Bobbin Brown of Cranfield and his lace bobbins

William Brown was the eldest of ten children and was born in Cranfield in Bedfordshire in 1793. He described himself as a bobbin maker in the census returns of 1841, 1851 and 1861. This was unusual as most bobbin makers were not so specific and described themselves as woodturners or labourers. However, he was called Bobbin Brown by the local people so presumably his greatest trade was in lace bobbins. He had six children with his first wife, Sarah, but sadly she died in 1847 and in the 1851 census William is described as living with his unmarried daughter Mary. However, in 1857, at the age of 64, he married again, this time to a 44-year-old lacemaker called Hannah and they had two sons, one of whom it is thought later became a bobbin maker.

William’s bobbins are characterised by a small bulbous head with a slight dome at the top and a shallow pointed tail end. He made a large quantity of bobbins many of them inscribed with names and messages. His lettering is always coloured red and the letters are very neat although his spelling is sometimes incorrect, which may indicate he was not very literate. The bobbins in the image at the top of this post read from left to right ‘Sarah Ions my D[ear] Mother’, ‘My dear Father’, ‘George Burt my brother Jan 1856’ and ‘Love don’t forsake me’. Interestingly the bobbin with the spiral inscription follows a left hand spiral indicating that William was left handed. It also does not feature the characteristic domed head but I think the rest of the bobbin is so obviously William’s work that the head is a replacement, probably made by another bobbin maker to replace one that became chipped or broken.

The bobbins with single names in the next image read from left to right Mary, Dan[i]el, James, John. These are all common names of the time and William would probably have had a stock of them for sale in contrast to the longer and more complicated messages above which would have been specifically made to commission. The name bobbins also have very similar patterns of coloured dots at the back, which you can see in the image above, using his trademark colours of red, black and yellow.

William also made many bobbins inlaid with pewter. They were made by incising the bone or wood of the shank and then pouring molten pewter into the channels. They are called tigers, leopards or butterflies depending on the shapes of the pewter. All the bobbins in the image are tigers, because they have stripes of pewter, but the one on the right also includes  the name Joseph and a V shape called a butterfly. A leopard bobbin would include pewter circles. Over the years, the pewter used by several other bobbin makers has corroded and fallen out of the grooves in the bobbins, but William used a type of pewter with a low tin content which has survived well and gives a lovely silvery shine to them. William made a huge number of beautiful bobbins through his life, many of which survive today in excellent condition and are still used by contemporary lacemakers so I feel his nickname of Bobbin Brown is well deserved.

Lace fashions in 1919

This image of two elegant women at the races in Paris shows wide bands of lace being worn at the neck, waist and knees. The woman on the right also has a parasol edged with a  fringe of lace. This wide lace with a bold abstract pattern was probably Torchon or heavy Cluny lace or it could have been Swiss embroidered lace, all of which were fashionable at the time. An article in the American magazine The Lace and Embroidery Review for the year 1919 reports that many types of lace were fashionable in Europe and production had begun to increase following the ending of the First World War at the end of the previous year. In particular, reporters had found beautiful handmade applique, duchesse and rose point laces for sale in Belgium, of the style shown below.

   

 The London correspondent of the Review reported an increase in the use of lace in fashion especially in evening wear, as flounces on straight skirts and as short cap sleeves. However, much of this British lace was heirloom lace that women already owned rather than new purchases. The reporter noted that wearing lace had been considered slightly old fashioned but ‘Today laces make the elderly look young and the young even more youthful.’ They also noted that lace was quite scarce at the time so was also sought after because of its rarity value.

Reports from America suggested that one of the best selling laces was Valenciennes, but in Europe laces such as Chantilly, filets, venises and vals (Valenciennes) were also selling well. The sales of good quality laces, like the Chantilly lace in the image, were being buoyed up by the number of weddings and parties being celebrated following the armistice at the end of the war. The reporter noted that frills of lace, net and fabric were popular and women wanted lace frills on accessories, such as hats, handkerchiefs and veils, as well as on dresses and blouses. It seems that buyers and designers were keen to embellish clothing with lace and frills after the war years, but this fashion for lace was short lived as more simple designs prevailed during the 1920s.

