We're quite busy these days at String Central. I continue to work on the long green sampler. Here's the latest strip, photographed in early dawn light. This pattern is also in TNCM2, albeit without the gridded voiding. The little complementing border was stolen from a different TNCM2 pair.

TNCM2 as a whole also progresses. And to top it off, Younger Daughter and I are hard at work on an outfit for her to wear to the Waltham Watch City Festival steampunk gala.

Long time readers here may remember that last year at this time, Younger Daughter spent quite a bit of April and May in Children's Hospital, in the throes of an argument with her burst appendix. She had wanted to attend the festival last year, and was very disappointed to have missed it. As a distraction, we planned out the outfit she would have liked to have worn. Being on the young side, what we designed for her was more steampunk than steamy-punk (no exterior corsets, hip high hemlines, or fishnet stockings). As incentive for cooperation with often uncomfortable hospital requests, I promised to make said outfit.

Now a year later, she's totally better and my promise has been called in. We're about halfway through the venture. A blouse/waist has been obtained (an antique barn bargain retread). We're just finishing up a camel wool walking skirt, and will be trimming it next week with black and brown point folded ribbon. She'll be decorating a brown suede bolero with copious brass buttons, plus a watch, a compass and a magnifying glass. The bolero and buttons were also flea market finds. Pix of all of these as they near completion. But I can present her hat:

She started with an costume top hat, and excised about 2 inches of height. She covered the surgical scar with a brown ribbon, complete with a bow and streamers in the back; then added feathers and gears.

Cute, no?

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Done with this strip, on to the next!

I spent some time noodling out what the next one will be. I tried out some complex Punto Spina Pesce patterns - the ones that use either Montenegrin or a Montenegrin-like long armed cross stitch variant to trace interlaces and intersecting lines, to make a linear design that's fairly heavy. Unfortunately more experimentation is warranted. I've got a basic understanding of these stitches and how they merge horizontal, vertical and diagonal elements, but the designs I'm looking at make those changes very quickly, sometimes after a run of only one graph unit. The methods I've learned from the Autopsy of the Montenegrin Stitch Exhumed book take two or three units to complete directional transitions. I'll have to play with these more off line to figure out "speed changes" and triple line conjunctions.

What am I working as the next strip instead? Stay tuned!

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In Part III of this series I mentioned two pieces now held in two different museums that I suspect were cut from the same original artifact. That would make them bona fide twins, separated at birth. I don't believe that was an unusual happenstance. Here is another example of a pair of items, now separated in two different collections, that I believe to have a common origin:

"Border," Art Institute of Chicago. Accession 1907.664. 17th century, Italy. 8.5 x 31.4cm (3 3/8 x 12 3/8 inches).

"Embroidery," Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Accession 95.1126. Undated. Italy. 17 x 78 cm (6 11/16 x 30 11/16 inches). Dimensions include several repeats and a considerable chunk of unworked linen.

The Art Institute's photo is sharper, but these are spot-on identical in pattern count and execution, color placement, stitch and edging detail. The Chicago write-up details the stitches used as being "back, hem, satin, and split stitches; edged with silk floss in buttonhole and detached buttonhole stitches." The MFA says "worked with line stitch, chain stitch, and laid work, and with red and yellow silk... The linen is joined by fagoting, and is edged with buttonhole stitch and loops and knots."

I am not daunted by the discrepancy. This is pretty typical. Terminology for stitching techniques and stitches isn't universal over time or place. One expert's "line stitch" may well be another expert's "back stitch." And neither one may be back stitch as we know it today. Sometimes that term is used for double running, even though the two stitches are produced differently and can be distinguished from each other by looking at the work's reverse. It's almost impossible to know from the descriptions posted on line when they were written or by whom. In fact, descriptions within a single museum's collection may not be consistent - having been written by different curators of varying degrees of familiarity with the type of work, decades apart. I would trust Santina M. Levey's descriptions the V&A in totality. But I'm not so sure I'd trust an unattributed blurb in another museum that may or may not have accompanied the piece when it was originally donated in 1909, and may not have been revisited since.

