Just because I could, Part III

In the previous two installments, I made a release-paper-covered polystyrene foam mold for a 9” high, 12” diameter carbon fiber bobbin lace lampshade, worked the lace, and smooshed a 24-hour epoxy into the fibers.

The next morning (yes, less than 24 hours later), I returned to the lab to attempt removal of the composite lace from the mold. The first task was to remove the wax-coated toothpicks which I had used as pins. I used a pair of pliers to grip the toothpicks, and pulling out with a slight twisting motion was usually sufficient. However, three toothpicks did break off as I tried to remove them. Considering that I used an entire box of toothpicks on this project, though, three breaking off is not bad. After removing the toothpicks, I went back and focused my attention on the broken stubs, and successfully removed them as well.

But even with the toothpicks removed, the thing was still stuck to the mold. However, my experience with removing the toothpick stubs pointed the way. See, I had grabbed one of the popsicle sticks that are stocked in the lab, wiggled it around under the lace to loosen the resin from the paper, and then turned it on edge to raise the lace high enough to reach in and grasp the stub. So to prepare to remove the shade from the mold, I slid the popsicle stick under the lace at an already loose point, then wiggled it around under the entire thing.

Finally, I pulled the slightly-flexible plaits along the bottom out and up enough that they were on the side. As you can see in the following picture, once I had everything loosened from the release paper, it slid off pretty easily. I had designed the top well enough that it kept everything stable as I pulled the basket-like structure off the mold. I just grasped the sides with my fingers, and pushed on the top of the mold with my thumbs. This was probably the quickest and easiest part of the whole project!
Next, I carried my carbon fiber composite basket across the street to my lab where I’d left the lamp hardware and assembled it all. I used a small piece of poplar as a support plate for the shade. After taking the project up to show my teacher, I took it home and hung it up in the dim corner by my fiction bookshelf.
I would like to put up another swag hook a little further from the shelf so that the lamp doesn’t block my view of the artwork on the top of the bookcase. But that will be a project for another day. In this slightly blurry view from the interior, you can more clearly see the lace pattern. The next picture, also an interior shot, shows the top pattern.

Almost everyone that I told about this project was intrigued, even if they were stumped by either the term “bobbin lace” or “carbon fiber” (or in some cases, both). This is definitely an example of how my wide ranging interests in making stuff come together in an unexpected way! I am fairly confident in stating that I am the only person in the world with a carbon fiber composite bobbin lace hanging lamp!
(Doesn’t it make a pretty pattern on the walls and ceiling? I should put in a liner to make it more of a lampshade though, and I should probably do that before friends come over for my birthday and burn their eyes out staring raptly at my fascinating lamp.)

Just because I could, Part II

In my previous entry, I described how I made the mold/working pattern for a composite carbon fiber bobbin lace lamp shade for my Composites semester project. In this installment, I will describe how I actually worked with the carbon fiber to make the lace.

First of all, I’m sure some people are wondering what carbon fiber is. (I’m pretty safe in that assumption, because some people have asked me, “So, what is carbon fiber, anyway?”) Carbon fiber is used for a lot of high-end uses where strength and low weight are necessary. New planes being built by Boeing and Airbus right now are being made largely from carbon fiber—the Boeing 787 has been in the news lately. Carbon fiber is made by taking another material with high carbon content and basically burning off whatever isn’t carbon. Sounds kind of weird, but it works. So you end up with long, continuous strands of solid carbon. This can then be woven into fabric or used in filament winding (where the fiber is wrapped directly around a mandrel to make the part). If I had followed my original plan to make laptop sleeve, I would have used carbon fiber cloth or prepreg (cloth impregnated with activated resin so you don’t have to add it when you are making the part). But for my bobbin lace, I took advantage of the fact that the lab had several spools of fiber for filament winding available.
At 44” long, this would be the longest piece of lace I’d ever made. Also, as you can see in the preceding picture, the fiber (which is made from many individual strands) is much wider than the thread I am accustomed to working with. So I needed a special set of bobbins to accommodate this unusual material. I got some craft dowels, cut them to three inch lengths, drilled holes in the end, and glued in long nails.
Now, winding bobbins is always my least favorite part of making lace, and these were awful to wind. I took the bag of bobbins and the spool of fiber over to the machine shop, where I could be available to assist students working on projects for the class for which I am a lab assistant. Not surprisingly, everyone looked at me oddly and asked what on earth I was doing. I got that a lot in the course of this project! I miscalculated how many pairs of bobbins I would need, and wound several more than necessary. That turned out to be a good thing.

