Because it's fun, and easier than you might think!
Once you start making lace seriously, you will probably want new patterns regularly, to try something new, for a special project, or just to stop getting bored with the same old patterns. There are patterns available in books, or you can buy them online, but that costs money! There are quite a few free patterns available on this website (click here), but you may get bored with those, or not like them.
If you design your own patterns, you can have as many patterns as you like, for free. You can also design patterns exactly the way you want them. You can choose (roughly) how many bobbins it uses. You can choose what shape it is, whether it's conventional headside/footside, an insertion, a double headside, or a more complicated shape. You may want to include a particularly subject, such as a heart, or animal, or flower, but you can't find any pattern that you like.
You may have a lace pattern that you quite like, but want to change some of it, or possibly take one element from one pattern and combine it with parts of another pattern. Do you dislike half stitch diamonds because it "muddles up the pairs of bobbins"? Are you bored with fan headsides? Or, as a correspondent told me, "I've done enough bookmarks - I want to try something different." If you design your own patterns, you can make a pattern which is as easy, or as hard, as you want, and carry on making lots of different patterns, just as easy, or harder and harder!
Once you start designing your own lace, then you will find other reasons to continue. You will acquire a new skill, and in doing so, you will learn more about working lace, and the nature of bobbin lace itself. Several lacemakers have told me that they like my wiggly lace but that came about simply because when designing lace, I started wondering what would happen if corners went alternate directions rather than always turning to same way (as when trimming the edge of a mat). It's really a very simple idea.
The more adventurous you become, the more of a challenge it becomes, not only designing the lace, but figuring out how to work it. Most lacemakers regard a new pattern as a potential challenge, I suspect, and this is even more so when you make your own pattern. I have tried to copy an existing pattern, and ended up with a pattern which was physically impossible to work! Still, after trying this and that, I figured out why, and that means I learned something, and that was useful later in some other context. (It was pattern 192, if you're interested. There are three versions on that page, and I haven't included the one that was impossible!)
You may now be worried that this is going to be all too complicated for you. But I must emphasise that it is up to you how adventurous you are. You can start with something very basic and simple, easy to design, easy to work. But once you have done it, it is your pattern, and it is such a great feeling to watch it appearing the other side of the pins, as you are working it. When it is finished, you can spread it out and admire it, knowing that perhaps no-one has ever seen that pattern before. This is not a copy of someone else's lace. This is the original!
Then you can design one or two more, and gain more confidence as you go. Perhaps one of your designs doesn't work very well, but that teaches you something to think about for the future. Gradually you start designing patterns which are different to anything you've seen, or make patterns based on lace you've seen and liked. Then you can start to set yourself design puzzles, or try to make something really different... But perhaps you don't - perhaps you just stick to tried and tested techniques. Your choice! But you will never be short of a lace pattern to work again.
You can also design lace for a specific requirement, such as a wedding garter, so that the pattern and size and complexity suit you (and the recipient). You don't just choose from what's available, you make your own design, and that adds so much value to the gift.
© Jo Edkins 2017 - return to lace index