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 Pins were originally made in two parts: the long pointed shaft and the head.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.