The influence of the toile de Jouy style on lace curtain design

 

Toile de Jouy printed fabrics became popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They are printed in one colour and depict scenes from classical mythology or other narrative themes. Many include idealised country views including shepherdesses, Grecian temples, and country pursuits as well as animals and birds. Many companies printed this style of fabric but the factory at Jouy, near Paris, that was established by Jean-Christophe Oberkampf in 1760 became the most famous and gave its name to the style of design. The fabrics from Jouy were a particular favourite of Marie Antoinette. In fact the piece of a bed valance shown below was designed by Jean-Baptiste Huet for the Oberkampf factory, commemorating the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. It even depicts her and was exhibited at the recent Marie Antoinette exhibition at the V&A in London.

Toile de Jouy style designs have been popular ever since their introduction and the fabrics were used for clothing as well as furnishings. It is not surprising then to find similar bucolic designs used in the production of lace curtains. In the collection of Nottingham Museums and Galleries I discovered several toile de Jouy style curtain samples in the archive of the Ashworth company. These samples were manufactured in the early 20th century so were a product of the revival of interest in toile de Jouy designs that occurred at that time.

This is a good example of the style, with a Grecian temple in the background as well as animals and foliage. In the foreground we can see various musical instruments and a girl on a swing with an admirer, in the style of a Fragonard painting, whose work was popular at the time of the first toile de Jouy designs.

This sample shows a detail of another typical design, depicting girls dancing in the countryside, to music being played by other women with pipes and tambourines.

Another good example of the toile de Jouy bucolic style is this very fine piece with idealised country figures, animals and the ruins of a Greek temple in the background. A detail of this sample is at the top of the blog and shows the fineness of the lace. The delicate shading gives a three-dimensional appearance to the animals and the figures. You can almost feel the skin of the animals and see all the folds and creases of the clothes the man and woman are wearing. I love the little details too, including the way she is spinning and the dog is licking its hind leg. Lace designers find their inspiration from many sources and the toile de Jouy style is just one of the many styles that they have used over the years.

A draught for the Nottingham lace curtain machine

 

This image shows part of the draught or pattern for a large lace curtain to be made on the Nottingham lace curtain machine. The designer would have drawn the pattern, probably starting with the main motif, then deciding how to work the pattern repeat across the whole fabric and finally designing the edging. It is interesting that the designer has incorporated one-third of the main motif at the edge and linked it in to the edging design rather than just leaving a strip of blank net between the edge and the first main motif. The main motif that is closest to the edge has also been linked to that side bar with a swag, to reflect the smaller loops on the side motifs. This is a large scale pattern and the large arrow head in the image below shows where the centre of the curtain will be.

Once the designer produced a drawing of the finished design, it was sent to the draughtsman to convert it into instructions for the lace machine. He did this using the graph paper you can see here. Originally draughtsmen, or their assistants, had to draw out the graph by hand before they began their work, but this graph paper has been bought from a supplier ready printed. Each square measures one inch and is divided into 180 small rectangles. These are painted by hand to indicate the movement of the threads that are required by the lace machine to create the design. Different manufacturers used various colours for their instructions but in general red indicated back spool ties, green symbolised Swiss ties and blue meant combination ties. The draughtsman had to be a technician as well as an artist because he had to ensure the instructions for the machine were accurate and would reproduce the design in the way the designer intended. However, I'm sure it was easy to make mistakes and you can see that this draughtsman has tried to paint a green square over one he first painted red and someone has circled his mistake!

