The Quiet Maths of Mauritian Lace
Long before I could read a pattern, I could read lace. It was a summer holiday. I was small. The afternoons in Mauritius were long and hot and slow. I spent them on the floor beside an elderly neighbour, an aunty really, watching her hands move. She had a steel hook and a ball of thread and a habit of not looking at either. Her fingers did the counting for her.
She never gave me instructions. She just worked, slowly enough that I could follow, and every so often she pushed the piece toward me so I could try. My first rows were a mess. Too tight, then too loose. Holes where there should not be holes. She would pull it all back without a word and let me start again.
That is how crochet lace gets passed on here. Not on paper. Hand to hand, summer to summer.
This lace finishes the edges of things. The hem of a dupatta. The border of a prayer scarf. A dupatta is a long scarf worn with South Asian dress. On a plain cloth the edging is often the only decoration, so it carries weight. On prayer scarves the colours stay soft. Cream, pale grey, the colour of weak tea. For a wedding the same pattern turns loud. Hot pink. Electric blue. A yellow you can spot across a room.
What I did not understand as a child, and love now, is that lace is arithmetic you can hold in your hand.
Every pattern has a number buried inside it. A repeat. You work the same small block of stitches over and over, and that block has a fixed width. Mine repeats every fourteen stitches. So the whole edge has to be a multiple of fourteen, with a few extra to turn the ends. Start with the wrong number and nothing lines up. The fans drift. The holes stop stacking. The maths tells you before your eyes do.
Then there is increase and decrease. To build a fan you crochet several stitches into a single stitch. Seven, nine, eleven, always an odd number so the fan has a centre. That is multiplication in thread. One stitch becomes nine, and the fabric swells out into a curve. To rein it back in you do the reverse. You gather several stitches into one. That is division. The fabric narrows again. A row of lace is really just these two moves, traded back and forth until the edge sits level.
Symmetry runs through all of it. Each fan is a mirror. Fold it down the middle and the left half matches the right. The whole border is a translation too, the same shape sliding sideways at an even step, like tiles across a floor or beats in a bar of music. Get the step wrong and the rhythm breaks. You feel it as a wobble long before you could explain it.
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There is even a ratio at the heart of the craft. Crocheters, call it gauge. So many stitches to the inch. Swap your hook or your thread and the ratio shifts, and the whole piece grows or shrinks to match. The angles stay the same. The proportions stay the same. Only the scale moves. The same pattern in thick cotton becomes bold trim for a cushion. In fine silk thread it becomes delicate enough to edge a veil.
My own piece is a fan and diamond edging, worked in a fixed sequence.
First a base of anchored loops. This is the baseline. Everything measures from it.
Then a row of large shell fans. This is where the count expands.
Then diamond connectors. These hold the spacing steady and stop the fans from crowding.
Then a row of smaller fans that echo the big ones at half the size.
Then a scalloped border to close the edge.
Fans add. Diamonds subtract. The two cancel out just enough to keep the strip flat. Too many increases and it ruffles like a frill. Too many decreases and it cups and curls in on itself. Flat lace is a balanced equation. That is the whole trick of it.
People who write about old European lace tend to skip crochet. Bobbin lace and needle lace get the histories. But crochet obeys the same rules. Repeated units. Even spacing. Small decisions about where the fabric grows and where it holds still. A hook, a needle, a set of bobbins. Different tools, the same geometry underneath.
I think about that aunty every time I count out a foundation row. She could not have told you the word symmetry. She did not need it. It lived in her hands, in the even step of the repeat, in the way she knew the count was off by the feel of the thread alone.
When I make a length of this edging now, I am working sums she taught me without ever calling them sums. The fans, the diamonds, the careful spacing. It is maths. It is also a long quiet conversation between one pair of hands and the next.
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“Bibi Samshad Duman is a textile design researcher and educator at Loughborough University. Her work explores crochet lace as both cultural inheritance and a logical system, shaped by counting, structure, and memory.”