I've worked in a museum and I know that the archivists and curators, no matter how educated and experienced, do not know everything about every artifact; and not every artifact in the collection has been studied and corroborated by experts in that specific area of endeavor. Lots of times an artifact languishes for decades in a storage case with the tag that was on it when it was donated. It would not be unusual for something acquired before 1925 to have a "best guess" attribution that's never been re-evaluated. Documentation standards have risen over the years, but these older acquisitions are not upgraded and retagged unless they have a bearing on a specific line of (funded) inquiry. So artifacts just sit there with speculative provenances and dates. One of the problems dilettantes like me face is that having no academic yardstick, we accept all published or museum attributions at face value. Or we reject them, or cherry pick the ones that fit our pet theories. (I'm no different in this. My pet theory du jour is that these are from the same original.) My point is that without validated and serious study, even the grandest and most augustly respectable museum's taggings can be incomplete or open to question.

I'd love to see these two items in person, and I'd love to see their reverse sides. Just looking at them I know I could re-create them using several techniques, depending on whether or not the originals were one or two sided. Double running stitch for the red and yellow linear elements, and carefully laid satin stitch on the count for the yellow diamonds? Sure! Providing ends were carefully managed, that would be the same on the front and back. Back stitch and pattern darning? Also would work on the front, although that would result in a one-sided finished product.

So until I have the entree to actually peruse these in person, I'll just contemplate the photos. I don't know if these two museums know of the commonality of their holdings. But I do posit with some amusement that somewhere back around the turn of the last century, a dealer in Europe made a killing, snipping an original (possibly already damaged), and selling the fragments to two wandering American collectors; who in all probability each went home each thinking he or she had snatched up the only remains of this masterwork.

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Yes, I'm still chugging along on the long green sampler. Here's the progress on the latest strip, and an "on the edge" view of the last one, so you can see the dimensionality of the Montenegrin stitch accents in the last one:

I was originally going to work the entire background of the center urn motif voided in long-armed cross stitch, just like the pepper-sporting companion edge strips. I'm still thinking on that one. That much green might overwhelm the piece. It's hard to judge visual balance when the previously completed parts are rolled on the scroll bar, but here are all the strips to date, in order (apologies for varying lighting, angles, etc. - a photographer, I'm not).

Opinions on working the urn section voided would be gratefully accepted.

Finally - are these odd bud shapes really peppers? I haven't a clue. New World peppers would have been a recent introduction when this design was new. They might be, or they might be some other vegetation as yet unknown to me.

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More duplicates!

First off, I've found two more examples of the spinx, urn, and pelican pattern I showed in the first note of this series. Both of the new examples are in the Cooper Hewitt. Here are just the center urn sections from both. Please visit the links to view the entire works:

Border, Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt, Accession 1931-66-144. 17th Century, North Africa

Band, Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum. Accession 1931-66-142. Undated, North Africa.

For comparison, here are the urn/bird sections of the three I've previously posted:

Valence Embroidered with a Grotesque Motif, Hermitage Museum, 16th century, Italy
Border, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession 14.134.16a, 17th century, Italy.
Valence Embroidered with a Grotesque Motif. Hermitage Museum, 16th century, Italy.

So on sphinx-urn-pelican, we're up to five examples in at leat two different stitching styles.

Of the red mesh background examples, two retain their companion edgings, but they are different and unrelated to each other and to the main pattern panel. No two are alike, neither in the main motif or the companion edgings, although all of the main motifs are clearly descended from a common source.

As to North Africa vs. Italy as the source of the Cooper Hewitt pieces, Iv'e noted that some panels cited by Freida Lipperheide as being Moroccan in origin are now attributed by other museums as being Italian. The style of stitching apparently was called "Moorish," or "Moresque" at one time, and that label may have influenced the early attributions. Again, without academic and detailed materials analyses we're at the mercy of the occasionally musty museum attributions.

It's interesting to note that the most detailed piece is the 17th century Cooper Hewit holding; and that iteratino is most like the 16th century darned net sample (two baby birds; pomegranates growing from the urn base; other similarities)/ The other pieces are closer to each other (one baby bird, downward growning side urn decorations, etc.). I note that the tendency fo these patterns is to lose rather than gain detail over time. But in the absence of any scholarly examination of these pieces, I can't challenge the museum dates. But I can safely say that considerable leeway exists in pattern interpretation.