When the draught was finished it was then passed to the card puncher to produce the jacquard cards that were used to instruct the lace machine. Based on the colour codes on the draught, he used a machine to punch a series of holes through the cards. The cards were then joined together to form continuous lines of instructions for the lace machine. Other instructions are hand written on the edge of the draught, giving the machine operator more information about the lace. These include the style of the lace to be made and the recommended size, as well as the gauge or fineness of the finished lace (10 point) and the quality (54) which is a measure of how many complete motions of the machine were required to make three inches of the lace. So, not only are these draughts beautiful pieces of art but they also contain a wealth of information.

Shopping for lace in seventeenth century London

This engraving by Abraham Bosse shows the interior of a Parisian gallery in the 1650s where lace, embroidery and other haberdashery items were sold. Examples of the pieces for sale are pinned on the wall behind the counter and saleswomen and their assistants are shown dealing with the customers. A similar establishment, called the New Exchange, opened in London, on the south side of the Strand, in 1609 and was described as having two long double galleries one above the other, which housed ‘great numbers of very rich shops of drapers and mercers filled with goods of every kind’ according to Count Lorenzo Magalotti who visited it in 1669. High quality fabrics and dress accessories were also sold in shops crowded together along the old London Bridge, which at that time was the only crossing over the River Thames in London. In 1633 the bridge was nearly destroyed in a fire that started in a needle makers shop. Luckily the bridge survived but 41 shops selling fabrics, hats, gloves and haberdashery were destroyed – imagine the value of all the beautiful things lost in that fire. These galleries were a place to shop but also a place to promenade and show off ones clothes. However, according to a satirical pamphlet of the time, the best place to show off was the middle aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral, where fashionable young men would congregate every morning to parade up and down, showing off their latest fashions, lace and accessories. The pamphlet advises them that ‘four turns’ of this catwalk were enough as any more than that would be boring for their audience!

A close up of the engraving shows the type of lace items being sold readymade to customers. There seem to be several styles of collar, some with lace edgings round a linen collar and others made entirely of lace. The latest fashion in lace at the time would have been Flemish bobbin lace, which was a flat style with detailed designs (the lower piece in the photo below), however Italian bobbin lace was also popular, and you can see an example of that in the upper piece below.

Needle lace and various styles of cutwork were also fashionable, so there was a varied choice for customers. Styles of neckwear were changing at this time from the ruffs  of the sixteenth century to the falling bands and soft collars of the seventeenth century, which most of the customers are wearing, and this shop seems to have both in stock. As well as collars the image shows lace cuffs and fans for sale. There are also some rosette shapes which are probably decorations for shoes. This shop would also have sold lace trimmings and lengths of lace for customers to buy and apply to their own clothes. Larger and more important items would have been commissioned and the design and type of lace discussed with the lace merchant. It is interesting to see that saleswomen seem to be advising the customers while their male assistants are collecting items off the shelf or boxing them up and wrapping them once the purchase has been made. Most shopping at this time would have been done locally because the cost of transporting goods was high. However many people took advantage of any of their friends and family visiting London, giving them requests to buy items of lace for them. It’s always difficult buying things for other people though and frustrating for them if the item isn’t exactly what they wanted, so it was not an easy task. However, it must have been very exciting for Londoners and visitors alike when these new galleries opened and people could wander past a series of shops selling so many luxury items and browse a variety of beautiful things. 

Contemporary needle lace sampler

 

Needle lace is made with a needle and thread and most of the stitches are variations on blanket or buttonhole stitch. You need an outline from which to anchor the stitches and this can be made by cutting areas out of an existing piece of cloth or by making a framework by couching down threads. In both cases you then fill in the spaces you have made with lace stitches. The little sampler in the image was made by attaching  thin ribbons in a grid pattern to a background that I had painted and collaged and then filling in the open spaces with a variety of needle lace stitches.

I started by filling  some of the rectangular spaces with solid areas of stitching. At the top you can see an area of cloth stitch which starts with a line of thread being sewn straight across the space. You then work back along the thread with simple loops at regular intervals. For the row below that you start again with the thread across the space but your loops this time go round the thread and link into the loops of the previous row of stitches. Once I’d finished the block I then threaded a fine gold thread through the stitches but I could also have done that as I’d worked or used a different colour as my base thread.