Finally, I was ready to start the lace. I placed a couple of clamps on the worktable in the composites lab, and laid a piece of release paper across them, to make a cradle to hold the mold/pillow/whatever you want to call it. I also got a box of toothpicks and rubbed a wax mold release into a few handfuls of them. The toothpicks would be the pins for the lacemaking. As usual, I hung the pairs of bobbins on in a diagonal. Honeycomb is a very easy ground to work, which is one reason I chose it for this project. It also can cover quite a bit of area rather quickly, which is another reason. Now, I had originally thought I would apply the resin to the fibers a few inches at a time while working the lace. Quite sensibly, I revised my plan and placed all the fiber for the whole thing before adding the mess of resin. As I mentioned in my previous entry, I have not worked on a bolster-type pillow before. I found that it actually wasn’t much harder than the other pillows I’ve worked with. The only real problem was that the strands of fiber kept getting caught in the heads of the nails on the bobbins, which got annoying. But it worked.
In the preceding picture, you can see the bobbins hanging on the pillow. The edges were worked as simple plaits, and I hung the edge pairs off the sides to keep them out of the way when I wasn’t using them. This only took nine pairs. This next picture is taken from the back, which is why the bobbins aren’t visible. Here you can see the worked lace, and how the whole thing is bristling with toothpicks!
As I worked, I found that I was starting to run out of fiber on some bobbins. I was prepared for this eventuality, though! As I mentioned earlier, I’d wound too many bobbins. So I had some prepared to add in to take over for those that were running out. However, I did it in a different way than usual. I took advantage of the fact that I was making a composite material: I had a little bottle of super glue ready. As a bobbin ran low, I would hang a fresh one nearby, then glue the fibers together. As soon as the glue was dry, I just cut the new fiber above the patch and the old one below. Not a way you would want to replace threads in regular lace, but a method that works well enough when the whole thing is going to be saturated with resin soon anyway! I ended up having to replace almost all the bobbins in the piece at one point or another. When I finished working the lace around the side, I finished off in the same way, by just gluing the fibers to the start of the lace.

Next, I turned the mold so the top was up and stuck toothpicks in all the points I had previously marked and plaited a center circle. I cut a long fresh strand of fiber off the spool, glued one end to the plaited edge at the starting point, and placed it along the marked path, pulling against the toothpicks to make the design. At the edge and center circle, I used a crochet hook to loop the long fiber around the plaits, and did the same at certain intersection points in the design. I placed the fiber along the entire top pattern twice.
Finally, I mixed up some room-temperature epoxy using a hardener that would give me a one-hour working time and 24 hour cure. I used a cheap paint brush to apply the epoxy first to all the lace on the side, then to the top. I paid particular attention to the plaited portions, since they were denser than the others, and I wanted to make sure they got enough resin to be fully wetted out. Then I just had to leave it all overnight and hope I would be able to get it off the mold the next day.

Just because I could, Part I

This past semester, I took the last class required for my Master’s degree. I had already taken all the other available electives, so Composites was the only one left. Composites are materials made of a reinforcement and a matrix. In general, the reinforcement is a fiber of some sort, and the matrix is a resin (not always, though). Fiberglass with polyester resins are probably the most familiar to the general public, as they are used in making boats and skis and such. As a requirement for the class, I naturally had to make something using the materials available in the plastics/composites lab. I opted for something made out of carbon fiber, rather than glass, because carbon is just cooler.

During a class period earlier in the semester, I think when we were discussing forms of cloth made from reinforcement fibers, I started joking about making composite bobbin lace. But for my actual project, I planned to make a carbon fiber laptop sleeve. Well, when it got right down to it, my joking captured my enthusiasm much more than my practical plan did, so I became determined to make a functional piece of bobbin lace out of carbon fiber. Due to the general dimness of my living room, I decided to make a hanging lamp, with a carbon fiber bobbin lace shade.