On to a new example. This one is an even better example of pattern conservatism over time. Centuries, in fact.

Band. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accession 09.50.1363, 16th to 17th century, Italy.

Border. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accession 09.50.3804. 16th to 17th century, Italy or Greek Islands

Band. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accession 09.50.61. 1th Century, Greek Islands

As you can see, I've found at least three examples of this one, spanning a possible 200-year range, done in different styles. The top one appears to have been worked in Italian two-sided cross stitch, but not pulled tightlly. Some of its side sprigs are in plain old cross stitch. The middle example features a pulled background mesh stitch - possibly the same Italian two-sided cross stitch, but tightly drawn. Jury is still out on this one, but up-close viewing reveals bundling rather than withdrawn or missing threads). The bottom example is worked in plain old cross stitch, with evidence of having been stitched in two colors (the vertical element in the fragmentary corner appears to have been done in a second color).

Now, not every pattern maintains recognizability and integrity over 200 years. But some clearly do, in spite of minor variations in detail (the side sprig flowers), and in stitch choice. Of course it's also possible that the original collectors bought items wihtout clear documentation of provenance or origin time; and that some of the examples we think of as being earlier, are in fact of later manufacture. Again we need serious inquiry on this, armed with all of the dating techniques at modern disposal. So I ask as a self-taught dilettante - Is anyone out there looking for a really meaty doctoral thesis topic in textile history?

I've got more of these multiples to show. Stay tuned!

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Yes, I'm still working on my long green sampler. Both of the patterns below will be in TNCM2:

Thanks to the Montenegrin book I've been able to do all those twisty, bendy parts where diagonals meet horizontals or verticals. It was a lifesaver! I really like this interlace. You'll note by comparing my piece with the original below that my ground cloth is off square - not quite even weave. So it goes. I'm working that distortion into my pattern selection and placement.

"Strip," Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession 79.1.13. 17th century, Italy, possibly Sicily

It's very hard to see, but it looks like there might have been spangles in the empty spaces between the internal curlicues. There may be a spangle in the upper left (better seen at the full photo at the link), where the work is the least damaged, plus some evidence of now empty holding stitches, and some corrosion aligning with where the spangles would have been. This pattern would make a killer coif or all-over sleeve panel with spangles there, and maybe a few more replacing the little four box free floating squares. I'm thinking of working it in black and gold with spangles for a modern envelope clutch style evening bag.

In any case, that strip is now done and I'm on to the next - a rather complex urn and branch with a very dark and solid background. It's going to take a lot of stitching to cover all that real estate in long armed cross stitch, so progress on the piece, once the double running foreground is all laid in will be very dull to watch for a while. Good thing I have other content lined up.

I am however less than pleased with the Zoundry Raven blogging composition software I've been using. The last few posts have killed it. I can get them composed and loaded if I do all the work in one session, but I can't call up a previously started piece for additional work - not even to copy out text and recompose in a new post. That means that I'll have to re-draft the next several Long Lost Twins pieces. Stay tuned!

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I'm happy that folk are enjoying this series. These sets are some of the material I presented at my Hrim Schola talk. I did have a bit too much material to cover there (I should have requested a two-hour timeslot), so this series is filling in some of the detail I glossed over in my class.

Today's family branches out into two colors.

The first two are both from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:

#1 Punto di Milano, MFA Accession 93.193, late 16th century, Italy 4 1/8 x 13 3/8 inches (10.4 x 34 cm)

#2 Punto di Milano, MFA Accession 92.42, 4 1/8 x 20 7/8 inches (10.5 x 53cm)

They were both part of the Denman Waldo Ross collection and the museum acknowledges the resemblance in their on line listing, but does not provide any other context for the two items, or opine as to why they might be so similar. And they are similar - not identical. Both are stitched in that pulled thread mesh-producing technique we've seen before, and both are green. Differences between colors on the two photos are more likely relics of the photo process or of differential fading, and do not necessarily indicate that the two started out either the same or different colors. We'd need to see the backs of the two side by side to get a better feel for original color.

