Lace with Celtic Knots

One of my other interests is Celtic knots so I thought I'd experiment with trying to make Celtic knots in lace. Here are the results.

Plait
Motif
Complex Plait
Small knot
Four way plait
Celtic cross
Celtic knot with trails
Weaving pattern

Plait

This is some attempts to reproduce Celtic knots in Torchon lace (sort of). The strands of the knot are cloth stitch with Torchon ground and twisted footside. I chose a simple background to set off the knot, and also so I didn't have to concentrate on too many things at once. The main problem is the flat sides. There are extra pinholes to take the worker thread, but the working can look a bit thin at times. You also must be careful when the threads in the cloth stitch divide at the top to produce the two halves of the top strand. You must get the right number on both sides. I didn't and had to undo quite a bit to get one pair of bobbins going the other way. Torchon tends to be unforgiving about this - you can't tidy the extra pair away and hope no-one notices it. There are only two pairs of bobbins in the vertical bit, although extra pairs come in from, and leave, both sides. If you get it wrong, then you have the wrong number of pairs at the end of this bit. It might be easier to work the knot the other way up, as then you don't get the divide. The flat top and bottom is less of a problem. There are pin holes there. You can either put in pins to make sure the threads are in the right place, or just leave them out and have the threads handing from the previous pins (or at the bottom, going to the next pins).

These problems do make some inelegancies when you look closely at the lace. However, from a distance this plait is quite clear.

20 pairs

Motif

This is a simpler motif, using the same stitches, but with a half stitch diamond. Again, you have the divide problem. What I do at the divide is to work one worker pair right across. Then I figure out which bobbins should go where. The pin doesn't go there, but one along, as the new second pair of worker bobbins must go round the pin and across in the opposite direction. Another way of doing the divide is to firmly put the pin in first, take one pair of workers half way across, and then work that with the new second worker round the pin, so they end up going in opposite directions. Or I suppose, you could start the old worker pair and the new worker pair from both sides simultaneously towards the middle, have them go round the pin, and then go back on their separate ways. Whatever you do, you must find a new worker pair from somewhere! One of these lace problems with more than one solution.

20 pairs again. I worked all these knots on one strip, in fact.

Complex Plait

This is a more complicated Celtic knot. There is one strand made of half stitch which goes through the whole knot. Then there are two other strands looped round it. Both these are cloth stitch. Of course, you could make the whole thing in cloth stitch or half stitch, or swap the half stitch and cloth stitch round.

One thing about these designs is that you cannot work one piece of cloth stitch (or half stitch) at a time. You keep finding that there is one pair of threads that needs to leave the pattern, and cross with another pair, that has to return to it. So you work part of one piece, leave that, do part of another piece, then return to the first. Make sure you know where you are!

Again, perhaps this design looks better from a distance.

20 pairs

Small knot

This is a Celtic knot with a very thin strand, made of cloth stitch. I wasn't even convinced that this would work, but it does, just! However, I left out all flat edges, and worked only on the slope. The thinner strand means that this is a slightly more complicated knot than a plait.

20 pairs.

Four way plait

This is a different way of doing a Celtic knot. Rather than keeping it within footsides as an insertion, I've made the edges into fans (rather flat but they are there). However, the fans are continued on both sides to produce one of the strands. This means that you can have four wide strands while the lace only takes 16 pairs of bobbins. Like all these knots, it's best viewed through half closed eyes. It is easy to work, but you find that you continually have to stop one strand while you work another, as the Torchon ground stitch between them requires both strands at the same level.

16 pairs.

Celtic cross

This is a more ambitious project. Celtic crosses can have complex Celtic knots on them, and I wanted to reproduce this. It occurred to me that you could work a cross in four parts. I've marked on the diagram where these parts are. I wound my bobbins and hung them from the pins in the middle of the cross, then worked on one arm of the cross. I finished that arm, cut off the bobbins, rewound them with more thread which had been threaded through the centre holes of the first arm (using a needle), so the bobbins for the second arm were connected to the first. (This was far harder than I thought, and as you can see, I made rather a mess of it.) Each of the arms was worked in turn, so the bobbins were rewound four times. (OK, I could have knotted them together, but I wanted to avoid extra knots in the design, and it would have made the threading through the holes even trickier.) Still, the basic idea worked, and anyone is welcome to develop the idea.

The design uses a double strand. This has the advantage that you can pack the threads closer together, so there isn't that annoying Torchon ground stitch, which means you keep heaving to work half a rectangle of cloth stitch, then half of the next door rectangle, then the Torchon ground stitch, then the second halves, as in the previous pattern. On the other hand, the basic strand is very narrow, which means that the pattern itself is not very clear. (If I had made the strand thicker then there would have been too many bobbins for my liking).

Another problem with the thin strand is that if I had worked it in an obvious fashion, there would have been no threads left to turn the corner at the edge. So I introduced a couple of extra pairs of threads on each side. If you look closely at the pattern, you will see dark green lines at the edge. These are not pairs of threads twisted, like the rest of the pattern. They are two pairs of threads, plaited as legs. This gives enough threads for the cloth stitch at the edge (two pairs of passives and a worker pair).

The single pairs of threads joining the cloth stitch are twisted three times, to push the strands as far apart as possible.

22 pairs. Each arm is worked separately.

Celtic knot with trails

This is another way to do Celtic knots. The previous methods have relied on Torchon solid areas. These work in the body of the lace, but there are problems at the edges. This pattern uses trails instead. Four pairs of bobbins are used for each strand of the Celtic knot. One pair is the worker pair (and so needs a lot more thread wound on). The strands cross, of course. Originally I planned to combine the threads with the crossing trail on one side, while losing them at the other, but this didn't work. So instead the bobbins of one strand work across all of the bobbins of the other strand. The legs are plaited with a pin at begin and end of each leg, to persuade it to go in the right place. I worked the two pairs of one leg across the other four pairs (of the other strand), then brought the worker pair back to do two rows between the legs, then work the other two pairs of the other leg across.

Sometimes a pin was used in more than one way, so there was a certain amount of looping of threads round pins already in place! Most of the work is just cloth stitch, of course, but it wasn't too boring to work.

16 pairs.

Weaving pattern

This is a simpler pattern since I ignored the wrap round at the edges altogether. This makes it easier to design, but ends up being a weaving pattern rather than a true Celtic knot. It uses half stitch diamonds, and two strands in each weave.

When you start a diamond, after the first stitch, you have a choice as to which pair you use as the worker. This controls which direction you go in. With half stitch, you don't, of course, have a worker pair as such, but you still need to decide on the direction of the row. With rectangles, it is a good idea to decide on a direction at the start, and always use that, as it makes the rectangles all the same size. This isn't as easy as saying left or right in each case, as the rectangles slope different ways. rather you must always start the second row heading towards the longer side (which means that the rectangles will be fatter) or towards the shorter side. In this case, I mostly tried to make the rectangles fatter. There is one, near the bottom, where I got it wrong!

There are also parts of rectangles near the edge. With the pinholes drawn, there are less pinholes round the outside of these part-rectangles than the inner edges. So for these, always work towards the inner edge for the second row, or you will run out of pinholes! If you prefer, you can put an extra pinhole at the very edge of the lace instead.

18 pairs.

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