Lace with Zig-zags and Diamonds

Narrow zig-zags

When I was writing my interactive lace designer, I tested it by designing little pieces of lace. I found this pattern so attractive that I decided to work it, and here is the result. The designer makes patterns on the slant for technical reasons.

There are cloth fans and twisted fans as headside, and two very thin cloth stitch bars. Next to the twisted footside, there is one stitch of triangular ground with a couple of stitches of Torchon ground on either side.

One peculiarity of these narrow cloth bars is that they work different amounts of bobbins according to which way they are sloping, and which side the worker bobbins started. I used the same worker bobbins throughout (remember to wind lots of thread for these!). For each zigzag, on the zig (as it were), the workers cross 3 pairs one way and 4 pairs returning. But on the zag, they use 2 pairs one way and 3 pairs returning. You can just see that one slop is narrower than the other. However, it depends where the workers started at the beginning on the pattern, and it so happens that one bar has narrow zigs and wide zags, while the other has wide zigs and narrow zags. I think there would be a subtly different result if one of the workers had started on the other side. If you don't understand any of this, try working the lace, and you'll see what I mean.

16 pairs of bobbins

This pattern uses woad dyed thread (also see this pattern). The thread is much thicker than ordinary thread, so I had to enlarge the pattern from what is shown here. Some printers let you enlarge printed pictures at the point of printing them, which was what I used. Even though the pattern was big, you can see that the result has ended up quite tightly woven. It is quite interesting to try different sizes of patterns with different thicknesses of thread and see what the results are.

This pattern has headsides on both edges. These are open fans. There are half stitch and cloth stitch zig-zags with some spiders, and Torchon ground filling in the gaps.

Contrasting zigzags can look like multiple 'Z's rather than two strands wound round each other, which is what they are supposed to look like. The first pattern on this page tried another way, by having one zigzag on top of the other, but the bottom one ends up looking like hearts. So here is another attempt, more successful, I think. The two strands, half stitch and cloth stitch, are wound unevenly. Sometimes there is a big gap between them, room enough for a spider. Sometimes there is a small gap, with only room for one ground stitch.

22 pairs of bobbins.

This is a similar pattern to the previous, but uses more bobbins.

This pattern has cloth footsides on both edges. There are half stitch and cloth stitch zig-zags with some spiders, and rose ground filling in the gaps. The rest is Torchon ground, with some triangular ground for additional interest.

30 pairs of bobbins.

This pattern is simple apart from the border (and that isn't hard).

There are cloth diamonds, slightly offset to make them more interesting, and Torchon ground. The edges are my rose ground border. This is a straight line of rose ground, with some Torchon ground stitches to fill the gaps. I'm not sure if it's a headside or a footside. You can have a passive before the edge if you want, but I left that out here, and it's still strong. I did twist the threads and extra time when they get to the edge, though, to strengthen it.

This edge produces a slightly weird effect of square holes along the edge - quite attractive I think, although I didn't expect it!

I also tried working the diamonds in a different way. Normally you have one pair of workers for the whole diamond. These have to change direction at the end of every row, and this means that you can have problems tightening the lace. An alterative way of working the diamonds is to change the workers in each row. As you bring each pair in, make it the worker for the next row. When reducing the size of the diamond, drop off the worker pair of the previous row, and use the next pair in as the next worker. This technique is the same as the alternate way of working a strip. If you don't understand any of this, don't mind - just do normal diamonds!

20 pairs of bobbins.

I designed this pattern to use some thread dyed with woad. It is said that the Ancient British painted themselves with woad before going into battle, so I tried a pattern of stripes and dots which would invoke that idea. Not quite sure if I succeeded! I bought the woad-dyed threads here.

This pattern uses strips and diamonds with Torchon ground. The Torchon ground is twisted twice rather than just once between each stitch. The points of the diamond are left out to make them more like dots. The other original idea is that there is no footside. The edge is merely a simple pair of threads, twisted three times (rather than twice like the rest of the ground). This does make a firm edge, but not necessarily a very straight one.

8 pairs of bobbins.

This is a very simple pattern as I wished to experiment with different types of diamonds. The start is perhaps a little tricky. See the diagram on the right. Hang the pairs of bobbins as shown. Half of the bobbins will travel downwards on the right. The other half go across the top of the pattern, and then downwards on the left. Make sure that the pairs going in opposite directions loop round each other, or the two halves will separate at the top when the pins are taken out. The end is finished off in a similar way, with the threads eventually meeting along a similar line, and then knotted together (and I've made a bit of a mess of it - see above, right!)

This pattern has headsides on both edges. These are open fans. In between are different types of diamonds. In order, from left to right, ground half stitch, normal half stitch, Gravenmoer diagonal half stitch, cloth stitch normal, double ground half stitch, ground cloth stitch, double ground cloth stitch, Gravenmoer diagonal half stitch (not done very well!), Gravenmoer diagonal clothstitch.

14 pairs of bobbins.

This is also simple. There are just two types of diamond, Gravenmoer diagonal half stitch diamond and normal half stitch diamond. Superficially, they look the same, but look carefully, and you will see the there is a thread going one way for the Gravenmoer, and the other for the ordinary half-stich. Otherwise, there is twisted footside and Torchon ground. The Torchon ground helps to keep the threads coming out of the diamonds straight.

14 pairs of bobbins.

The original different diamonds pattern was rather haphazard, so this one does the different diamonds in a more logical order. There is twisted footside and Torchon ground. The Torchon ground helps to keep the threads coming out of the diamonds straight. The diamonds, in order, from the top:

17 pairs of bobbins.