 

In one of the lower spaces I worked my row of looped stitches over small lengths of thicker gold thread. With these wider strips of gold I didn’t need to secure them at each side of the space because the looped stitches are sufficient to keep them in place. In the rectangle on the right I have worked a more open stitch called double net stitch and again threaded fine gold through part of the work. To give some texture to the piece I also made some thicker interconnecting bars by sewing several threads across the space forming a rough T shape then worked close blanket stitch over them to form a more solid structure. By interlinking the shapes as I worked they form an intertwined grid. I also embellished the piece with small circular couronnes, made by wrapping threads into a circle and then working blanket stitch tightly all round them. Once made, the finished circles can be sewn to the work with the same thread used to make them. I also added beads and other couched threads, so quite a lot of additions, but I’ve kept the same subdued colour palette throughout the work so hopefully it all works together.

Machine embroidered lace collars

 

This net fabric covered with embroidered lace collars shows how embellishments like this can be made in large numbers for the clothing industry. They are made with a multihead embroidery machine which acts like several sewing machines joined together. The net base is stretched on a frame and can be moved automatically from side to side or back and forth as the embroidery progresses

The machine includes a number of heads which contain the needles. Each needle has its own supply of thread so different colours or types of thread can be used in each one. In this case a thicker glossier thread has been used in one needle to outline and highlight parts of the design in the same way a gimp thread would be used in handmade lace.

These collars have been designed to use in pairs as the front edge is longer than the back so they would fit round the neck with the smaller edge at the back of the garment. Once the embroidered fabric is removed from the machine the excess net separating the individual collars is cut away carefully leaving the shaped collar. Any loose threads at the beginning and end of the embroidery also tend to be cut off as the backing net is removed. The lace can then be attached straight on to the neck of a garment. The thicker outlining thread will ensure that the collar retains its shape and doesn’t fray as well as providing a slightly scalloped edging to the design. The whole process is a fast and economic way of producing lace clothing for the mass market.

Lace songs and tells

 Researchers in Vienna have recently found that groups of people singing together can improve team work and interpersonal coordination. This would not have been news to Victorian lacemakers in the East Midlands area of England who encouraged the children in lace schools to sing as they worked at their pillows.

These songs, known as lace tells, improved concentration and were often linked to counting the number of pins worked in a lace pattern in a specific period of time. One Bedfordshire counting tell goes as follows:

Needle pin, needle pin, stitch upon stitch,

Work the old lady out of the ditch,

If she is not out as soon as I,

A rap on the knuckles shall come by and by,

A horse to carry my lady about –

Must not look off till 20 are out.

The children then worked 20 pins and if any of them spoke or looked away from their pillow before they had completed 20 pins the others would call out:

Hang her up for half an hour,

Cut her down like a flower.

The girl referred to would then place another pin and reply:

I won’t be hung for half an hour,

I won’t be cut down like a flower.

Other lace tells were related to local people and events. Many local lacemakers were unhappy with the treatment they received from the Buckingham lace buyer Mr E Godfroy who often paid them in tokens, which could only be used to buy food in certain shops, rather than money that could be spent anywhere. In revenge they sang this lace tell about him:

Nineteen miles to Charing Cross,

To see a Black Man ride on a white horse.

The rogue was so saucy he wouldn’t come down,

To show me the road to the nearest town.

I picked up a turmut and cracked his old crown

And made him cry ‘turmuts’ all over town.

Godfroy was known as the Black Man because he was the first lace buyer to get the lacemakers using black silk thread to make lace. Obviously many lacemakers would have liked to pick up a turnip (a solid root vegetable known locally as a turmut) and hit him over the head with it to ‘crack his old crown’. These are just two examples of lace tells collected by Thomas Wright in his history of lacemaking, based on his research at the beginning of the twentieth century. Others deal with a variety of subjects including romance, death, gruesome murders and each other’s appearance, which must have made for a lively school day.

