Pattern 143 had two butterflies along one edge. I wanted more butterflies!
Pattern:
Bobbins: 12 pairs (2 blue, 2 green, 8 white)
Style: Torchon
Stitches:
half stitch
cloth stitch
cloth stitch and twist
twist pair
Details:
cloth scallop headside (yellow and green)
Torchon ground (grey)
joining shapes horizontally
Description:
Follow the links above for explanation of how to work the different parts of the lace. This pattern has an odd start. It is straight across, but it starts in the middle of a scallop, so there is only one pair at each pin. This means that false pins are advisable.
Unlike pattern 143, here the butterflies are scallops. The cloth scallops are worked with cloth stitch rather than cloth stitch and twist, so they are more "filled in" than conventional scallops.
The cloth scallops are coloured with the worker pair in the normal way. However, the workers change colour in a different way. Rather than hiding the "wrong" colour at the edge (see pattern 143), here the worker pairs swap sides half way through the scallops. This is a double headside pattern, and since the scallops touch in the middle, you have to work half of the left-hand scallop, then half of the right-hand scallop, before you can work the stitch that joins them (see joining shapes horizontally). Normally the worker pairs would go round the pin and each other, and return to the side they started. Here, the pairs do just a single cloth stitch, then pin, so they are now on the opposite side. Since the workers are different colours, this swaps over the colours as well. Each butterfly is made up of two half scallops.
I am not sure if this works. Also, I am not sure whether my version has blue butterflies and green leaves, or blue and green butterflies! You could get different effects with different colours, or if one of the worker pair was the same as the background colour. There are also coloured pairs at the edge, which I have made the same as the worker pairs (so, two pairs of each colour). If you made them four different colours, and thought a bit about which pair was worker at any one time, you could get 4 colours of butterfly. Or perhaps you could give up the idea of butterflies, and just treat it as an intriguing pattern.
© Jo Edkins 2016 - return to lace index