Cattern Lace

It’s been a while since I updated here on the Lacemakers of Tomorrow initiative but that’s not to say that things haven’t been happening!

Myself and Caroline West (@englishlacemaker on Instagram) established the initiative earlier this year to address the declining number of lace teachers in the UK, something which has contributed to bobbin lacemaking being categorised as Endangered on the 2025 Heritage Crafts Red List.

We’ve so far run a series of successful webinars which are now available to view on our You Tube channel This includes our recent series ‘A Life in Lace’ (which is continuing into the autumn) where we talk to established lace teachers about their experience. We’ve spoken to Andrea Gaskell and Sue Smith already, and future conversations will be with Louise West, Jane Atkinson, Doreen Creed, Claire Bonito and Alexandra Stillwell. Having this digital archive of lacemakers and teachers sharing their advice and guidance will be invaluable now and in the future and we’re so grateful for everyone for giving up their time to be involved.

At the start of the initiative, we surveyed new and aspiring lace teachers to establish what would be most useful and two key themes emerged – a digital community and mentoring support. To address the former, we’ve set up a Discord community which is building in numbers and provides a useful space for discussion and resource sharing.

For the latter, we applied for funding via Heritage Craft’s Endangered Craft Fund to set up a mentoring scheme and we were delighted to be successful in our application! Our initiative is voluntary so this funding will go directly to mentors for their time and expertise. We’ve had a great response from experienced lace teachers who are keen to become a mentor to pass on their knowledge, advice and skills to the next generation of lace teachers. We will soon be opening applications for new and aspiring UK-based lace teachers who wish to be matched with a mentor and will be sharing the successes and learning from the programme on our new website: www.lacemakersoftomorrow.co.uk

We’re so excited to see how the initiative grows and develops – if we can help to support the development of even a handful of new lace teachers, we’ll be over the moon! I’ll continue to share updates here but you can also get in touch via hello@lacemakersoftomorrow.co.uk