A painted lace tablecloth

 

Over the Easter holiday I was lucky enough to visit Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum where I saw an exhibition of some beautiful portraits painted by John Singer Sargent. He was part of the Broadway colony of artists painting in Worcestershire at the end of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries. The exhibition also featured some works by the other artist in the group including ‘Between two fires’ painted by Francis Davis Millet in 1892.

It wasn’t the subject of the painting that attracted me. In fact I felt a bit sorry for the puritan man in the picture who looks rather intimidated by the two maids on either side of him. It caught my eye because of the accurate depiction of the lacework round the tablecloth, which you can see in close up in the photo at the top of this post. It is in fact drawn work where threads are pulled, or drawn, out of the background cloth and the remaining threads are used as a background for embroidery stitches. The horizontal and vertical threads you can see were originally part of the cloth and the diagonal ones were added as embroidery stitches with a needle and thread. The raw edges of the rectangular shapes would have been secured with closely worked buttonhole stitches like the edges in the image below.

However this embroidery, although it looks like the lace in the painting, is not drawn work because the threads used to make the pattern across the open space are thicker than the cloth threads and have been added afterwards as free embroidery.

I was also interested in the caps on the maids’ heads especially as I had been looking at speldenmuts a few weeks before. The ones in the painting are much smaller than the caps from the Netherlands and beautifully painted so you can see the gathers and the spots on the muslin. However I wasn’t sure that embroidered muslin would have been use for servants headwear in the seventeenth century, which is the time that the painting is set. I’m also dubious about the net curtain at the window. I’ve seen several paintings and photographs of similar half curtains at the windows of cottages in the nineteenth century but not in the seventeenth. Who would have thought that a casual visit to an art exhibition would have thrown up so many textile questions!

Religious lace bobbins

 

I was trying to find some inscribed lace bobbins relevant to the Easter period to blog about this week, but I haven’t managed to find any. T S Huetson in his survey of bobbins in the early part of the twentieth century reports finding lace bobbins inscribed with the words ‘Easter’ as well as ‘Christ crucified’ and ‘Jesus died for me’. The closest I could find were the general religious inscriptions in the image above, reading from left to right ‘I love Jesus yes I do I do’, ‘Thou O God seest me’ and ‘Jesus’. Many lacemakers followed a nonconformist Christian faith, which meant they believed they had a personal relationship with God and their services involved hymn singing and personal reflection. They would have attended newly built chapels rather than the local village church and the children would have attended Sunday school where they learnt stories from the Bible and their significance to contemporary life. Sunday was the Lord’s day and therefore a day of rest when no work was done. Lace pillows were covered over on Saturday evening and not uncovered again until Monday morning when lacemaking recommenced. Religion would have played an important part in the lives of most lacemakers so it is surprising that so few religious bobbins survive. Perhaps it is more of a reflection on the types of lace bobbins subsequent generations have decided to keep and the cheeky ones like ‘Kiss me quick’ or those with names on have proved more popular with collectors and lacemakers.

Speldenmuts - pin caps from The Netherlands

 

I saw this pin cap at Luton Museum (Wardown House Gallery and Museum) and was fascinated by the row of tiny pins around the lace. I was interested to know whether they were just there for decoration or had a practical use. I’ve since been doing some research and found that these caps are part of the regional costume from the south west region of Brabant in the Netherlands.

                                

The caps have a large crown, gathered on to a strip of lace or fabric, attached to linen ties to secure the cap. These ties would have been pulled tight and tied in a bow at the nape of the neck to keep the crown in place so that it would have kept the wearer’s hair off her face and neatly covered. In most of the caps I have seen the crown area is finely embroidered although whether this was common or only the highly decorated ones have survived I don’t know.

