Maltese bobbin lace … What comes to mind when you think of it? Perhaps watching your great grandmother working lace when you were a child, perhaps listening to stories about where your mother’s most prized tablecloth came from, memories of hawkers at Gozo selling their lace products or images of British royalty wearing our Bizzilla. Even as lace-making slowly and silently fades into our cultural history, we all have some story to tell or some experience to share.
St Jeanne Antide Foundation’s SOAR service launched a project in late 2019 called A Stitch in Time, to bring women together, especially women who have faced difficult life circumstances such as poverty, depression and domestic violence. In collaboration with Hajja, a social enterprise run by Bibiche Rath, a number of weekly sessions were held where the participants of the project learned new bobbin lace stitches, documented their progress, shared their lace stories and memories, shared jokes and laughter and learned about the cultural history behind the lace. Each session provided a safe space for an exchange to be made: sharing and learning, dotted with moments of calm silence broken only by the relaxing chime of the wooden bobbins knocking each other as they were worked.
Maltese bobbin lace can teach you a lot about life and about yourself
It tests you, to see how you deal with making mistakes.
It tries your patience, tauntingly only showing you where your bad stitch is 20 minutes and 2 rows later.
It teaches you perseverance and resilience as you are faced with the choice to either leave the mistake in, like a permanent blemish and reminder that your piece is flawed, or to undo the work, understand what you did wrong and redo it.
It helps you be self-compassionate, because even though you feel frustrated that you made a mistake and need to unravel rows of work, you learn to be kind to yourself, to acknowledge that you are only human, and humans err. Making mistakes is a part of life that we learn important lessons from.
Finally, it gives you that sense of accomplishment and with it comes a sense of appreciation for the precious hard work that goes into such a small piece of lace that you and others make.
Maltese bobbin lace (and friendship) truly are priceless.
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck our islands, the project was threatened by the lockdown. The group couldn’t meet every Monday to work lace anymore because of the risk of infection. So two months into the sessions, SOAR was faced with the possibility of being forced to end the project. As everyone self-isolated they needed to find a remote solution to keep up the contact with each other.
Soon enough a way was found to make the project work, by using recorded tutorials, a whatsapp group for the project, and Zoom. All participants had a smart phone, through which they could all participate in a Zoom video call. The Arts Council Malta were very understanding and supported the necessary budget changes to accomodate this shift.
Mobile phone holders with flexible necks were purchased and supplied to all participants including the tutor, to free up hands to work the lace while chatting and following the tutor on Zoom.
Some participants needed coaching on downloading and using whatsapp and Zoom. The tutor had never made video tutorials and being on Zoom as a group took some getting used to. Most participants did not have the materials they needed like the threads, additional bobbins, the pillows, pins and the patterns to make new stitches. Bibiche from Hajja painstakingly prepared and made special Bizzilla Boxes with all the necessary supplies, measuring out different threads for different stitches and organising them with colour codes. Then she made personal deliveries across Malta to get them to the participants!
The challenges were many, but together they were overcome. The need to reach out to the participants, even more so as they isolated themselves for their own safety, was the driving force to find a solution. The sessions were originally meant to bring women together, to promote good mental health and to combat social exclusion – and never were those aims more meaningful than in the middle of a global pandemic. Our Arts Council Malta project monitor gave us some great feedback, hailing it as an example of best practice. Ms Annalisa Schembri commented on the “intelligent way the project was Covid-proofed, by pivoting online and acting in an agile way to adapt to the current scenario.”
Difficult and challenging times show the significance of working together and being innovative. It was nothing other than the resilience of the women that brought a historical, artistic, cultural craft to meet modern day technology.
This project was supported by the President’s Award for Creativity and the Arts Council Malta.
Are you part of similar projects that women would like to know about? If yes we’d love to hear about it! Contact us or send us an email at [email protected]
