Striver pins in bobbin lace

Pins play an important role in bobbin lace, they are the temporary structure around which the lace is produced but some special pins have other functions. The two pins in the image are called strivers. They are made from two brass pins and could only be made because the heads of these nineteenth century pins could easily be removed. One pin was threaded with beads and also had its head replace with a bead. It was then attached to the head of another pin. These strivers were used in the Midlands lace counties of England to see how quickly a strip of lace could be produced. T L Huetson in his book ‘Lace and bobbins’ says the striver was inserted ‘in the hole in the parchment pattern’ and the lacemaker then checked how long it took until she had ‘worked out all the other pins and come to the striver again’. This sounds a bit hit and miss to me though because first of all it depends how many pins you have and also when I work a lace pattern I don’t take the pins out in a set order but just remove them randomly from the back when I need one! Using the striver in the footside would be a more accurate point to measure from as it couldn’t be removed until a certain number of pattern repeats had been made and the lace was secure. Actually using the striver in the lace, rather than just pinning it next to the pattern, would have meant it couldn’t be moved easily so it would be difficult to cheat! Using strivers would certainly have been a useful way to incentivise children learning to make lace and encourage them to compete with their peers to be the quickest in the class. I also think that English lacemakers liked to brighten up their lace pillows, for example with colourful spangles and interesting bobbins, and this was another way of doing that.