Letters are made of lines, some slanting but a lot are horizontal or vertical (straight across or up and down). Lace designs like slanting, but don't like vertical or horizontal lines. Torchon lace has a limit to how wide you can make it, as well. All this makes letters a challenge!
Here, I have the letters out of 'pixels' which are small diamonds. You can work these in half stitch or cloth stitch as you please.
Here are designs for all the letters. You may ask, why are the letters going downwards rather than across? The reason for this is that letters are quite complicated shapes, and making them out of diamonds ends up with a wide design. Letters are taller than they are wide, so writing them downwards like this does mean that they take up less room, and so use less bobbins. This strip uses 20 pairs, and in fact, the letters only take 14 pairs. The rest are the edge of the pattern. However, this does mean that the letters end up very narrow. Some of the letters are perhaps not very good (especially M, N and W!)
Pattern 139 has an example, with photograph and instructions, using some of these vertical letters.
Click here for a second version of the alphabet where the letters are the 'proper' way up.
© Jo Edkins 2017 - return to lace index