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Bobbin lace fan

Click here for fan patterns.

Bobbin lace fan

I suspect that lacemakers are always on the look-out for an interesting project, and making your own lace fan is certainly that!

Fan sticks

Before making a fan, you need a pattern, and before choosing a pattern, you need the sticks that will make up the fan.

This British website sells fan kits, with the sticks and a pattern that will fit, or you can buy the sticks without the pattern. I have not used them myself. There may be other lace suppliers who sell fan sticks.

Another approach is to buy a fan and replace the fabric or paper with lace. An antique or junk shop may sell a damaged fan cheaply. Two of my patterns came from this source (and I have another old fan waiting for when I have some time!) I am happy with the results from using these.

The last approach is to make your own fan sticks. This is not easy. The sticks need to be very thin so they close up neatly. They must not be too fragile, or bendy. Wood or plastic are the normal materials, and I have not managed to buy them in such thinness, without being bendy. You also need to work out how to fasten the sticks together at the base. (You don't need to worry about the other end - the lace will hold the sticks together.) I have tried to make a couple of fans, but they were very small. They don't work as fans, but they could be considered as display items, perhaps. I used plastic from a robust plastic folder - the type you can buy in stationery shops. It was really too bendy, the fans are very small, and you do need to be careful opening and closing the fan. But you can open and close them, and if you make your own fan sticks, then you can use any pattern, and fit the sticks to the pattern rather than the other way round.


Pattern

It is very important that the pattern fits the fan. Every fan has a shape. If you have bought an existing fan, then you can see what shape it is that you need to make.

Bobbin lace fan shape

Spread out the fan (or the fan sticks) and see what shape they make. This is likely either to be a half circle (left) or a third of a circle (right). It may be another shape. If your pattern doesn't match this, then it won't work. Perhaps you can extend or truncate the pattern, but you need to think about it.

Bobbin lace fan shape

You also need to work out the outer edge of the circle. How long are the fan sticks? Is the pattern big enough? Or too big? But there is the inner edge as well. A fan does not go all the way to the centre of the circle. Even when the lace (or fabric or paper) is attached, you can see quite a bit of the fan sticks. The red area above shows the lace that you might be working, and the pattern must be this shape.

So it could be that the patterns on this website will not fit your requirements!


Pillow and bobbins

Working fans are usually a substantial bit of lace. They might need a lot of bobbins, so check you have enough. Also, you need to think about the pillow. The lace for the fan curves, so a roller pillow or block pillow might not work. I suspect that you will need a cookie pillow, and you need to check that your pattern fits on the pillow, remembering to allow room for the bobbins as well.

Bobbin lace fan working

I made my biggest fan in two pieces, starting at the centre, and working outwards. For the second piece, I reset up the pillow, pinned the first piece in its correct place with the starting pins, and threaded through one thread from each pair of bobbins, looping the thread round the back of the starting pin. That seemed to work OK. It might even be possible to work the lace in several sections, tying each piece off, moving the pattern up, and starting again. But that would leave the tying off section in the middle of the fan, where it might be noticeable. By starting in the centre and working outwards, the tied off parts are at the edge, where they can be hidden when attaching the fan to the sticks.

Another trick to reduce the 'large lace' problem is to use thicker thread, and a simpler pattern. It doesn't help with the pillow problem, but it does mean less bobbins for a given width of lace.


Working the lace

The pattern is probably a straight-forward strip of lace, but on a distorted grid to bend it round. It is really part of a roundel. This means that you will have to shift the pillow round slightly as you work the lace, to keep the bobbins hanging downwards at the correct angle. You will find that the pin holes are closer at the inner edge of the fan than the outer edge - this is caused by the distortions of the grid. The look of the stitches may be distorted as well. If the pinholes are very close together at the inner edge, then a good light helps to work the lace and find the correct pin hole. At the outer edge, the pin holes are wider apart, and it may help to twist to edge pairs more than usual, to give strength to the edge of the fan.

The end of the lace needs to be neat. A fringe will not work! Tie the pairs off with reef or square knots.

