Tuesday 13 June 2017

Free bobbin lace


Preparing a talk about my lace I’ve been looking back at some of the work I made when I started designing and making bobbin lace in a free style. The photo shows a detail from a necklace inspired by looking at flints in a museum. I drew and painted some of the flints to explore their shapes and the myriad colours they contain and decided to make some necklaces based on those images. For this one I first made a rough necklace shape using triangles of fabric in the colours of the flints, trying to bring out the different golds, browns and blues of the originals. I glued the shapes together and then worked bobbin lace over the top of them, using the edge of the fabric as my footside, and sewing in by piercing the fabric with a crochet hook, pulling through one thread of the worker pair and looping the other through it. I tried to keep the lace open so glimpses of the fabric could be seen behind it and worked round the necklace making triangular shapes with the lace. It’s interesting to see how something as sharp and angular as flint can be used to inspire bobbin lace.

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