Some differences are quite obvious. #1 is a single width strip, and #2 is double wide, mirrored like the strips in Friday's post. But there are other differences. I've graphed out both of these for TNCM2, and they're not spot on. The wings on the center motif in the double wide are significantly longer than the narrower version, and those little triangles at the reflection points vary oddly in treatment, being somewhat similar piece to piece to piece, but having a fair amount of variation, even within the same piece. The presence or absence of the triangles in #2 may have more to do with some very evident mistakes made by the stitcher - look how the center line meanders across the piece.

We can't draw any conclusions based on the other obvious difference - the absence of edge patterns on the double wide strip because the museum sample was closely trimmed. It may have had companion edgings at one point, now lost to time and someone's aggressive scissors. Note that size of the artifact is given edge to edge of the snippet, and in this case does not represent a measurement across the stitched area alone. It's close on #2, there's not much unstitched area left on that sample, but there's a tiny bit more left on the single wide.

The edgings on #1 are of separate interest. It's unusual (but not unknown) to see a piece with two different edgings, rather than the same one appearing top and bottom. I also am amused by these edging. The stitcher chose to ignore all of the difficult bits where the mesh fits in and around the leaves of the companion motifs. He or she just left those bits bare, but did so consistently across the piece so we know it wasn't a mistake. (There is a mistake on top border of the single-wide - the first frond on the right is too short).

Were these part of the same original artifact? Perhaps a bedspread or towel, with narrow banding up the sides and a wider strip elsewhere, similar in design use proportion to this one?

Bed Spread with Border Embroidered in Grotesque Motif. Hermitage Museum (no accession number). Mid 16th century, Italy.

It's tempting to say so, but we can't be certain.

Finally I've stumbled across another iteration of this pattern:

Frontal (detail) Victoria & Albert Museum Accession 747-1892. 17th century (made), no provenance.


This one is even more problematic. Here is the whole artifact. It's an altar frontal, composed from pieces of older works. The V&A's date 17th century (made) acknowledges the fact that the item is composed of earlier bits:

But you can see that the borders at the left and right of this piece are clearly our friend, the Wandering Y pattern, presented with yet another companion border, complete with occasional and illogical presence of that little triangle center hat.

What can we learn from this grouping? Again we've got items identified by century, which is rather wide dating window. Might the red strips in the composed altar frontal be older than that artifact's dating, and in fact be contemporary with the green pieces? Perhaps. One rarely cuts up brand new work to reassemble into a recycled piece, and this piece is clearly pieced together in a rather eke it out and make do manner. Was the frontal assembled in Italy from Italian lacis and edging scraps, or was it made up elsewhere? Unknown. There are other examples of assembled altar pieces of this type, so they were not uncommon.

I would like to speculate that given the mistakes on the two blue-green pieces, that we have evidence here of a pattern copied by "loving hands at home." Were they from the same source artifact? We can't say. That conjecture is possible, and stylistically congruent with other pieces of the time, but there is no hard proof in the on-line descriptions.

Maybe there's more detail about these works in the museum archives, or in the archives of the the D. Waldo Ross collection. Wherever those are papers are today. But again we have a grouping that spans up to 200 years, sporting a recognizable core pattern, in multiple and varying expressions.

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To start off, a quick revisit of Part I of this series. I've found another example of the same sphinx and pelican with urn design (I knew I had seen one more, I just had to remember where.) This one is also part of the Hermitage collection, a piece of lacis (darned net). Note that due to problems with my blogging engine, only the museum citation will work as a link to the artifact page.

Valence Embroidered with a Grotesque Motif. Hermitage Museum. 16th century, Italy.


So now we have a second 16th century example of this design, and proof that these patterns were used to execute multiple needlework styles. There are some differences between the details of the lacis and the voided embroidery examples I posted earlier this week. The lacis work is closer to the other Hermitage piece - the simpler of the two - but that could be because lacis does not lend itself to the fine detail that can be worked in double running.

Now on to today's multiple. This is a fun one.

First, here's our basic design worked as a single width strip.

