When you start to design your first lace pattern, don't be too elaborate. It is tempting to visualise a complicated pattern, but you might fall into all sorts of problems, and then you might give up right away!
This is the lace from my first lace design:
I had visited the Salisbury Museum (UK), which had a display of Downton lace, which has many Torchon design elements. I was particularly intrigued by the hearts. It was obviously how they were worked - a short zigzag - but I wanted to try working them, and didn't have a pattern. So I made one!
I started with the grid.
I think I used graph paper (it was a long time ago!) but click here for a wide choice of grids. You need a Square grid, and lines. Choose the size you'd like - this one is Medium.
So I started with a footside. This is a straight line, through the dots. (By the way, I'm putting the pattern across the page, rather than downwards, as you work it. It doesn't matter which way you design lace, as long as you know which way to work it!)
Traditional patterns don't bother to put in the passive of the footside, but I do, so I don't forget it! The passive pairs of a footside are odd. They don't go through any dots at all. Instead they go near the edge footside line:
Now to make the heart. Remember that I'd never seen a pattern of a heart! But I guessed... I filled in the squares made by the lines between the dots until I had something which looked like a heart. There was a bit of fiddling around, but this was what I came up with:
Note that I made it in the middle rather than starting at one end. After all, we haven't yet decided where to start the lace. And starting in the middle stops me falling off one end by mistake.
Add more hearts either side. You can see what I meant about falling off the ends...
Now for the other edge. It could be a headside, of course, but footsides are easy, so let's make it an insertion, with a double footside. The upper line mustn't go through any part of the hearts, of course.
And the passive for the upper footside:
You could work that pattern. But let's tidy it up a bit (since this is on the computer). Rub out everything outside the footsides:
And I don't like those cut-off hearts at start and finish:
You could make the whole thing longer, if you had more grid, of course! That's the point of designing your own pattern - make it as long or short as you want.
That solid pink area is cloth stitch. You don't need the lines and dots inside. You do need the dots round the outside of the heart, though.
Turn it round the way you'll work it:
Now go and look at pattern 32! The only thing that is added is how many pairs there are to work this pattern, and where they should start. For a horizontal start (which this is), you will need two pairs at each starting pin. How many starting pins are there in this pattern? There are six pins, but you can see that while there is a pin on the left footside edge, there is no pin on the right footside edge. It would actually be truer to say that there are 6 1/2 starting pins! (There is no such thing as half a pin, of course. But it means you will need to add a pin there, for the single pair which starts the footside edge.) So you need at least 13 pairs to work this pattern, but you need a couple more. The footside passives have been ignored, because they don't use pins. So the total count is 15 pairs.
That bobbin count sounds complicated. I must admit that when I started designing lace, I had no idea how many bobbins any pattern needed. I would start at the top, wind and hang a pair from the first pin, and as I needed more pairs to make the next row of stitched, I added them. Every Torchon ground stitch needs two pairs coming in to this pin from pins above. The heart needs two pairs at the start, and has an extra pair joining at each row, until it starts getting less again. You'll soon find out if you have too few or too many, pairs to work the lace! Too few - add a pair at this pin. Too many, remove a pair. I made many pieces of lace this way, and it wasn't until a lot later that I worked out the principles of how many bobbins. Click here for more about this.
This pattern is a very simple one, but it works. The next step is to think about how it could be improved. For example, are the hearts too close to the footsides? Perhaps the hearts shouldn't touch? How about smaller hearts rather than big ones? Perhaps a different ground, for more interest? Could we think about colour? Here is my second pattern:
As you can see, I decided on a more interesting ground - triangle ground. But that led to problems. A unit of triangle ground uses 4 pairs of bobbins, 2 pairs on each side. If I used the bigger heart, the triangles didn't fit. I could have added some Torchon ground along the bottom, to fill in the gap. (You'll get used to using Torchon ground, or the other simple grounds, such as Bucks Point net to "fill in the holes" in your patterns!) But I decided on a different solution - use a smaller heart. The hearts don't touch any more, either. The passive footsides are a different colour as well - always an easy way to add a different colour to your pattern! The resulting pattern is pattern 33.
So where do you go from here? It depends on your own confidence. On this website, there is an automated interactive lace designer, where you can drop elements into a pattern and they will either work, or the designer will tell you that they don't fit! It can't make every possible lace design, but it's a good and quick way of coming up with patterns.
Or there is the Lace design kit. You print off and cut out lots of lace element shapes, such as bits of ground and solid shapes, headsides and footsides. Then you try fitting them together, like a jigsaw, until you come up with something you like. Those kits give you hints as to what will fit with what.
Perhaps you would like to make a pattern from an existing bit of lace? That means that you know that the lace is possible to work before you start - all you have to do is figure out the pattern!
Or perhaps - you just starting looking carefully at lace, and lace patterns, and come up with ideas of your own. Possibly you can start changing existing patterns slightly, changing cloth stitch to half stitch (or the other way round), or altering the type of ground. Then you get more adventurous and change more. It might help you to read about some principles of designing Torchon lace.
That gives you several different ways of getting started. It doesn't matter which you use, or how tentative you are, or how bold. Have a go! If you make mistakes, then you'll learn from them. In fact, I have learned far more about lace from what I did wrong (then worked out how to put right) then I ever did by just following someone else's pattern. And when it goes right - well! Making bobbin lace is fun. But designing your own pattern, and working it - that is something else!
© Jo Edkins 2017 - return to lace index