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Given the current interest in
working with wire I
decided
to post this article, which I wrote in 1980 for the ‘Solutions’ column
of Craft Clarion, the magazine of the Crafts Council of New South Wales
(Australia). Although it was written with monofilament yarns in mind,
in the intervening years I have successfully used these bobbins with
wire of varying weights and also with optical fibre light guides, and
slippery rayon and metallic yarns. I no longer bother to drill
the
dowel before sawing the slot. The bobbins are particularly good
for working with wire because the conventional hitch is no
longer necessary, thus avoiding unsightly kinks in the wire, and
it is really easy to slip the wire out of the slot to release extra
length when needed.
or several years now I
have explored the use of nylon mono-filament in bobbin lacemaking, and
for much of that time found the actual manipulation of this fibre very
trying because it would constantly slip off the
bobbins. The thread on a lace bobbin is normally hitched in a
particular way (diagram, left) to prevent it from unwinding whilst
suspended from the work, but this hitch, and any variant
I could devise, was useless because monofilament was both too slippery
and too springy. It became obvious that I would have to design
a special bobbin or abandon the use of this fibre in my work. This
would have been a pity as felt that it had enormous potential
both for use on its own, and with the more traditional fibres
 bout
six different complicated prototypes and
several months
later I
finally arrived at a satisfactory design, which was so devastatingly
simple that I felt rather foolish about spending so long over it. The
diagram on the left shows how the bobbin works. It can be made from
ordinary wooden dowelling of a diameter and length appropriate to the
size of monofilament to be used. The dowelling is cut to the required
length (generally about 10 centimetres) and a small hole
drilled through
it about 1cm from one end.
hen a diagonal saw cut is made in to
this hole with a hacksaw
or fretsaw from a point about 1.5 cm further along the dowel. The
heavier the monofilament the thicker the dowel needs to be, and the
longer the saw cut. Extra weight may also be an advantage and can he
achieved by drilling the bottom end and plugging it with lead shot. The
end of the monofilament can be simply sellotaped onto the dowel before
winding, or wedged into a second finer slit sawn about .5 cm from the
first.
his might seem a very small
solution to an even smaller problem, if it were only applicable to lace
making. In fact, any fibre craftsperson needs a simple method of
containing such fibres to make their use less painful, and even if
nylon monofilament is not widely used, there are bound to be other
slippery fibres in the future.
© Rosemary Shepherd 1980, 2000
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