Templates may take many shapes and also constructed in many ways. The Flanders diagram is just an example.

The blue circle in the screeanshot contains clones of stitches from the pile, as explained on [Annotations]. These clones are cloned again in the three groups at the bottom. These three groups in turn are cloned into the main diagram.

The head and foot side are drawn as pairs with fat grey dotted lines. As with the ground itself, a lace maker has many choices here too. A classical dense edge, or a sparse modern one, picots or not, special stitches to control how colored threads re-enter the ground.

This tiling procedure up to and including step 4: "decorate the tile" is applied three times to construct the main diagram from the groups at the bottom of the screenshot. The faint backgrounds in the bottom groups serve as prototiles in the linked article. These prototiles set the tile sizes.

A trial-and-error method:

• start with and educated guess for the size of the prototile
• decorate the tile with stitches
• cut the decoration from the group, save some backup in case it gets lost from the clip-board
• apply the tiling
• restore the decoration
• not Ok? cut again, re-size the prototile and repeat the cycle

But you can also clone once, move the clone into a desired position, then duplicate the clone multiple times and use snapping to position the duplicates. Or correct tiling result by moving the clones, or...