Lace pattern generator

Threads and the spaces between them

Lace is a fabric where the holes matter as much as the thread. Bobbin lace is plaited from many threads wound on small bobbins, needle lace is stitched loop by loop, and both grew into trades in the towns of Flanders, Italy and France. Torchon is the plain, geometric kind, worked in diamonds and fans on a net of crossing threads. Guipure drops the net: separate motifs, often flowers, are joined by bars, and the bars leave the openings. Broderie anglaise is not lace in the strict sense but its cousin, white cloth with small embroidered eyelets and petals cut out of it. Filet is crochet worked on a square mesh, where some squares are filled in to draw a picture. Cane webbing, the woven seat of a bentwood chair, makes a similar openwork out of octagonal holes.

Tiny loops called picots, and thickenings that look like pearls, finish the edges of all these laces.

How the generator builds them

Each style is drawn from thin threads and filled shapes on a square or diamond grid. The net is a mesh of crossing threads with a pearl at every crossing, Torchon fills alternate diamonds of the mesh, and the guipure flower is a ring of petals tied to its neighbors with straight bars and small picots. The eyelet pattern draws outlined petals with a dot and a stitch in each. The filet is a grid of squares, some of them filled in an 8 × 8 motif that repeats across the tile, and the cane is a lattice of octagonal holes with a small diamond where four of them meet.

The grid has a whole number of cells per repeat and every thread is cut at the same place on opposite edges, so the tile joins up without a seam. The richness setting adds rings, holes and picots to the same design.

What you can adjust

• Lace — net, Torchon, guipure, eyelet, filet or cane.
• Cells across — how many motifs fit into one repeat.
• Richness — from a plain thread to rings, holes and picots.
• Motif — for filet, which pattern of filled squares is drawn.
• Petals — how many petals each flower has, for guipure and eyelet.
• Thread weight — from a fine gossamer to a heavy cord.
• Colors — a ground and up to three threads; any palette.

Export and use

Download the seamless tile as PNG or SVG, or copy a ready CSS background. The patterns you create are free to use, personally or commercially.