Fabric Definitions — definitions of fabrics, cloths, laces and textile materials from Apparel Search
Bobbin lace is a delicate lace that uses wound spools of thread — the bobbins — to weave together the shapes in the lace. The work is held in place with very fine lace pins and made on a lace pillow, a cloth form traditionally stuffed with straw or sawdust. Pairs of bobbins are twisted or braided to form meshes, also called ground, or woven to form solid shapes.
Bobbin lace is a delicate lace that uses wound spools of thread (the bobbins) to weave together the shapes in the lace. The lace is held in place with very fine lace pins while being worked and is made on a lace pillow (a cloth form traditionally stuffed with straw or sawdust).
Pairs of bobbins are twisted or braided to form meshes (also called "ground") or woven to form solid shapes, depending on the type of lace made.
Many styles of lace were made in the heyday of lacemaking (that stretched possibly between the 1500s-1700s) before machine-made lace became available.
The advent of machine lace at first pushed lace-makers into more complicated designs (ones that the machines couldn't handle) and then eventually pushed them out of business almost entirely. The resurgence of lace-making is a recent phenomenon and is mostly confined to a hobby status.
Some well-known types of bobbin lace are:
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Every bobbin lace pattern divides into motif and ground. The motifs — flowers, leaves, geometric shapes — are worked densely, with threads woven closely like tiny cloth. The ground is the net that joins and displays them, and grounds are where regional styles are most easily told apart: Torchon is known for its variety of beautiful grounds, Buckinghamshire for its characteristic hexagon mesh. A lacemaker reading an unfamiliar piece starts with the ground, because the mesh structure, the pin spacing and the way motifs join the ground identify a lace's tradition faster than its flowers do. Both halves are built from the same small vocabulary of moves — cross and twist, applied to pairs — which is why bobbin lace scales from coarse Torchon beginners' edgings to Honiton, a very fine English lace crowded with flowers, without changing its basic equipment.
The working setup explains the lace's character. The pattern, called a pricking, is a card pierced with the pin holes of the design, fixed to the pillow; the maker follows it hole by hole, so a bobbin lace design is planned as points to be pinned as much as lines to be drawn. Bobbins hang in pairs around the pillow — a modest edging may use a dozen pairs, a wide Honiton piece well over a hundred — and their weight keeps the threads taut. Managing that many hanging pairs without tangling is the craft's first skill, and the traditional pillow stuffing, straw or sawdust, mattered because it had to grip pins firmly hundreds of times without tearing the pricking. Nothing in the setup has a machine equivalent at hand scale, which is why machine lace, however fine, is a different product: net made by other means, imitating the look of crossed and twisted pairs.
Threads are wound in pairs on bobbins, and the lacemaker works four threads at a time — two pairs — crossing and twisting them in set sequences. Repeated crossings build open meshes called grounds; working the pairs back and forth like weaving builds solid cloth-like areas. Pins pushed through the pattern into the pillow hold each completed point while the work advances.
A gimp is a heavier thread worked through parts of the design for emphasis, outlining motifs so they stand out against the fine ground. Buckinghamshire lace characteristically uses a gimp, along with its hexagon ground and very lacy, open effect.
When machine-made lace appeared, hand lacemakers first moved into designs too complicated for the machines — Bedfordshire lace's flowing lines and picots were developed partly to foil them — but machines eventually undercut hand work almost entirely. The modern resurgence of bobbin lace is mostly as a hobby craft.