Some of my projects have taken some time to do, perhaps most notably the 30-year patchwork quilt, but bobbin lacemaking is the one I’ve struggled with most. When I was a child my mother had attended night school for a while to learn to make lace and I loved not just the lace and that gentle rhythmical sound of the bobbins clicking together but also all those fascinating lacemaking accoutrements. My father made her a pillow which was stuffed with straw donated by my guinea pigs and got his lathe out to turn some bobbins. I had rather hoped that these would eventually come down to me but sadly, they seem to have been disposed of at some stage and with leaving home, pursuing a career and raising a family, my interest in lace lay dormant.

 

It was Vermeer who rekindled that interest. His extraordinary painting The Lacemaker (c.1669-70) was on loan from the Musée du Louvre for the 2011 exhibition Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The work is the smallest of Vermeer's paintings, just 24.5 cm x 21 cm (9.6 in x 8.3 in), but it is exquisite and I stood in
front of it for ages, absorbed by the lacemaker’s absorption in her work. Just a painting perhaps, but Vermeer of course was a master at depicting women in a way that somehow reveals their complex inner lives. I loved it.

I bought the exhibition catalogue and a couple of other books about Vermeer but then found myself sidetracked into lace. Before very long I’d joined The Lace Guild and visited a fabric and threads sale where I’d purchased a ‘travel-size’ lace pillow and some very pretty bobbins. 

Bobbins themselves of course, whether wooden, bone or glass, are so wonderfully tactile and have such a fascinating history. They are eminently collectable and so I joined a “bobbin-a-month” club and bought a year’s worth of gorgeous bone bobbins. Putting those bobbins into action though seemed too complicated to do on my own, so I enrolled on a residential lace weekend at Belsay Bridge, where I was shown how to make a small bookmark and suffered serious bobbin-envy looking at the packed pillows of some long-term lacemakers.

  That first piece of lace

Inducing bobbin envy!

 

Unfortunately, although the tutor had set me up to work on a second piece of lace at home, I very quickly got the threads tangled and then got hopelessly lost and put the pillow aside to get on with other/easier things. 

 

Ten years and a house move later, those threads were never going to be untangled but the bobbins were calling. I looked at a few online demonstrations but felt I needed face-to-face instruction so decided to go on another beginners’ course. Then came COVID and out came the patchwork which led to quilting, samplers, embroidery and needlepoint but not lace. No foreign holidays obviously, so in place of a planned trip to look for peonies in northern Greece I booked a trip to see the wild beavers in the river Otter. This was surprisingly successful; we had some fabulous views, which of course reminded me of Lewis Carroll’s lacemaking beaver.

 

Female beaver at the River Otter in Devon

So this year to try to breathe new life into the lacemaking endeavour, I thought I’d share my struggles in the hope that going public will give me the push I need to get those beautiful bobbins into action and make some lace. So I intend this to be a monthly blog about lace, bobbins and any other vaguely textile related topics that occur to me, with sidetracks into any flowers that may catch my attention, the natural world and most probably beavers.

Bobbin for January;

This was the first bobbin I bought, designed as a sweet Japanese doll and spangled with colour coordinated bead.
She has a twin sister in pink to make a pair.










In one textile blog that I read somebody had commented that nobody posts pictures of their failures and she often gets quite disheartened looking at the perfection of other people's work. I have long thought that it is my role in life to make my friends feel better about themselves, their homes and lives, so I will share my failures and you can feel quietly smug that at least your textile work is better than mine!

Do feel free to comment, to share stories of your own stalled projects or even to just (gently) tell me to get on with mine…