Wavy Lace

I bought this piece of lace because I liked the way the threads waved up and down. It is however rather ugly, with coarse threads and a distinctly confused idea of which thread goes where. I thought it would be fun to design a Torchon pattern based on the same idea. Josette Martin-Favelier, from Rully, Bourgogne, France has told me: This lace attracted my eye, because it looks very much like the peasant lace that is sometimes "Free Hand Lace" (i.e. without any pricking and with just a few pins on both sides) that can be found in Europe. The thread being coarse and the threads not following a certain regular pattern could be explained by the fact these laces were made "by heart", some of them being either "perfect" or regular, or if the lace maker was a beginner or less clever, they contained a certain amount of mistakes.

I didn't get anywhere with this design until I treated the 2 pairs of wavy threads (dark blue in the pattern) as a sort of gimp, not part of the Torchon pattern proper, but weaving through part of the net.

The yellow and pink bits are in cloth stitch. The pink things are made with 6 pairs of threads, in two groups. You weave them through each other, like half a spider. (I haven't marked these threads in the pattern as it would look too confused). Then you weave pairs of threads through, with a triple twist in the middle. (These are marked in the pattern.) The pins marked are not covered, they are just there to help tighten the threads after the cloth stitch. When you've finished all the pairs of threads going through, weave the 3 pairs of threads back through the other 3, like the other half of the spider. Generally in this pattern, give the pairs of threads an extra twist if they have to cover an extra distance, like the base and edge of the fans.

This pattern has an attractive part twisted fan headside.

With single twisted footside, this takes 17 pairs of bobbins.

The previous pattern was an attempt to mirror the original as closely as possible. This pattern puts in more net each side of the pattern. This stops the pattern and the fans from interfering with each other. Also, the fans are shifted along a bit so they are centred on the pink things rather than bracketing it. This looks more attractive, but has wandered considerably from the original. Still, I like it. It uses 21 pairs of bobbins.

It's strange that the best part of the original lace, the wavy threads, have got lost, while the fans and the other things (which I think look like flying saucers!) have improved. It might help if you made the wavy threads (dark blue on the pattern) a different colour to contrast with the white.