The first thing I needed to do was make a mold. I had decided to use an epoxy that cured at room temperature, so my mold would not need to withstand the pressures and temperatures of curing in an autoclave. I got a few rounds of Styrofoam and glued them together.

I just used Elmer’s all-purpose glue, and I wasn’t sure how well it would work on the polystyrene foam. Fortunately, it worked quite well for my purposes. The glued-up foam pieces were the size of the lampshade, with no cutting or shaping required. So next I needed to make the pricking for the lace.

Normally I work lace on either my broad, slightly domed cookie pillow, or my roller pillow, which is set into a broad, flat pillow that supports the bobbins while working. For this project, I would be basically working on a large bolster-type pillow, with the lace working around the entire pillow and the bobbins just hanging from the work.

Because the resin would be applied to the fiber while on the pillow, I needed to make sure the composite lace wouldn’t get stuck to the pricking. I took a sheet of release paper home from the lab—I’d used it before in some preliminary work and found that the cured epoxy peeled off the paper quite easily.

I had done some preliminary drawings on graph paper to determine the design, a basic honeycomb ground to fit the 9” width of the pillow. After cutting the release paper to a strip that would just fit around the mold, I started drawing grid lines. At first I tried using pencil, then gel pen, but neither would mark the paper. So I dug out a couple of Sharpies, red and black, and drew grid lines at one inch intervals in red.
Next, following the plan on my graph paper, I used the black marker to place the spots for the “pins”.
And, because it is a good idea anyway, and even more important on something like this, I drew in the working lines of the honeycomb ground between the dots.
I finished up the mold by cutting a circle of release paper to fit the top of the shade and drew a flower-like design, which I marked with pin dots, arrows, and numbering so that I could work the entire design with one continuous strand. (I did end up adding two more circles for support later on). This top part would not be worked in traditional bobbin-lace techniques, but rather the fiber would just be placed along the design, and smooshed together with the resin.
Next, I clipped the top and pinned it to the mold using straight pins, then pinned the honeycomb pricking around the side.


The mold was now completed and ready to be taken to the lab. I’ll stop my story for now, but I will be continuing it in two more installments!

What Do You Tink About That? (Part I)

A fellow seller on Etsy, TinkersShop put forth a challenge for those daring enough to accept it: use three vintage pharmacy labels, provided by her, in our own creations to be completed by October 2. I thought this sounded intriguing, and had an idea in mind, so I signed up. I received my labels and sadly neglected them for several weeks. This week, living by a very strict to-do list, I have finally carved out niches of time in which to work on the “Tink Projects”.
My first project was using the purple “Belgique” label. The elements of the label that particularly caught my eye were the scroll saying “Machelan (Brabant) Belgique” and the little circles with faces. The references to Belgium made this label a natural for my first idea—a pair of lace bobbins with the label decoupaged onto the handles. Belgium is famous for its bobbin lace, including one particular style, Bruges Flower Lace.
I started by turning a pair of cherry bobbins. The thistletop and neck were turned normally. For the handle, I wanted a smooth recess in which to place the paper. I did not do any decorative cuts, other than a little shaping of the area between the neck and the recess, as well as the end. For once, I did try to copy myself and make a matching pair. Although they are not quite identical (they never are), I surprised myself by liking the second one more! Usually when I am trying too hard to match, the copy is not as pretty. (The one on the right is the second one.)
Next, I cut the portions of the label that I wanted to use. I cut them to fit in the recess, but with excess length to roll up. I then rolled the papers on without adhesive to test the look and fit, and trimmed again as necessary. Then, I applied Mod-Podge to the back of the papers and carefully rolled them tightly on to the bobbins, also being careful not to smear the wood.
Afterward, I applied a couple of coats of the Mod-Podge to the paper (and a very small amount to the wood along the edges) to seal and provide a glossy finish. Then I carefully propped them up to dry. Yes, my drying rack is a cookie cooling rack.
The next morning I applied tung oil to the wood, this time being careful not to smudge the oil onto the paper. After the regular finishing and spangling procedure, the bobbins were ready to list for sale, submit to Tink, and just generally show off!

