Good old lace

I picked the "Ostrich Plumes Fern" wrap back up last night and worked a bit more on it. (This is a very simple pattern - just the old Ostrich Plumes lace pattern worked over a couple repeats. You knit it until it's "long enough" or you run out of yarn)

I like the old stitch patterns. Part of it is, over time, I suppose patterns got winnowed down (like everything does, more or less), and the ones that work well, that look nice, and that are easy to memorize got kept, and the ones that weren't so good got discarded.

(This is actually reminiscent of Marva Dawn's argument about "praise songs" - that most of them are so recent they have not gone through the same sorting process that, say, 19th C. hymns did, and she cautioned worship leaders to be careful in their selection to make sure they don't select praise songs with "bad aesthetics" (and yeah, I've heard a few of those) or, worse, "bad theology." )

But anyway. I tried to think of all the "old" lace patterns I know a name for:

Feather and Fan

Old Shale (and yes, there are apparently differences between them, even though some use the terms interchangeably)

Print O' The Wave

Cat's Paw

Ostrich Plumes (which is similar to Feather and Fan, but each repeat offset 1/2 of a repeat)

Horseshoe

Razor shell (this may be somewhat similar to Old Shale in appearance; at least it is to me.)

There are some others here. One thing that strikes me is how many of the patterns are named from natural phenomena or objects - Print O' the Wave, shells, snowflakes (Cat's Paw, I have also seen called Snowflake...) I suppose people named things based on what they knew.

I admit, when I tend to think of "historic lace patterns," my mind first goes to the Shetland knitters and the Shetland lace patterns (I think most of the ones I listed above would be recognized by traditional Shetland knitters....) I suppose that's because it's what I've read the most about (Lace knitting was also big in parts of Russia, and there are Italian lace stitches that I presume came from Italy, and I suppose many cultures that had knitting had a form of lace knitting. And there is a tradition of German lace knitting; I know there are famous (and difficult!) doily patterns by Herbert Niebling).

Also, most of the lace patterns I've learned are Shetland lace, or at least lace stitches that seem common in British Isles lace knitting.

(There's an interesting short e-book out there - or maybe a monograph, not sure what I'd call it - by Elizabeth Lovick called Same but Different (n.b.: pdf file, will need to be downloaded), in which she compares Shetland patterns to Faeroese, Icelandic, Estonian, and Orenberg patterns. And she has knitting patterns for projects in it as well...)

One of the comments she makes in the introduction is: "In lace knitting, we are dealing with an ‘alphabet’ of just 4 letters:

yarn over
left slant decrease
right slant decrease
decreasing two stitches in one

written on two types of ‘paper’ - stocking stitch and garter stitch. Yet over the centuries these same tools have been used to produce widely differing patterns."

Yes. I like that. I like that way of thinking about it. (Ooh, it's like genetics! Like DNA with its four bases. Except, not exactly. Though just as those four bases can code for everything from a paramecium to a redwood, those four stitch combinations can produce all the traditional laces plus, I suppose, anything we could dream up in the way of lace)

(It's actually surprisingly difficult - or maybe I'm not doing the search right - to find pages devoted to just the history of lace, or just to individual patterns. There are lots of book reviews of a few books out there, there are a number of sites selling lace shawls....)

Some patterns using the stitches I talked about:

Eunny Jang's Print o the Wave stole (This also exists as a PDF download). This is one I want to make some day; I just like that stitch pattern.

Cat's Paw lace scarf by Jo Morohashi

Dishcloth/facecloth using
Old Shale socks from Fat Cat Knits. Apparently a free download.

And yeah, I know - these are all super-simple, and I've written before about the people I've heard snarking various places about how "you can't claim to have designed a pattern if you're just fitting an existing lace pattern into it" and yeah, I suppose I could see that if you were charging big bucks for the pattern and claiming copyright. But I do think these old patterns deserve to keep going on, to keep being knitted. I like the aspect of "shaking hands with the past" when I work them - I like the idea of making something my great-great-grandmother (well, at least the ones on the Irish or Scots side of the family) might recognize, even if I dress very differently than they did, and have a very different life, and the yarns I use are very different....