Band. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession 09.50.1. 16th-17th century, Italy. 3.75 x 13.25 inches (9.5 x 33.7 cm)

And here is the same design but done up as a double width strip:

Fragment. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accession 09.50.1366. 16th century, Italy. 11.25 x 14.75 inches (28.6 x 37.5cm)


There are some minor differences in treatment between them. I can't tell what stitch is used for the voided background of the second, but whatever it is, it is not the pulled thread mesh of the first example. And some of the interior elements of the design - the Y an O centers at the reflection lines - are filled in in the second sample, while they're left unworked in the single width band. It may also be possible that the outline on the second sample was worked in a contrasting color silk because it appears to be darker and more crisp than the outline in the narrower example. And of course, the companion edging treatments are totally different.

But that's not all. Here are two more examples of the same pattern, also with their Y and O centers left unworked:

Punto di Milano. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Accession 11.2879. No date, probably Italian. 7 9/16 x 18 7/8 inches (19.2 x 48 cm).


Insertion with Border. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession 12.9.2. Greek Islands. 7.5 x 18.5 inches (19.1 x 47 cm).

Now these two are EXTREMELY close in width, proportions, background treatment, count of the main design, and of the border. Even the placement of the little dots in the border element are identical. Both were collected between 1900 and 1920, the MFA's by D. Waldo Ross (active around that time); and the MMoA's originating from F Fischbach in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1909.

I believe that these two are actually and truly long-lost twins. It would not be impossible for these two pieces to have been cut from the same original artifact, or from a closely matched set of originals (like two of a set of multiple matching coverpanes - sort of like oversized napkin/towels). The two snippets were thens old to two different well-heeled collectors.

As to style, unlike the second item above, the outlines of our two twins are clearly not worked in a contrasting color. This piece also has a rather nifty and individualized border, created specifically to match the center strip. Sprigs of the main design's foliage and center element are echoed in the companion edging.

Note that in NONE of these samples does the count of the companion narrow edging have anything to do with the count of the main panel repeat. This is pretty much universal. Modern attempts to align the repeats of edging and main strip are over-fastidious efforts, a practice not seen in historical samples. To my eye aligning border and main strip removes a bit of visual spontaneity, making the whole into a more static entity. But that's my just own aesthetic opinion. Your mileage may vary, and your own tolerance for visual disorder might be lower than mine. All is good.

What conclusions can we draw from this set? Again, minor variations in working method were totally at at the discretion of the stitcher. There were then like there are now, no embroidery police. Narrow borders were also chosen independent of the main design, and might or might not match the style or design elements of the center strip. And finally - mirroring strips to make wider bands is a totally historically legitimate method of working a deeper strip.

On dating and provenance, again these designs were very conservative, varying little over time. We've got another 100 years or so to play with if we go by the museum dates. Plus this won't be the last time we'll see pieces attributed variously as being of Italian or Greek origin. There was a very lively trade in the region, and these pieces are very hard to pin down to just one place. Plus Greek Island embroideries retained many of these patterns in active vocabulary long after similar designs had passed out of high style in Italy. Not all traditional Greek stitchery patterns are of 16th-17th century origin of course, but some do share a common lineage with Italian works of the same time.

For the record, this pattern (in single width) is among those I'm hoping to present in TNCM2.

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To continue our museum hopping trip viewing similar patterns, here's another cluster Again, this is a group that to my limited knowledge is NOT based upon a graph appearing in an extant 15th ro 16th century modelbook (but I haven't seen them all).

1. Embroidered Textile. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Accession 1894-30.112. 15th century, Italy. 7 x 15.25 inches (17.8 x 37.7cm)


2. Band. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession 09.50.1361. 16th-17th century, Italy. 6.25 x 11.5 inches (15.9 x 29.2 cm).

3. Embroidery. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,, Accession 06.351. 17th century, Italy. 4 3/8 inches x 19 1/8 inches (11.1 x 48.5cm).

4. Kendrick, A.F. and Holme, C. Book of Old Embroidery, London: The Studio, 1921. Plate 48 (around page 102 of the PDF). No date, Italian. About 4 inches wide. Cited as being in the Victoria & Albert Museum.