Silk. Lots and lots of beautiful silk!

A few weeks ago, I found out that an enthusiastic trader on Etsy had some skeins of silk laceweight yarn she was clearing out of her abundant yarn collection. Since I like silk, I’ve been curious about working with yarn, and I was wondering just how thin laceweight yarn is, I traded a keyring pen for a skein of blue silk yarn.
Since I like to experiment on new types of thread by making longer pieces of lace, I needed to make a new pricking. After a bit of debating with myself, I decided to draw it out at a scale that would give me 8 pins per inch along the straight sides. I had thought to make scalloped edges, similar to the edges on the variegated thread bookmark I made a few months ago, but decided to simplify it with straight edges. The center of the strip is a simple honeycomb ground. The triangles along the edges are half-stitch, and along each edge two pairs of passives are worked in whole stitch to give a sturdy woven edge.

After drawing out the design, I scanned it in to my computer and printed out two copies. I carefully cut and taped the strips to align the design. Cheating a little, I did not mount the printouts on a stiff backing, and I did not pre-prick the holes. The reason I made the pattern so long is that I wanted to try working it on a roller pillow I bought on ebay a few years ago. I pinned the paper strip to the center of the roller, then wound about a yard of yarn onto each of 32 bobbins (16 pair). I started the lace at a point, similar to the bookmarks I’ve made, and worked it as normal.
For the most part, working with the laceweight yarn was no different than with thread. However, it was not an even thickness, and the thicker slubs had to be worked with carefully. They tended to get stuck in the whole stitch edges. The lace was a little looser than usual, due to the large scale at which I drew the pattern.
When working on a roller pillow, you work an inch or so at a time, then turn the roller back a bit to expose the next section to work. You take the pins from the back to use in the lace at the front as it is being made. I found that I liked this, because it left me with not as many pins to take out and the end when I’ve finished! However, there are some thing I don’t like about this roller pillow. I can’t push the pins all the way down, like I do on my cookie pillow. The slope on the roller is a little too steep, and the apron—the part where the bobbins lay—is awfully thick, making it a little awkward to position when working. As this is the only roller pillow I’ve ever used, I don’t know whether this is normal. I plan to make a new roller pillow myself, so I’ll try to eliminate at least a couple of those issues.

I started to run out of yarn on a couple of bobbins before I quite reached the end of the 17 ½” long pattern, but what I had was long enough for what I wanted, so I finished off at a point similar to the beginning. Because the lace was fairly loose, as I mentioned earlier, I laid the strip out flat and treated it with spray starch. I didn’t iron the lace, but let it air dry. That worked wonders!
It wasn’t until I was partway through making the strip of lace that I finally decided what to do with it. I often wear my hair pulled back by a sash, since it’s too short to pull back in a ponytail. Since I have quite a bit of undyed silk chiffon left over from a rather nice dress I made a couple of years ago, I decided to make a silk hair sash on which to mount the silk lace.

Originally, I’d thought to make a long, skinny sash, barely wider than the lace. But the first piece I pulled out of my bag of leftover silk was a roughly rectangular piece the full 44” width of the fabric, with the barely noticeable selvages still present. That gave me a new idea. I sewed the long edges together in a French seam and pressed it in the middle of the long strip.

Folding it in quarters, I marked the center, then marked the center of the lace and sewed it in the middle of the sash. I decided to leave the ends open so that, when tied, it would give the effect of a regular scarf. When I was taking pictures of it, I played around with folding it in long thirds the width of the lace, and laying flat like a head scarf. I even tied the folded sash around the neck of my wig head for another variation!


The next time I use this yarn, and probably for any other laceweight yarn, I’ll still use the eight pins per inch scale, since that works well with the unevenness, but I’ll add extra twists as necessary to make the lace a little tighter. Even doing that, though, I’ll probably still need to starch the lace. Which reminds me, I need to get some more starch because I finished off my current can on this!

