Difference between bobbin and machine-made legs

Legs are lines which join parts of lace together. In bobbin lace, they are made with two pairs of threads worked with continuous half stitch on top of each other. This gives the effect of a plait of four threads.

The technical description of half stitch is CT, or cross, twist. For a description of how legs or plaits are made, with an animation, click here.

In this example, picots decorate the legs in this Bedforshire lace. The legs cross over in a Lazy Join or Windmill. Here each pair is treated as a single unit, so the four pairs of the join are treated as four threads would be normally. This disturbs the normal under and over, which is unusual for bobbin lace. For a description of how a Lazy Join is made, with an animation, click here.

Click here for the whole piece of lace.

In Bedfordshire lace, the legs are worked at the same time as the rest of the lace. This means that you can trace the individual threads travel through the legs and the shapes eithout a brek. The legs leave and enter the shapes smoothly, without a knot.

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In Honiton lace, the motifs, such as flowers or leaves) are made first, then joined together with legs afterwards. The advantage of this type of lace is that there are no limits to size, since more can be added, using more motifs and more legs, as you want.

In this example, you can see where the leg has started and end with knots, see top left and bottom left.

Although the legs are added after, they are made in the same way as the Bedfordshire legs, with coninuous half stich to make plaits.

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Bobbin lace mats may be worked in several pieces, from the inside outwards. This means that one circular strip needs to be added to the previous one. Sometimes they are sewn, in Bedfordshire lace, they are joined as they are worked with a sewing, done with a crochet hook. Here the cloth stich on the left has been joined to the legs on the right.

Click here for a description, with an animation, of how to link or join two pieces of lace, with a sewing done with a crochet hook.

Click here for the whole piece of lace.

Needle lace is made with a completely different technique to bobbin lace, using a needle (surprisingly enough!) The legs are made with buttonhole stitch over threads, which can be seen here. There is a different type of leg, without picots, just made by twisting thread round the basic thread.

This example has picots on the legs, made by looping the thread. But needle lace does not use pins, so the hole in the centre of the loop is less prominent.

The joins of the legs to the rest of the lace, or the cross-overs, are different to bobbin lace.

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Crochet is made with a completely different technique to bobbin lace, using a crochet hook. A crochet stitch consists of pulling a loop of thread through another loop, and this can be seen here, in the legs.

This example has picots on the legs, made by crochetting for a bit, then joining it back to the leg. This gives quite a heavy picot.

The joins of the legs to the rest of the lace are made with yet more crochet stitches, this time round a whole leg or part of the lace, rather than just a thread.

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This looks superficially like needle lace, but looking carefully at it, the apparent buttonhole stitch is in fact crochet stitches instead. The ridge is made of a 'fishbone' design, rather than the simple ridge of buttonhole stitch. The picots also are made the same way as the crochet example above.

This is an example of Irish crochet.

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The (separated) picots show that some of these are supposed to be legs. There is no sign of plaiting. The threads are held together by narrower threads, visible near the top.

There are different lines, top right and bottom left, which at least show evidence of the weaving effect. But they are not plaits. Instead there seem to be pairs of threads used as workers across a single pair of passives. I amo not sure whether these are supposed to be legs, or tallies! The cross-overs look odd as well, with threads going in various directions - not showing the neatness of the Lazy Join.

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This is an example of Schiffli or chemical machine lace. The pattern is embroidered onto fabric chemically treated so as to disintegrate after the pattern has been created. The end result looks rather fuzzy. This is a pattern of legs, and presumably the ball at the top is a picot.

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