I've graphed the MMA and MFA examples (#2 and #3) for inclusion in TNCM2. I also stitched #2 in long armed cross stitch, on my big blackwork sampler:

Compare my proportions to the museum examples to see the minor distortion caused by the not-quite-even weave grounds of the historical examples, especially #1.

#1 from the PMA is cited as being worked in silk using cross and eyelet stitches (trapunto). The MFA cites #2 as being stitched in "Punto di Milano," which is a term they use for a family of pulled thread techniques that produces a mesh-like appearance, often by use of two-sided Italian cross stitch, pulled very tightly. It's more commonly found as a background in voided work, but pops up for foreground elements and accents, too. There is no consensus among museums on what this technique should be called. To complicate matters, there are several ways of producing the overstitched mesh background look, both single and double sided. Still the execution of these are very close, and both look to have been done using pulled thread technique rather than a withdrawn thread method.

But #1 and #2 are not pieces of the same artifact. I've confirmed counts between them. There are enough small differences in strip width, ground cloth thread count proportions, stitching and minor pattern details to conclude that #1 and #2 are not twins separated after birth. But they are so close that I'd opine that they were probably stitched from the same source - pattern collection sampler, printed broadside, hand-drawn pattern, or source artifact. There's even a remote possibility that one of these is the paradigm for the other. We can't say for sure, all we can do is note that they're children of the same family.

Now #3 and #4 might be more closely related. The width measurement, count, proportions, form and color placement on them are extremely close. Even those nasty little skips that give the tree branch bark its texture are spot on exact in placement between the two pieces. But I can't say for certain that they are either pieces of the same original, or photos of the same artifact. Pieces have moved between museums before, and even the most scholarly author can make a mistake in attribution. The problem is the accompanying descriptions. #3 is in Punto di Milano. But the Kendrick-Holme book specifies that #4 is "embroidered with red and green floss silks in satin and double running stitches." Again, attributions might not be correct. I wish I could find out if #4 is still in the V&A, and get a closer look at it.

So to sum up, again we've got a recognizable and stable pattern, possibly spanning centuries of active use. I think the attribution on #1 is a bit early, but I have no proof. We've also got two and possibly three different methods of execution, and evidence that variants of the same pattern were worked in both monochrome and multiple colors. We can posit that multicolor variants came later, but we cannot flatly conclude that monochrome came first, due to the broad and overlapping range of dates given for these pieces (with the 15th century date discounted as a possibly questionable outlier).

There are lots more of these in my notebooks. I find this fascinating, but I realize that not everyone is an uber-stitch-geek like me. Please let me know if you're bored to tears, or if you'd like to see more examples of patterns over time.

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Work continues on my long green sampler. I was a bit of a stall last week, but with the help of the excellent Autopsy of the Montenegrin Stitch, Exhumed by Amy Mitten, I've forged on ahead. The Montenegrin is what I'm using for the dark accent stripes in the interlace:

Autopsy is a small flip book that contains nothing but diagrams for two Montenegrin stitch forms, showing the order and logic of the individual stitches. How tough can that be? Plenty tough. What the book lays out is the stitch sequence for EVERY junction where horizontal, vertical and diagonals meet. As you can see from my piece, there are lots of junctions possible! This is a boutique item to be sure - not everyone leaps in and rolls around in this particular stitch style, but if you are planning a project using it, the book is well worth its its price.

It's no secret that I'm nearing completion of my own book. I've got about 60 plates of patterns done. 58 of them are complete. I may or may not expand that to 62 for publication. I have to make some decisions on some out-takes and patterns that span multiple pages. I have the companion "about" pages written. I've got the bibliography done. I'm working on the introduction now. And as I do so, I'll be posting related bits to String. I can't include museum photos in the book without licensing them. But I can use links to those photos here. Much of this material is stuff I covered in my Schola lecture. But instead of running through the travelogue of styles and techniques, I want to start with the fun part. The "Long Lost Twins" examples.