Rubber ducky, you're the one!

The April EtsyFAST challenge theme is "Just Ducky". I felt like going with a rather literal interpretation of the theme and work out a small motif shaped like the stereotypical bath toy. I decided the best way to go was to make a simple braid outline, similar to the one I used for the heart earrings, but with a plaited filling rather than a torchon-type ground.

The first difficulty I encountered was how to create the narrow, tapered shape needed for a beak. I remembered a design I once saw, which used a leaf-shaped tally for a bird's beak. I made the drawing for the pricking based on this idea, and added in a spot for a small seed bead to be worked in, representing the duck's eye.
Next, I scanned the drawing in to my computer and mirrored the image so that I can make a ducky facing whichever direction I like. After printing the design, I cut it down to a square. I prepared the pricking by using clear contact paper to stick the printed design onto a slighlty larger square cut from a file folder. Finally, I used a pin to poke holes in all the designated spots.
For working the lace, I decided on a very bright yellow cotton sewing-weight thread. I also got some bright orange cotton thread for the beak, and tiny size 15 black seed beads for the eyes.
Now, a tally is worked using only two pairs of bobbins. Each bobbin is used singly as one is woven back and forth, forming a small, dense shape. So in order to make the beak a different color from the rest of the lace, I started by hanging in the two pairs of yellow-wound bobbins as usual, but instead of using one of them to weave the beak, I hung in a single orange-wrapped bobbin as well. I used the two center bobbins as one. The method I learned for making tallies includes tying the worker thread around one of the others at the beginning and end anyway, so that made a convenient way to bring the contrast thread in and out.
After working the beak and removing the single orange bobbin, I added in more bobbins for a total of seven pairs and worked in cloth stitch to the eye. I incorporated the bead using my amazingly helpful teeny teeny tiny 0.4 mm crochet hook, then worked on around, completing the head in straightforward cloth stitch. For the body, I used a simple braid: cloth stitch with twists setting off the outside edge. As I worked it, i found a few spots where I preferred the pins to be place closer in. So I poked new holes and moved the pins. After completing the body and discarding most of the threads, I kept two pairs to form one side of the plaited filling, and added in two more pairs for the other half.
I plaited the filling pairs a little, worked the pairs through each other at the crossing, and continued on to a couple of picots. After another crossing and finishing off, the ducky was done!
But I wasn't completely satisfied with my little duck. The contrast beak was fantastic, but the way I added the additional pairs in left a gap. Also, the plaited filling didn't seem quite stable, due in part to the fact that I have not yet fully mastered right-hand picots, I expect.
So for the next ducky, I started with three pairs, with each pair used as a single thread in the tally when woven with the orange. This made the transition from the beak to the head much more smooth, but does make the beak tally a little wider. Since rubber duckies don't usually have sharp beaks, that didn't bother me. For the filling, I skipped the picots altogether, and just sewed the plaits to pinholes to make the shape. Happy with this one, I went on and made another the same way, and made them into a slightly silly pair of earrings!

I have an idea for using the same pricking to make some more realistically-colored ducks, so stay tuned for an update when I complete them!

Yeah, I can't draw.

I wasn’t originally planning a blog post about these earrings, but…well, it’s been a little while since I’ve posted something, and I’m inordinately proud of this design, so here goes!

In my continuing efforts to make bobbin lace more accessible to the masses, I decided to make some Valentine’s Day earrings. After all, if lace doesn’t go with Valentine’s day, I don’t know what does! While I was at my former desk job, I had a tendency to doodle little pictures of items I want to make. On my last day, I gathered up all the little notes on my desk that had as-yet-unrealized sketches and took them home with me. One was for some bobbin lace hearts.

Once I actually started trying to make the pricking for the hearts, I came to a grave realization: I can’t draw a heart. If I tried to make it symmetrical, it came out uneven. If I tried to make it asymmetrical and whimsical, it just looked weird (and got very complicated when drawing in the filling ground). I even tried drawing half a heart on my computer, then using digital magic to copy and mirror the other half. That didn’t look right, either. So I resorted to lessons learned in childhood: I folded a piece of paper in half, grabbed my scissors, and cut a heart. The first one seemed a little too big for an earring, so I cut it down a bit more.

