1 Inspiration

The starting point for this pattern was a photograph of a tree in Hilliers Arboretum in Hampshire, UK.  I didn’t think to look at its leaves to see what it was, but a bark photo in a tree book suggests it may well have been a sycamore.  The bark seemed to have been stretched in a fascinating manner as it grew, leaving a pattern of deep clefts.

2  Overlay

By laying a sheet of acetate over the photograph, and colouring in the clefts with an overhead projector pen, I could lift off that pattern, take it to the photocopier and enlarge it to a size suitable for large-scale pattern design.

3 Draft pattern

When designing large patterns, I usually start with a 1 cm Torchon grid of dots.  My inspiration will need to be a size which offers character and detail to fit that scale – I might have to enlarge many times to get this, and piece the basic pattern together.  In this case, after trial and error, I chose to take the white areas as the basis for cloth-stitch and the dark ones as ground areas.

4 Repeats

I designed an all-over repeating pattern to allow repeats both width-wise and length-wise, which would enable me to make the finished lace in any size I fancied. This is done here by designing a diamond-shaped area of pattern, cutting that into four, and repeating the four triangular shapes at opposite sides of the diamond to make a square.  The pattern that results may have to be considerably refined from this to achieve a harmoneous result.

5 Final pattern

This is a small section of the final pattern.  Having designed the pattern with basic Torchon ground in the holes, I turned some of these as I made it into honey-comb areas.  The pattern has also been enlarged to allow me to make the scarf in 8/2 spun silk (it is 60 ins/152 cms long, 12 ins/30 cms wide, and took 50 hours to make).