Long Lost Twins Part I

The counted thread styles I've been working for the past three years are quite well represented in museums worldwide, largely thanks to those interested in historical embroidery between 1870 and World War II. This is the era that included both Freida Lipperheide whose pattern collection documented specific artifacts (published in 1880s), Louisa Pesel (a leading needlework researcher most active from around 1900 until her death in 1947), and Arthur Lotz who cataloged all extant modelbooks (published in 1933). There were countless other books on old lace and needlework, and collectors ranged all over Europe harvesting examples. Many of these collectors amassed impressive assemblages of artifacts, and their collections form the backbone of what's available for view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Hermitage in St. Petersberg, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and others. We owe a lot to their diligence and enthusiasm.

However the collectors were rather more of the Indiana Jones school than we as modern stitching devotees would like. The pieces are not clearly associated with provenance or date. Often they are small snippets disassociated from the original integral artifact, so the exact nature of the item they adorned is open to discussion, and center strips that might have been used in combo with additional narrow edgings have been cut and removed from context. Styles and patterns were also relatively conservative, appearing over long spans of time. Unlike samplers which have an increasingly wide body of academic research documenting them, these (mostly) domestic embroideries have drawn lesser attention, probably because they are anonymous and problematic to date. I don't claim to be an academic. I'm just a dilettante. But I can observe. And this series contains some of my observations.

But enough dry disclaimer. Here's our first example of fun.

The image on the left is Valence Embroidered with a Grotesque Motif, now in the Hermitage Museum. They date it as 16th century, from Italy. It's stitched in red silk on linen, with a pulled thread background to achieve a mesh like effect and double running stitch for the outlines and details. The whole piece is about 5x29 inches or 13x75cm, unclear if that's with our without the fringe, or whether the photo shows the entire artifact. The Hermitage obtained this piece in 1923. The item on the right is Border, Accession 14.134.16a in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They date it as a 17th century Italian work. I've only shown one repeat, but the whole two+ repeat artifact is shown on the museum photo. It's 6.14 x 24.5 inches or 15.9 x 62.2 cm. It was acquired in 1914.

You have to admit, they're pretty darned close. If anything the later work has a bit more detail than the earlier one (although the earlier piece shows more diligence in filling in the more difficult tiny background bits inside small diameter swirls. This usually not the way the generation to generation transcription of patterns works. Detail is usually lost, with chubby Renaissance cherubs devolving into the minimalist "boxers" on 17th century samplers. To date I have not seen this pattern in a period pattern book.

As to the iconography, the pelican vulning itself (pricking its breast to produce blood to feed its young) is a standard image of the time. The obvious allegory is self-sacrifice. The other two winged creatures are rather sphinx like to me - wings and feathers, heads of women, lion bodies. They appear to be either blowing pan-pipes or sipping on flowers, depending on which piece you are looking at. The well or giant urn and vegetative components are very standard. Large urns flanked by facing beasts or mythical figures are very common in weaving and other decorative arts of the 1500s and 1600s. So what I end up with is a piece extolling virtues of self-sacrifice and wisdom, with a vaguely feminine cast.

Now, why are these so close? I haven't a clue. I do not know if work of this type was done at home by talented amateurs, or in workshops. The skill level to create these is relatively high by modern cross-stitch kit standards, but in truth it's not all that difficult, and the majority of today's dedicated counted thread stitchers would have minimal trouble achieving it. I have no doubt at all that non-professionals in the 1500s could have churned out this work in quantities sufficient to edge bed hangings, sheets, curtains, towels, or pillows. About all I can say is that they are not from the same original. There are enough minute differences between them both in pattern details and the way they were stitched to preclude them being from a matching set.

I also have no choice other than to rely on the museum's dates. And so we see the weaknesses of the attributions inherited by the museums from the original collectors. Are they in fact close in date with one being rather late 1500s and the other being rather early 1600s? Are they contemporary, from one century or the other? No way for me to tell.

What were they originally used for? Again, these pieces are out of context. We don't know. The Hermitage pegs theirs as being part of a valence, probably based on the presence of the fringe along the lower edge. Was this part of a bed suite? A good guess, but without pieces or fragments of the rest of the suite, there's no way to tell. The Met's sample is even harder to place for use. It's been totally removed from its origins. If it had accompanying top and bottom borders (very common), or a fringe like the Hermitage piece, they're long gone.

