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Rosa Ena Torruella, whose home is now Jacksonville, was taught by her
grandmother in Puerto Rico to make traditional bobbin lace. In Puerto
Rico bobbin lace is called mundillo (“little world”), in reference
to the cylinder apparatus used to produce the material. Torruella was
born in Caguas, Puerto Rico, in 1935, and grew up in a household that
included two other children, her parents, and her mother’s two brothers
and seven sisters. Much of her time was spent in the home of her paternal
grandmother, who was born in Spain. Her grandmother said that Rosa Ena
could thread a needle by the time she was two. Some of her earliest memories
are of returning from school to spend the afternoon sitting with her grandmother
and making lace.
Bobbin lace is typically used for fancy clothing or very fine home decorations,
which are only brought out for special occasions. Entire table cloths
can be made of the lace, but heavy duty thread must be used for such pieces.
More delicate lace decorates baby bonnets and the bodices of dresses.
Torruella recently used bobbin lace to embellish the bodice of a wedding
dress.
To make bobbin lace, one begins by creating the lace pattern with pin
points on a small strip of stiff paper. Then one “connects the dots”
by drawing the pattern with a pen. The drawn pattern is attached to the
cylinder (mundillo) with straight pins. The cylinder is covered with velvet
and mounted on a wooden stand with notches around the rim, one for each
wooden bobbin of thread. To determine how many pairs of bobbins are needed
to make a particular lace pattern, one counts the number of strands (pen
lines) in the newly drawn pattern. Each line in the lace is made with
one pair of bobbins; 16 lines of lace with a border line would require
18 pairs of bobbins. Each bobbin is approximately 4-1/2 inches long, the
diameter of a pencil and is hand-wound with about 4 yards of thread. To
“sew” the lace, one must cross two bobbins, twist the thread
and repeat the process. Each pair of bobbins can be separated off and
anchored in place with hat pins, when not being held.
Torruella has an extraordinary knowledge of the history of bobbin lace
and of variations in technique and style in different regions of Puerto
Rico. In earlier years she worked with the Puerto Rican Museum of History,
Archeology and Anthropology to document this tradition. She also excels
in several other kinds of needlework indigenous to Puerto Rico, including
fagoting, hair pin lace, and drawn work (“randa” and “calado”).
These crafts simply require a needle and thread, as opposed to the mundillo
for bobbin lace.
— Elizabeth Higgs
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