Chinese lattice, in thick bars that repeat
The new Chinese lattice maker draws window-grille lattice in thick bars on six frameworks: square fret, octagons and squares, hexagons, diagonal, interlocking frames and ice-ray. Set the bar width and how many cells fit in a repeat, nest up to three frames inside each opening, choose a solid frame or an open edge, then download a seamless repeat, a panel or a printable PDF.
Samples to start from
- Generating…Ice-ray with one nested frame, in a solid frameOpen with these settings
- Generating…Octagons and squares, two frames deepOpen with these settings
- Generating…A finer square fret, three cells to a repeatOpen with these settings
- Generating…Interlocking frames in thin bars, with an open edgeOpen with these settings
- Generating…Hexagons, three frames deepOpen with these settings
- Generating…Finer ice, with no nested framesOpen with these settings
How the bars join
Each framework is a set of tiles that fill the plane, and a bar is where two tiles meet. Every opening is its tile moved in by half a bar width, so corners, crossings and T-joints are mitered cleanly at any angle, and because the tiles themselves repeat, a bar leaving one side of the repeat comes back in at exactly the same place on the other. Nested frames sit a gap inside the opening and are tied to the frame outside by short bars, so a cut-out lattice holds together.
Cracked ice that still repeats
Ice-ray, 冰裂纹 in Chinese, imitates ice cracking on a pond, so it has no regular grid. Here the ice is broken from points scattered on a surface that wraps around at its edges: each piece is the area nearest one point, and some pieces are cracked once or twice more by a straight cut. The cracks look random, but the repeat still meets its neighbors without a seam. Change the seed to crack it again; the maker remembers your last seed in this browser.
Sources and names
Sorting lattice by its framework, and building richer designs by nesting frames, follows Daniel Sheets Dye's A Grammar of Chinese Lattice (1937), listed in the acknowledgements. The designs are constructed from their geometry, not copied from the book's figures. Dye's group labels are descriptions, not traditional names, so the frameworks here have plain names, with the Chinese name given only for ice-ray.