                           

The front part of the cap is made up of a border with a wide scallop sewn from fine lawn edged with lace or entirely of lace. It is attached to the strip of fabric that holds the crown with fine pleats. In many examples the lace seems to be of the Lille type with a wide area of open net with occasional tallies and a floral border along the edge outlined with a thicker gimp thread.

The defining feature of all the caps is the row of pins fixed closely together to make a band of shining silver down the centre of the lappet. Some sources say the pins are copper others say they are stainless steel but so far I have only seen the silver-coloured steel ones. The examples I’ve found in museums all date from the nineteenth century, however some are from the early part and others from the end of the century, reinforcing the theory that these caps were items of regional dress that were kept and reused possibly by different generations, rather than fashion wear that changes over time. As for my original question about the pins, all the sources I’ve seen suggest the pins were decorative and were added to give sparkle to the caps and had no functional use at all.

Modern lace fashions inspired by Marie Antoinette

 

Last week we looked at some of the eighteenth century lace from the Marie Antoinette exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but this week we’ll see some examples from the exhibition of how modern fashion designers have been inspired by her style to use lace in their creations. Some of these gowns were made for actresses portraying her in films and others were designed for the catwalk.

The Christian Dior gown at the top of this post was made for the actor Emilia Schule who played the title role in Banijay’s series Marie Antoinette in 2023. The image here shows details of the silk layers trimmed with machine-made lace.

This wedding dress was designed by the Vivienne Westwood fashion house in 2025. It includes a paniered skirt and train made of machine-made, Chantilly-style lace, combined with a stiff, lace-covered bodice, none of which would have looked out of place in eighteenth century France. However, where a period gown would have a full skirt, this one instead has a gathered mini skirt revealing the model’s legs. It also features a lovely veil made of fine net, edged with the same lace as the gown.

This gown, designed by Alessandro Michele for Valentino in 2025, also has a paniered silhouette and train and incorporates layers of floral lace. It was inspired by Marie Antoinette’s private hideaway, the Petit Trianon, and reflects the idea of an idealised countryside lifestyle with shepherdesses in the fields.

This older design inspired by Marie Antoinette was made in about 1923 by the Boué Soeurs. They were known for their ‘lingerie dresses’ and their advertisements featured models as shepherdesses. These references to the Petit Trianon, relaxation and idyllic countryside reflect the life of Marie Antoinette and the scandal she caused when she was painted in a simple muslin dress, which the public considered to be nothing more than underwear. This lingerie dress features paniers under a lace and silk chiffon skirt, embellished with dainty ribbon roses reflecting the bucolic theme and the fashion house, which incorporated a rose on its labels.

These dresses aren’t actual lace, but I couldn’t resist including them. The one thing everyone thinks they know about Marie Antoinette is that she uncaringly said ‘Let them eat cake’ when she heard that French peasants were starving. However there is no evidence she said anything of the sort and the story did not appear until 50 years after her death, so it does seem unlikely. However, these silicone dresses designed by Jeremy Scott for Moschino in 2020-2021 are lace-like and great fun and reflect the fantasy and excess of what has become known as the Marie Antoinette style.

Lace in the V&A Marie Antoinette exhibition

 

Although several of the artefacts in this exhibition at the V&A Museum in London once belonged to Marie Antoinette, such as the chemise she wore in prison before her execution, her prayer book, a shoe, and items from her dressing table, none of the lace on display can be attributed to her. However, the examples are typical of the time and are similar to lace she would have worn. The image shows a detail of a beautiful silk embroidered robe from about 1780 embellished with white silk bobbin lace and net.

The first garment on display in the exhibition is a beautiful silver brocade, silk gown and train worn in 1774 by Marie Antoinette’s sister in law, a future Queen of Sweden. It is thought to be a copy of the dress 14-year-old Marie Antoinette wore on her wedding day in 1770 to the 15-year-old Louis-Auguste, Dauphin of France, the future king Louis XVI.

