Rose ground lace

Rose ground is one of my favourite lace filling stitches - I love the structural lattice form of it. There are several ways of working the stitches and Pam Nottingham includes six varieties in a rose ground sampler in her book The technique of Torchon lace. The one in the picture is one of my favourites, which is cloth stitch and twist on the outer pairs and half stitch pin half stitch in the inner pins. I also like the variation with half stitch on the outer pairs and half stitch pin half stitch on the inner pairs. They both have a similar block like appearance but the first one gives a more defined square look to the pattern. I think it works well as a ground and also as a block (as in the image above) or as a diagonal run of just one square linked to the next by a corner. The other variations in Nottingham’s book use different combinations of stitches and twists for the central pins, such as cloth stitch and twist, or an extra half stitch but I’m sticking to this one for the pattern I’m working here.