Lace with Serpent Edging

Serpent - equal wiggles

I visited the Cecil Higgins Art gallery in Bedford, which holds the Thomas Lester Lace collection. One of the pieces there had an interesting edging. I have tried to reproduce it in this piece. Now, I have not done much Bedford lace, so please don't think that this is an authentic design!

The edging is a serpent headside, a simple piece of cloth stitch, but when you work it, you need to turn the cushion one way, then the other, so the bobbins will always hang down. This means that you need a cushion where you can work it from any angle. There is one pair of worker bobbins, so you need to wind lots and lots of thread for these! The other bobbins tend to be taken in from one side, and then leave the other side to make the cross pieces, which are simple twisted threads. You may notice on the photo that to start with there are five cross pairs for each loop. However, later I cut this down to four cross pairs. This left an extra pair to pad out the turn, which I think makes it look better. That's the way that the pattern is given, anyway. It also stops the cross threads running right across the pattern all the time, which I also prefer.

There is a single pair from the edging to the main part of the design, and a single pair to the footside. The rest of the design is plaits joined with lazy joins.

22 pairs

Serpent - equal wiggles

This is an extension of the same idea. Here, the serpentine edging has unequal wiggles. The pair of threads joining them was just twisted in the previous pattern, and were all parallel to each other. Here, some of them cross over in a simple Torchon Ground stitch, and the rest slope to produce a more interesting design (or at least I think so!)

The rest of the pattern is a fairly straight-forward Torchon design of a half stitch diamond, with cloth stitch half diamond either side. One pair of bobbins from the headside leave to join this cloth stitch, and then return to it again. To balance this, there is an extra pair of bobbins on the other side of the diamond, next to the twisted footside. You could leave this out, if you want, and then the number of pairs will be 20 rather than 21. The other non-orthodox part of the pattern is the straight edges running parallel to the footside. These require extra pin-holes, but are easy to work. The straight edge and the extra pair of bobbins give a different feel to this pattern.

On the headside, the pinholes should probably be picots. However, I dislike picots as I find them fiddly, so I just twisted the worker pair twice and put the pin in. This gives the 'loopy' feel without the work! But if you're more patient than me, by all means make them picots instead. For the straight edges of the rest of the pattern, I didn't twist the worker pair at all when putting the pin in, so the loops are much smaller if there at all.

Remember that this headside requires working due left, then down, then due right, like the previous pattern. This means that you must have a cushion that you can turn from one side to the other.

21 pairs