Paintings of the wedding show Marie Antoinette sparkling in this formal court dress, known as a robe de cour. The extensive train is edged with silver bobbin lace which is attached from the bodice and round the circumference of the train. Silver lace is made from a core of thread wrapped in silver so is quite stiff and does not gather well. Applying it to the fabric in this way allows it to catch the light and shimmer. It would have looked spectacular in candlelight.

This bodice stiffened with whalebone is similar to ones Marie Antoinette would have worn at the French court. These bodices were very uncomfortable and her mother, the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, writing in one of her numerous letters to her daughter offers to send her a more comfortable one from Vienna. This bodice dates from about 1760 and is embellished with rows of silver bobbin lace in a scalloped design.

Lighter more delicate lace at this time was mainly needle made and the exhibition includes these fine Alençon lace borders dating from 1780-1820. This type of lace would have been used to edge sleeves and frills.

These two pieces of lace are lappets, which were lengths of lace that hung down either side of a cap. Some hung over the ears, others down the back and lappets could also be pinned up on the top of the head. I have not seen any paintings of Marie Antoinette wearing lappets, although her hair is always ornately dressed and she often wears hats, feathers, and jewels on her head. Perhaps lappets were out of fashion by this time or were a fashion for older women. The lower lappet in the image is Alençon lace but the upper one is from Argentan. These two towns were both famous for their fine needle lace and the styles were similar. The main difference is in the ground stitches that form the net. The  Alençon mesh is made up of fine blanket stitches with an extra twist giving a square appearance, while for the Argentan mesh each side of the net is overstitched in blanket stitch making a more solid hexagonal mesh. These are the types of lace that Marie Antoinette would have been familiar with and would have worn. The exhibition also includes more modern examples of lace that fashion designers have used in garments inspired by the Marie Antoinette style but we’ll look at those another day.

Lace making pins

 

Pins are an essential part of bobbin lace making as they are the temporary structures around which the threads are worked to make the lace. They come in many different lengths, widths and metals to suit the type of lace being made. Pins were originally made in two parts: the long pointed shaft and the head. The first types of head were made of wire twisted into a sphere and then attached to the shaft by compression. Later, solid heads were made with a small hole at the base into which the shaft was pushed and kept in place by the tightness of the fit. As you can imagine the heads often came off these pins and the lacemakers improvised to replace them with blobs of sealing wax or seed heads. Pins with permanently attached heads were not made commercially in England until the mid 1830s.

The image at the top shows modern stainless steel pins in the background with some interesting antique pins in the foreground. These pins were made using two brass pins joined together. You can see from the picture of the individual pin that the heads of the two pins were joined, then some small coloured beads were threaded on to the top pin and the end sealed off. Thomas Wright, in his history of East Midlands English lace areas, says this was done by using the head from another pin, so that one pin was wasted to make one of these longer pins. This seems unlikely to me as pins would have been precious and few lacemakers would have wanted to waste one. Also the close up shows a pin with a blob of sealing wax at the top to stop the beads falling off. Of course the sealing wax could have been used over the head of another pin, but I would have thought that if the sealing wax did the job that is what the lacemakers would have used. Of the four pins in the main image three seem to have sealing wax heads and one has a pin head. These long, decorated pins were known as limicks or bugles in Buckinghamshire, as King pins in Bedfordshire and as strivers throughout the lacemaking area.

Wright suggests that limicks were used to decorate the lace pillow, but strivers were used to measure the amount of lace produced in a given time. The striver pin was either used in the footside of the lace pattern at the start of the period or pinned beside the lace on the pillow. It was then possible to measure from the striver pin to the end of the lace to see how much lace had been made in a period of time. Striver pins were used in the lace schools to encourage the children to work harder and compete with each other to produce the most lace in a given time. Lacemakers today still use decorative pins, both as strivers and to beautify our lace pillows, like this lovely set of rose pins I bought in the Misuyabari needle shop in Kyoto, Japan.