Briefly back to lace. Nottingham Society of Artists exhibition featuring textiles and lace.

 I'm just adding this post as the exhibition motioned opened yesterday 27.5.25 and runs until the 31.5.25.

The current exhibition is called Found and I attended the launch party last night, rather last minute as I had been intending to go on Thursday. I may still go back then and take a closer look.

The three artists are very different, Christina Williams produced cards, hand made books and exhibited a collection of spoons made from found objects

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I apologise for the reflections, glass is always a little difficult.

Like many people, I was studying these hard, trying to identify what had been repurposed

Jackie Ward makes amazing figures of people being people, absolutely loved them.

However , I must admit that the main reason for going was to see the Suzanne's lace.

what if bobbin lace experiment

Hi, I'm confined to the house at the moment with a chest infection. If I move, I cough, if I talk . I cough so I'm waiting , not too patiently for the antibiotics to take effect. However I'm not good at sitting still and not doing something with my fingers.

So I doodled this

dug out this

added these


worked this


bit more progress


more progress


new pincushion!!


maybe a little unusual but it kept me busy.


Ooh, the monster giveaway is still open for comment :-) and have a good week.

What If? lace experiment continues

All week I've had a few chunky lace bobbins on the pillow with thick wool? thread from my stash. These a a mixture of bobbins collected over the years and are easier for me to pick up than my usual pretty ones with the beads. The thread is not terribly strong in places so I have managed to snap it a couple of times and my tension is totally shot at the moment but I'm making lace again to a fashion. Will show you the finished piece hopefully tomorrow.

What If? lace experiment continues

This post was to be published around the time of my accident but got forgotten about. Some time ago I blogged about using this thread with my embellisher.

I then decided to use it for my lace-mmm, different. I hope to finish this as soon as I am able as I am intrigued as to how it will feel.

cold, cold Tuesday

Morning everyone! they promised us snow last night and they lied ! its cold and frosty but no snow as yet. I tend to get excited about snow because we seem to live in a UK hotspot. Every year snow falls around us, even my sister seems more than I do and she only lives 15 mile away, but misses Nottingham.
On the agenda this week is Guzzisue ice skating!! main problem is that I don't know how but I'm sure we can overcome that one hahaha. If my posts suddenly stop you know that my attempts were unsuccessful and I'm nursing a broken something.
The Ice skating proves that Christmas grows closer, the open air rink is up and running, the German Market is buzzing and I get to have time off work next week to catch up with the dreaded housework etc.

In the meantime I am still embroidering the felted surface and making some slow progress on the lace.The brass coloured "beads" are actually the heads of the pins pushed down into the pillow. I hope any serious lace makers following this experiment aren't too horrified by the way I am misusing traditional techniques. I love making traditional lace as well.

What If? lace experiment continues

Its cold outside and I don't fancy getting wrapped up to go out so I will be clearing the decks and getting the embellisher out again especially as I have found some bags of fibre previously buried at the back of the cupboard.

I foolishly left my credit card by the computer for the last two weeks and for some strange reason I felt compelled to use it.LOL So much for the credit crunch!! Anyway, I have a strict maximum bid limit on e-bay and really fancied buying some old bobbins to go with my small vintage sewing tools collection.

Now I have the bobbins which are well used and worn but feel good in the hand, I needed a challenge to try them out so I drew an ATC size, shape, closed my eyes and drew lines down through it, grabbed a bag of threads from the drawer (eyes closed) and allowed myself a thicker thread to match. Freeform lace here I come....what do you think, will it work?



I quite like working with the old bobbins, they are comfortable in spite of the imperfection.

I'm off to dig out the embellisher, enjoy the remainder of the weekend!!

What If? lace experiment continues

What if I try and intergrate bobbin lace with oddments of threads using the embellisher? First tentative results here:




seem to be making some sort of progress here :-)

What If? lace experiment continues

I searched high and low yesterday for my copper wire without sucess but I did find some childrens tinsel pipecleaners. What if............................

pattern adapted from bookmark in Beginning Bobbin Lace by Gillian Dye, I've reduced the munber of bobbins and simplified things slightly.


result................bendy bobbin lace

What If? lace experiment continues

The distorted grid worked until the space between the pins became too great. There is obviously potential here and I will have another go soon.

What If? lace experiment continues

I've ended up with 24 pairs of bobbins and a bit of guesswork but it should be interesting to see if the lace ground shows the distortion clearly once completed. Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment!!

Still it keeps me busy and stops me from stressing about the day job.

I must admit that I am looking forward to a weekend at home so I can sort out the house a bit as at the moment it is full of wet tent and sleeping bags.

"what if" bobbin lace experiments continue

I hope you can see this! its a basic pattern for torchon ground in lace making, in other words regular dots. Each dot is where you would put a pin and the finished result would be a regular mesh.
So, what would happen if I run this pattern through my Corel software and distort it? would i still be able to follow it? will it hold together?

now to find some thread and wind my bobbins.