Pulling the Nearest Bobbin Made the Hole Larger

The bookmark had developed a hole I couldn’t account for, and pulling the nearest bobbin made it larger.

I put the bobbin down. Picked up its neighbour. That tightened something else.

By this stage, the pillow held a narrow strip of lace, several encouraging little diamonds, and a junction where the threads appeared to have abandoned the pattern by mutual agreement. I had been following the instructions aloud. Apparently I also needed to listen.

Hobby #246, bobbin lace making, had reached its first incident review.

Earlier, at the second-hand shop, I’d mistaken a bundle of wooden bobbins for miniature furniture legs. The volunteer showed me a donated lace pillow with work still attached. Threads spread down from the pins into an orderly wooden fringe. Up close, I could follow individual threads into the lace, then lose them among the crossings.

That unfinished piece persuaded me. Someone had stopped halfway through making this astonishing thing, and the equipment preserved exactly where they’d been.

I brought home the beginner kit, left the donated work alone, and started a narrow torchon bookmark on a fresh section of the pillow.

Preparation went well enough to encourage a dangerous opinion of my abilities. The paper pattern had dots. I made holes through the dots. Pins went into the holes. Bobbins hung from threads. Everything agreed with its picture.

Then my hands became involved.

A cross and a twist sound like instructions you could retain without much effort. In the usual arrangement of two pairs, the cross takes the left middle thread over the right middle thread. A twist takes the right thread over the left within each pair. The directions differ. My fingers strongly preferred that they didn’t.

For a while, I checked each movement. Then I recognized the rhythm and began doing it from memory.

My memory had simplified the procedure.

Reading Irvine and Ruskey’s account of how bobbin lace works, I found another detail I’d underestimated: the pins provide resistance so you can tension a thread without dragging its neighbours out of place. I’d been treating them mainly as coordinates. Get the threads through the correct places and the lace would happen.

Instead, loose loops accumulated behind my attention.

The first response was to pull everything a little tighter. This improved the appearance near the bobbins while transferring uncertainty upwards into the lace. One diamond narrowed. The unexplained hole opened beside it.

I remembered the right edge pulling inward on Diane’s loom. There, too, I’d spent considerable effort arranging thread before discovering what my hands did to it during use. Remembering that afternoon did briefly stop me hauling harder.

It did not tell me which bobbin to pick up.

I tried working backwards. This required identifying the last correct crossing, something I had neglected to mark when it still seemed unnecessary. Undoing a movement was manageable. Deciding whether I’d undone a mistake or removed a correct stitch was harder.

Eventually I had a longer loose section and less evidence.

During a break, I checked the thread against the packet and pattern. Jean Leader’s beginner instructions warn that thicker thread needs a larger pricking and thinner thread a smaller one. Mine matched the kit. I’d hoped to discover a purchasing error. Purchasing errors can be corrected while sitting comfortably.

Returning to the pillow, I started a separate practice strip and said “cross” and “twist” before moving anything. Slowly, a small patch held together. The bobbins clicked against each other whenever I set them down. That sound had been pleasant earlier. Now it announced each completed operation to a room containing nobody who needed the update.

The Lace Guild’s history of the craft mentions students once spending their first class stuffing chopped straw into a pillow. I would have welcomed a straw-stuffing interval.

By evening, the practice strip was still attached and reasonably orderly. The bookmark remained beside it, with a pin parked near the doubtful junction.

I haven’t cut it off. There’s a crossing in there I want to understand before I lose access to it, although I can no longer remember whether the loose loop below it was part of the original problem or something I added during repairs.