After a few revisions, I held the paper prototype up to my ear and decided it looked about good. I then placed my little heart under some tracing paper, copied the outline, and drew another line for the other side of the braid. (I did that freehand, but it was much easier since I had a reference). Again, it took me about three attempts to get the dots for the filling ground marked and looking good. Once I had it the way I wanted it, I just cut out the section of tracing paper, taped it to a piece of file folder, and poked all the holes with a pin. (Yes, I’m just using a pin to prepare my prickings at the moment. I am planning to make a set of tools, including a proper pricker, a matching sewing hook, and maybe even a pin lifter if I can find a congenial jeweler to help me with that.)

This is the type of lace that cookie pillows were designed for. I pinned the pattern to the center of my circular pillow, and turned the pillow as I worked my way around the motif. I worked the first pair in pink, but didn’t take pictures. So the in-process pictures are of the second pair, which is red and white. Because of the small scale of the lace, I used Coats and Clark Cotton sewing thread. I used a simple but pretty four-pair braid for the outline, with extra twists at the outer pair. For the red and white hearts, I used white for the outer pair of the braid, red for the inner two passive pairs and the worker pair, and white for the ground. I found it easiest to hang in the filling pairs as I worked the braid, and added an extra twist of the worker pair at each pin that would later be used for anchoring the ground threads. This made sewing in and finishing much easier. The filling is a simple half-stitch ground (hs, pin, hs, tw, ).


This is the first pattern of this type that I have drafted from scratch, so I am quite pleased with it! I think I’ll try doing a similar pattern with rose ground, just because that is my favorite ground. I also need to dig through my stack of sticky-note sketches and find the one that I thought would be good for black hearts…

(Click the picture to see where you can get your own pair!)

I don’t know, what color do YOU think it is?

A little while ago, I decided to join the Fiber Arts Street Team on Etsy. The main thing that interested me was their monthly challenges. I figured the challenges would be a good way to encourage myself to stretch a bit beyond my usual work. The January challenge this year is to make something in a color that is new to my shop. While I was brainstorming on this, I realized that I have always worked with solid colored thread. Not just thread, but even in my crocheting, I always used solid colored yarns. So I decided that for something different, I would use variegated thread for my challenge piece.

In crocheting, knitting, sewing, and other single-thread crafts, use of variegated yarn/thread results in blocks or sections of color that blend from one to the next. It is an interesting effect, although not one that has generally appealed to me—hence the fact I have never used it. However, bobbin lace is different. Since so many different threads are used, with most of them at different points in the color blend, I knew there wouldn’t be definable color sections. But I didn’t know how the lace would actually end up looking. I chose to work a bookmark, so that there would be plenty of chances for the threads to move around and the color changes to become evident. I worked it in embroidery floss (2 strands to reduce risk of breakage), DMC 4140. Because separating off strands for the lengths I needed is difficult, I decided to work the fans in half-stitch to eliminate the need for vastly longer threads on the worker pairs.

As I started, it was interesting to see that the first fan was predominately brown, and its opposite was predominately pink. As I continued through, the colors mixed more and color sections were not so well defined. I think I need to reevaluate the number of twists I use when working this design. Usually, when working in continuous half-stitch (the fans), the thread traveling across gets switched out every row. However, I noticed after a while that the same bobbin was always the one in that position—which isn’t good when you haven’t wound on enough thread for one to continuously weave back and forth! So I kept an eye on my bobbins. Whenever one seemed to be getting low, or I just felt like changing the colors in the fan, I’d add or drop a twist at the edge in order to ensure that the other bobbin in the pair was now the one travelling. I don’t know how obvious this is when looking at the lace, but at least I didn’t run out of thread and have to hang in any new bobbins!

Because the colors sort of remind me of milk chocolate and strawberry cream (and because of an entertaining thread on the Etsy forums which suggested that items with food names seem to get more attention), I’m calling this a Strawberry Chocolate Truffle bookmark. Yum.

The finished bookmark!