Something else about working the lace didn't occur to me when I did my first fan, so I will pass it onto you. Lace has holes in. Therefore you will see the fan sticks through the lace, even from the 'good' side. Usually fan sticks are dark, so fade against the pattern of the lace. But it is as well to check that the colour of the lace threads does stand out against the colour of the fan sticks. White works well!


Attaching the lace to the sticks

if you are using an existing fan, then see how the original fabric or paper was attached. There may be pin holes in the sticks, so you could sew them on. Or perhaps you could make pin holes, but remember that wood might split, especially thin wood. I found that I could glue the lace to the sticks quite easily. You need a good general purpose glue - not a "gluing paper together" type glue, but you don't need a super glue.


Different grids

All fan patterns are worked starting at one end and working to the other (unless you work a pattern in two halves (such as above, or in more parts, because of problems of fitting a pattern on the pillow). They are equal width and bent round in a curve, and look like similar shapes. It might be assumed that they are all worked on a similar grid. This is not necessarily true. The grids do not matter while you are working the fan (although it may determine whether the start is on a diagonal or a horizontal start). However, you may notice that the pattern does not do what you expect, or that part of the pattern has pin holes closer together than other parts, or that shapes within the pattern get distorted. These effects vary according to the underlying grid.

The simplest grid is to take a conventional grid (either Torchon or Bucks Point) and distort it so that it forms a circle. The centre of the circle has the pin holes impossibly close together, but this doesn't matter, as for a fan, you don't use the very centre of the circle, only a strip round the outside. This type of grid is similar to a roundel. For a fan, you only need to use part of this, perhaps 120° or 180°. The advantage of this grid is that the pattern looks similar to a normal strip of lace, just distorted in a way that is fairly simple to understand. The disadvantage is that pinholes on the inner edge are closer together than normal, while pin holes round the edge are further away. This can become quite serious if you have a broad fan, without much gap in the centre. Pattern 246 is an example of this type of grid - se photo at the top of this page.

Another approach is to start with a circular mat. This is similar to a square mat except it is distorted into a circle. You can take part of such a grid to make a fan. See pattern 247:

Bobbin lace fan

This has pinholes equal distance at the inner and outer edge. It does, however, produce rather odd effects within the pattern, as one part is the 'corner' of the original mat. This has been distorted so that no corner is apparent and the edge is smooth, but when working the pattern, you must be aware that it falls into two different parts, and the first half completed before starting the second.

I have experimented with other grids, trying to avoid the close pin holes of the distorted strip, as well as the odd working of the circular mat. Pattern 248 uses one of these:

Bobbin lace fan

This is indeed worked as a strip rather than part of a mat, but it has equal(ish) pin holes. However, it isn't an equal width shape! It is slightly fatter in the centre. This could be a problem.

If you are wondering how a strip can avoid the 'too close pin holes' problem, then here are a couple of clues - this grid used a diagonal start rather than the horizontal start of the 'bent round strip' grid, and also this grid has less pin holes along the inner edge than the outer edge. The 'bent round strip' grid has the same number. This grid certainly distorts the shapes near the start and end.




Picture of pillow

Here is rather an eccentric idea which seems to work. The problem with a fan pattern is that it changes direction. The white bit above is a polystyrene base of a pizza! I washed it, cut it in two and put the two halves together. The fan pattern neatly fitted on top. Then I put the pizza base on a normal pillow (I used a block pillow because it was flat.) The pins go in the pizza base, and if the points end up in the normal pillow then it doesn't matter. The bobbins rest on the normal pillow. There are a couple of pins holding the pizza base in position on the normal pillow. When the bobbins start to hang awkwardly (as the pattern curves round), then it is easy to lift the couple of pins holding the pizza base in place, then moving it round and repinning it. In fact, if you put one pin at the centre of the circle of the fan, then you can swivel the pattern round using that pin. The pattern's pins, threads and bobbins are not disturbed too much. No pins came out and no bobbins unwound themselves, or dragged on the pattern.


A different approach

So far, I have assumed that the start of the design is at one end of the fan, and you work across to the other end. There is another approach. You can treat each piece of lace between the sticks as a separate panel, to be worked and stuck on separately. That means that the lace can be worked the other way up, so you can have a much bigger fan (but of course it involves more work). See pattern 311 for an example of this.

Picture of lace
Whole fan

Picture of lace
One panel