Bucks point ground, and torchon grounds.
BUCKS POINT
In Bucks Point – you work a stitch (cross and 3 twists), put up the pin, – and move on to the next stitch – NO stitch after the pin. Your left bobbin, when gently tweaked, should tension up all the way to the foot. Bucks Pt Ground looks more like Mosquito netting
TORCHON
In Torchon Ground, you close behind the pin – a Stitch before the pin, and a stitch after the pin.
There are two ways of working a circle, square, or hexagon – whether in Bucks or Torchon…One way is to hang on the pairs along a diagonal line and work in sections…like a slice of pie – six slices of pie make up a complete circle. When you get back to the starting line, you join the circle up, darn in all the ends (Yuk!) and there’s the circle finished. This method of working requires fewer bobbins. The other method is, like the Rhododendron, hang on all the pairs needed and work from top to bottom. This method requires more pairs of bobbins, because at some stage (and probably only briefly) you need enough pairs to cover the widest part of the circle or hexagon. So many people get hung up (or should I say tangled up!!) on the number of bobbins needed…but the basic working techniques are still the same – ground, picots, tallies, honeycomb, gimp….they’re no different just because you’ve got a bigger number of bobbins on the pillow. Try something one day (OK, perhaps not this one!), but something just a little more demanding than what you’ve already done….go at it carefully and ignore all the extra bobbins until you need them….you’ll find that you’ve let yourself be freaked by the thought of the numbers, and that you can actually work the piece when you concentrate on the techniques you already know, rather than being overwhelmed by the number of bobbins.
Quick question for you – I am going through some lace books and noticed that both Honeycomb net and Scandinavian ground 1 are both CTTpCTT (hs, tw 1, pin, hs, tw 1) SOoooo what is the difference or is it just the same stitch under different names? Ref: The book of bobbin lace stitches Bridget M Cook and Geraldine Stott ISBN 0-486-42228-3 2002 edition. Pages 40 and 42
No difference, Jenny, except for the angle of the grid it’s drawn on (which makes it look a bit different). But I learnt Honeycomb on a 90degree grid (= Scandinavian ground 1) … Another case of different names for the same thing – maybe they’re just trying to pad the book out a bit?!?!?My copy of the book was published in 1980 and has the same stitches on the same pages, so obviously not a lot of difference between the editions! Their abbreviated book, Intro. to Bobbin Lace Stitches (1983), has the Honeycomb net but not the Scandinavian ground. But it does have Alternative Honeycomb, which is worked the same way but each succeeding diagonal row is offset so it looks more like an open fishnet effect rather than honeycomb. There is a lot of overlap between the two books, but there are enough differences so I can justify having both! (Not least is the lovely sampler tree on the cover of the Intro. book).
VIRGIN / ROSE GROUND
Virgin ground stitch translates into Danish as Russerbund. (For the record, the Danish Rosenbund is translated as both roseground and honeycomb).
I was taught that as Roseground is also called virgin ground that you need to cross your legs before you start the Rose ( virgin ) ground ( CT no pin )
“Virgin Ground …. See Reseau”. So I turned to Reseau: “Reseau (French, network). The ground of small meshes filling the open spaces of a lace.”
“De Techniek van de kloskant Stropkant (II), by M. J. Geers-Vermeulen of the Kantcentrum in Brugge, definitely uses the term to describe various forms of Roseground.
Don’t let the number of different ways of working it bother you. A rose is a rose is a rose!! The stitches before and after w/o pins are blind stitches. All you need to remember is there is a blind stitch each side going into the rose and one each side going out and you do the same thing at all of them. The rose is four pins and they are all worked the same.
Three virgin grounds are diagrammed on pages 88-91 in the LOKK book “Kant uit Vlaanderen en’s Gravenmoer. De Schuine Netslag” [which translates as: Lace from Flanders and Gravenmoer (a town in The Netherlands). The Diagonal Half Stitch]
The first virgin ground given looks like Cook and Stott’s ‘Rose ground 11’.
The second virgin ground is worked in the same way except there is no stitch between the diamonds of pinned stitches. The third virgin ground looks like, what is to me the more common rose ground, 5.
In a recent exchange with Pene Piip, who now lives in Estonia, I received a book “The Patterns of the Estonian Bobbin Lace Club”. In the notes at the back the diagram of ‘rose ground’ shows the 4-pin diamond but the ‘virgin ground’, otherwise diagrammed identically, has only a central pin – cf Flanders ground.