Vocabulary & Materials | Stitches | Mundillo song for new students

In this section, you'll learn the techniques that are used to make bobbin (pillow) lace.

Techniques

The mundillo loom. Photo: Elena Martínez

The Bolillos
In bobbin lacemaking, a pillow called a loom holds the pattern and bobbins, forming a workplace for the tejedora (lacemaker). The bolillos (bobbins), pieces of wood about the size of a pencil, are wound with cotton thread. By twisting and crossing the threads stitches form a pattern. Each stitch is made with at least two pairs of bobbing (four threads) and held in place by pins.

The pattern is stenciled on graph paper and often made by the tejedora herself. Depending on the pattern, two dozen bobbins or hundreds of bobbins may be used. In addition to its use as edges and borders on clothing, collars for shirts, and handkerchiefs, at one time mundillo was also used to decorate items for special occasions such as wedding dresses, baptismal gowns, and the cloths used to adorn religious icons. It was also once common to give mundillo lace embroidered with romantic inscriptions as a gift to a lover.

Rosa Elena teaches her students and apprentices through a three-part process. First students learn the basic stitches: claro, brusela, zurcido. Intermediate students move on to more complicated stitches like araña, mosca, margarita, and almagro, which requires four pairs of bobbins instead of two. These stitches require more than just twisting and crossing the threads because the lacemaker has to pull and manipulate the thread to form a shape. Punta abierta (a zurcido-like stitch with an open row in the center) and punta bruja (a series of interconnecting margaritas) are also ore complicated stitches, combining one or more stitches. Advanced students start using these stitches in patterns to make handkerchiefs, collars, and baby booties.

Lace makers from Almagro in the province of Castilla, Spain. In the background, placed on chair, are additional lace pillows. Photo: Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America-NY, with thanks to Dr. Mitchell Codding and Constancio del Alamo.

The Loom
At one time the pillow used was a round or oval board placed on the knees of the tejedora. The looms that Rosa Elena and her students use consist of a wooden box with a revolving cylindrical pillow.

In Spain cylindrical pillows emerged because the Spanish style of bobbin lacemaking did not require the bobbins to remain flat on the pattern. Rosa Elena remembers her mother saying that although she used this cylindrical pillow, there was a time when her grandmother had used the flat pillow.

In Galicia, Spain lacemakers used a flattened pillow filled with straw and supported by two wooden dowels which could be leaned against a wall or put on a support so the lacemaker could work on it.

Looms in Puerto Rico were sometimes filled with dried plantain leaves. Photo: Elena Martínez

As a child Rosa Elena remembers some people using pillows that were filled with plantain leaves, or others, like herself, who would fill the pillow with old pieces of cloth. Today, she and other lacemakers use polyurethane foam.

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Mundillo Vocabulary & Materials

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Mundillo Song
Rosa Elena teaches this song to her new students so they can remember how to do the edges of a lace piece:

Rosa Elena uses a simple song to teach mundillo, but its simplicity belies a much larger tradition of spinning and weaving songs which are a genre of "work songs." Worksongs are among the oldest forms of folklore as Lithuanian folklorist Skirmantë Valiulytë describes,

They [worksongs] came into being when rudimentary manual labor was employed. As farm implements improved and the management of labor changed, many work songs were no longer suitable for accompanying the tasks and began to disappear. Many of the songs became divorced from the specific job and became lyrical songs on the subject of work to be sung at any time.

Work songs vary greatly in function and age. There are some very old examples, which have retained their direct relation with the rhythm and process of the work to be done. Later work songs sing more of a person's feelings, experiences and aspirations. The older work songs more accurately relate the various stages of the work to be done. They are categorized according to their purpose on the farm, in the home, and so on.

Spinning and weaving songs are the most important of the songs about work done in the home. The imagery of both is very similar and it is not always easy to distinguish one from the other. In spinning songs the main topic is the spinning itself, the spinner, and the spinning wheel. In some there are humorous references to the tow or the lazy spinners who have not mastered the art of spinning and weaving by the time they are to be married.

Some spinning songs are cheerful and humorous, while others resemble the milling songs which bemoan the woman's hard lot and longing for their homes and parents. These songs have characteristic melodies. There are also highly unique spinning sutartinës (polyphonic songs), typified by clear and strict rhythms. The texts describe the work process, while the refrains mimic the whirring of the spinning wheel.

The main imagery of weaving songs is the weaving process, the weaver, the loom, the delicate linens. Since the girls were usually weaving linens to fill their wedding trousseaux, the weaving process was highly poeticized. Weaving songs, like spinning songs, have no characteristic melodies associated with them.

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Stitches
Below is a list of mundillo stitches. They are listed in the order of how students learn them:

Claros		Claros are one of the basic stitches, and is a foundation for the more complicated stitches. Claros are usually used used to fill spaces between other, more ornate stitches.
Brusela		The Brussels, brusela, stitch is another basic stitch that is created by crossing pieces of thread over others. This stitch is very similar to zurcido.
Zurcido		Zurcido is a very tightly woven darning stitch. Although similar to brusela, zurcido is distinguished by the additional twist of the thread before it is crossed over another.
Araña		Araña is the spider stitch and is created through a a series of twisting and knotting stitches. Araña is the last stitch a beginner learns.
Mosca		Mosca is the first stitch students learn with Rosa Elena after they've mastered the first four. Although mosca is a bit easier to create than the margarita (daisy) stitch, it is still quite a leap in skill level. The tejadora must not only move the bobbins around each other, but move their hands around the loom to try to get the proper shape.
Margarita		Margaritas (daisies) are the most complicated stitches involving more than just twisting and pinning; one must create the petals by pulling and easing up on threads which are woven around each other.
Almagro		Almagro is different from most other stitches because whereas the others use two pairs of bobbins to make a stitch, almagro requires four pairs.
Cardoneta and Pelisco		These two stitches are created together. They are used to create decorative borders.