An Ancient Art Form - Bobbin Lace with Eva Caye

Please welcome Eva Caye to The Far Edge of Normal. She has numerous hobbies, but her latest is bobbin lace. I love fiber arts, but this one looks too complex for me! All photos in this post are hers. She was kind enough to explain it to me and share her fascination.

Bobbin lace is a complex knotting and weaving of thread to make decorative lace. Wood bobbins are used to hold the thread, which is pinned to a pattern on a pillow or bolster, as you work.

You can use two types of pillows. I made my own circular one, which is for long laces, and then there are flat ones, which are for bigger laces like collars or hankies.

What got you interested in bobbin lace?
I've been crazy about tatting the past six or seven years and had always come across beautiful samples of bobbin lace

and thought, "Oh, too complicated. I could never do that." But one of my Facebook friends said it was pretty easy all told, so I started the way I usually do: getting tons of books on the subject!

There are many more bobbin lace books out there than there are tatting books, so you can get them fairly cheaply. I don't know if I spent more than $4 on all but one of these books. The CD was more expensive at $6.95 (eBay). And on the right is a pricking that you use to make the design.

So where would you suggest people start if they're interested? After buying the books of course!
You can make it easy on yourself and get a kit -- Lacis makes these.

Or you can do the freakish crafty thing and assemble everything yourself! I purchased the bobbins unfinished, sanded them, and color coded them by pairs before treating them with boiled linseed oil. Also pictured: a size 13 crochet needle or beading needles, and thread -- this picture shows pearl cotton size 8.

You also mentioned you enjoy tatting. Please tell us a little about that.

Tatting is fascinating because you need so very little to do it, and you can do it just about anywhere. If you know how to shuttle tat, all you need is a shuttle, thread, and something to cut it with.

I tried for about five months to teach myself to shuttle tat, 20 minutes a day, but when I discovered there was such a thing as needle tatting, I was utterly amazed at how easy that was!

I've only ever seen the shuttle tatting. Can you explain more about needle tatting? It sounds almost like tatooing.
Hah! Yeah, that's what makes it hard to find things on eBay -- their search engine likes to 'interpret' what you type!

it's so easy because there are only two stitches you can make, and you usually make them together: two half-stitches makes the 'normal' stitch. There are occasions you can do a half-stitch in rows, but needle tatting makes it so easy because your stitches are automatically uniform.

Here are some of the things I've tatted:

Lace fan

Valentine's Heart 

Wedding Cuffs with beads

Christmas Ornament with beads

Beautiful work! One last question, why do you do lace work?

To be honest, I'm a pretty rough-and-tumble kind of gal. I learned how to crochet from my grandma when I was eight, took it up again in college, dabbled whenever I wasn't reading, and realized all along that I was 'rough' on my yarn. I decided I needed to learn something delicate! Tatting came first, and shuttle tatting is supposed to be easy but I couldn't get the trick of it. Needle tatting is much, much easier!

And, on that first bobbin lace project, what's supposed to be a caterpillar is more like a centipede because I'm strangling the threads too tightly, hahahaha!

Anyway, both tatting and bobbin lace take time and gobs of patience. You'll pick out a lot of your first pieces, but that'll just teach you more about how the threads set and so forth.

Actually, in my book Fidelity the main female character does tatting (and all kinds of crafty things). I even have her making Imperial emblems!

Thanks so much for sharing this fascinating look at lacemaking!

Eva Caye also writes books - check them out!

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Author Interview: Eva Caye

I met Eva online. We chat on Facebook, commiserating on the fun things life throws at us. But today we're here to talk about writing, not the rest of it.

It took a health crisis to inspire Eva Caye to walk away from teaching and pursue her long-time hobby, writing. She had written eight books before finding a way to pay for an editor, and then she succeeded in getting all eight books in her To Be Sinclair series published within one year while she worked on the finale. Her current works-in-progress are two prequels about colonization some 450 years prior to the series, and an unrelated novel about 60 years in our future featuring a rare telepath.

