Karen in Malta wrote <<I would like to offer an opinion on this subject. Can't you just 'repair' the old spangling i.e. maybe keeping the old beads, possibly removing one or two if the spangle is too large and simply changing the wire. You could also wash them. I, too have a collection of old bobbins which I use all the time. Over here in Malta it is slightly different because we don't use spangled bobbins but continental bobbins.>>
With English antique bobbins if you wash anything you should only wash the beads and "not" the antique bobbins themselves. The colouring used to decorate many antique bobbins was water based and washing them would wash away the colour. Some of the colours were made with sealing wax which with it's age might not take kindly to being dunked in a bowl of soapy water either, it might just fall out.
The glass beads on the other hand will probably come up nicely if you soak them for a bit in some warm soapy water.
When I used to spangle sets of 50 beginners bobbins to sell here at lace days I used to buy lots of Indian glass beads that had a white chalky powder in the hole, left from the manufacturing process. The beads would arrive in the post smothered in the loose powder and as I spangled it would get on to the bobbins too and make them a bit grubby. So I used to put a kilo or two of these beads into a net drawstring bag, that I had made form a bit of old net curtain, and washed them in warm water. It was easy to wash, rinse and drain them in the bag and not have to gather up all the beads by hand from the water. The tiny holes in the net curtain didn't let even the smallest bead through. If you have a lot of beads that could do with a wash then a small net curtain bag might be useful for keeping them together in the water.
I used to spread all of my washed beads out on trays that were covered with tea towels and put them in the sun shine for a day or so to dry off. They came up a treat compared to how mucky they were on arrival.
I would spangle about a thousand of these bobbins at a time so you can imagine how many beads I had to wash. I had a half kilo reel of spangling wire and would thread several hundred bobbins, interspersed with the right number of beads for each, on the wire until it became unwieldy then I would go along with my wire cutters and pliers snipping the wire between each bobbin and it's spangle and finishing off each spangle in turn. This was the quickest way to do so my spangles.
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