"One possibility that has not yet been mentioned is that England had a number of its men in the Indian subcontinent at some point (the Raj). It is not inconcevable that some of these men had ivory and exotic wood bobbins made for gifts to sweethearts and family back in England. Certainly, a lot of the workboxes and their fittings came from India.
Might not sailors and whalers carve bobbins out of narwhal, whale and walrus? They would be quite rare, but they should exist ..." All this is documented as happening, but it is highly unlikely that these bobbins would then look exactly like the ones made by the local English bobbinmakers. As I said in an earlier post, there are bobbins made in India from ivory, but they *look* Indian - or at least not English. And because the bobbin makers weren't getting direct feedback from the lacemakers some of the ornamentation was impractical. And the numbers of these overseas or hybrid bobbins is tiny compared to the thousands that were made for and used by the working lacemakers. The batches of bobbins that turn up on the TV programmes are normally 'ordinary' Midlands bobbins, which is why we feel so confident in saying that these particular ones are bone, not ivory. I am willing to be corrected as I don't see a lot of TV, but I don't remember seeing, or hearing about, any Honiton, Malmesbury or Downton bobbins. Perhaps they tended to stay more local to their source and usage, and without the beads were more easily overlooked and thrown away in house clearances. For that matter, the same applies to Bucks thumpers. Jacquie - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