Find her on Facebook, Twitter, her blog, and her website.

What genre do you prefer to write? What books or stories that you've written are your personal favorites? Anything new coming up?

I write science fiction romance, which covers the spectrum of awareness from logic or reason (science) to feeling and emotions (romance).  I have finished my To Be Sinclair series, featuring a scientist as Empress and her children as progressive, high-minded, hard-working Imperial Family members who truly care about their people.  It’s tough enough for regular people to find love – what about not only the most important person in the galaxy, but also her children, raised to be paranoid?  How do you date under constant security, anyway?

Since the majority of my books feature different Imperial Family members, they all have different ‘timbres’ to them according to their personalities, so it’s hard to say which are my favorites because they are all unique.  I add ‘Easter egg’ short stories or novellas to my books as lagniappes, just little ‘thank-you’ gifts to my readers, and even then they tend to have a completely different tone than the books, moving from serious to funny or social to intimate.  An add-on book I refer to as ‘book 6.5’, since it consists of four novellas, is my editor’s favorite, whereas I adore book 5 but it has few reviews, all of which say something like, ‘good book but not my favorite’.

I am working on two distant prequels to that series, and I have a third work-in-progress that is more paranormal fiction than romance, although there is plenty of love in that story.  In particular, I deal with the societal influences of my characters and do not shy away from sexual situations, although I try to project what I feel is a ‘healthy’ approach to sexuality.  I avoid purple prose, but I also avoid smutty descriptions!

What about you as a person? What do you do to relax? Favorite movies or tv shows? Hobbies?

Between diabetes, depression, and a long-lingering infection, I suffer a lot of brain fog and don’t have much energy in the first place.  I garden a bit but won’t tell you how many plants are still alive, and if I’m not writing or editing, I’m listening to brain improvement or subliminal mp3s while crocheting small stars to piece together into a garment someday.

I don’t watch TV, unless hubby has something on.  He wears headphones so he doesn’t distract me unduly, though I can sometimes hear what he’s watching.  I abhor violence and even wear a visor to cut off subconscious images from the TV, unwilling to let the least image of guts and gore slip sideways into my brain!  It’s about the only argument I’ve ever had with my hubby, trying to figure out why he likes that stuff in the first place.

"All writers must have cats, especially if they write fantasy or speculative fiction." Do you have a stand on this one? Any cute pictures of your kitty or other pet?

If anything, I would say all writers must have dogs.  Dogs worship you like a deity, adore you for every smidgen of attention, and are always happy to see you, feeding your ego.  Since writers tend to be ignored, scorned, or demanded to produce (stories, money, freebies, aka ‘food’) anyway, why would any writer want a cat?

I hear you there. I've got dogs and a cat, but they belong to my kids and husband mostly. The frogs are mine. What writers inspired you to become an author?

Robert A. Heinlein and Lois McMaster Bujold are my favorites, although Anne McCaffrey, Spider Robinson, Arthur C. Clarke, Julian May, and Marion Zimmer Bradley are way up there, too. For the record, I’ve not verified any of the personal information I’ve heard about these authors, which shouldn’t detract from what they have written, anyway.

If you could travel to any time in history, when would you visit?

I would love to see the construction of the Pyramids of Egypt, but I would really love to see what high civilization occupied the current Gobi Desert.  In my opinion, civilizations create deserts, with their monocultures and need to feed their people destroying the environment as their populations swell.  I always figured Coleridge psychically accessed that civilization to write Kubla Khan.

Describe your dream writing spot.

Anywhere completely plain, really.  If I’m too comfortable, I might not get anything done.  If the scenery is too beautiful, I might get distracted.  I tend to curl up on the couch, with my chores undone while I pound away at the laptop.  If I get to feeling too guilty, I’ll take a break and do some chores while I work on the next scene in my mind.

Sounds like me most days. Thanks for stopping by, Eva, and good luck with your series!