So what we have are two pieces officially dated up to 100 years apart, recognizably highly similar in design, worked in very similar materials and techniques, from the same general geographic area. The later one displays slightly more detail than the earlier example. We've got no unifying source of pattern that link them. My only conclusions are that these prove that patterns were re-used; that they were relatively conservative over time AS IF the workers were stitching from common source material either printed or stitched. I'd also say that small variations work to work validate similarly small deviations performed by modern stitchers wishing to replicate the style and design, but that's just my own personal opinion.

I have lots more of these. Stay tuned!

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No pix this week. The Resident Male took my preferred camera with him on a business trip overseas, and I'm not disposed to dump batteries down the gaping maw of the older camera in their joint absence.

I had a lot of fun at the Hrim Schola event in Quintavia (Marlborough, MA) this weekend past. I took both Elder and Younger Daughter, plus Younger Daughter's Pal. The four of us did the full day of classes and workshops, pausing briefly between activities to nosh out on the offered foods and snacks. I thoroughly enjoyed the three sessions I attended - an overview of fleeces and spinning by Lady Ermengar; a lessons-learned lecture on Italian Renaissance era Perugia towels by Master Peregrine the Illuminator; and an introductory taste of withdrawn thread work given by Kasia Wasilewska. The towels come from the same period as my favorite stitching, and the motifs are very much akin to it. Whitework is on my agenda, especially the early forms of cut and withdrawn thread stitching. And anyone who's followed here knows that knitting is my hobby-away-from-my hobby - the thing I do when I'm not stitching (and vice versa.)

The kids went to several other workshops on Viking wire weaving; basic chain mail construction (no rivets or soldering); Japanese Kumihimo braiding; combing and carding wool; hand sewing; and needle weaving. Adding in the lucets they've both acquired this year (plus the lucet technique book they picked up from Small Churl Books at the Schola), we now have infinitely more ways to play with string in all its forms.

As part of the day's activities, I gave a whirlwind tour of some of the things I've stumbled across doing research for TNCM2.

The first part of the talk was a travelogue of some of the counted styles popular in the 1500-1650 time range. I touched on the difficulty of exact dating due to the nature of the major collections in museums - that they were mostly amassed between 1860 and 1920, by collectors whose boundless enthusiasm and interest was rather more greatly developed than their ability to pin down dates and provenances. I also mentioned that while my original goal had been to develop a chronology of techniques and styles, doing so crisply based on the meager attributions and origins was impossible. Maybe as 16th and 17th century edging and domestic embroidery scraps become as well known and appreciated as samplers, and are studied by academics armed with the latest in dating technology it will become easier, but for now chronology is rather mushy.

After the style stampede I glossed over uses - the usual: clothing, domestic linen (sheets, napery, coverpanes, cushions), liturgical items. I tried to show examples not commonly represented in books or on-line image collections.

Then the real fun began. I tried to show that some standard preconceptions about these works can be challenged in the artifact record. We looked at work that wasn't just red or black (or blue or green); monochrome vs. polychrome works; mixed techniques; that historical linen was not always even weave by the modern definition; that stitching was most often done over 3x3 or 4x4 threads on finer linen than we use for modern 2z2 countwork. I showed examples of contrasting color outline voided pieces, and some works that were less concerned with adherence to precision pattern fidelity than they were with overall effect. And we looked at some pieces that while worked on the count, were probably drawn on the fabric freehand prior to stitching rather than being reproduced from a graph or previous piece of stitching.

After that it was a short move to the "treasure hunt" part of the talk. I have great fun finding and matching disparate works. I've found quite a few pieces that represent distinct pattern families. Some of these designs appear on snippets of finished works and also on specific historical samplers - not English didactic ones, on pieces I believe might have been sample sheets for professionals (my fave V&A sampler falls in this category). In other cases there are groups of finished snippets that were clearly worked from the same master pattern. Some of these have roots in German, Italian, French and English modelbooks. Others have no printed original that has descended to us, but are so close in base design that a common source must have existed. And other snippets, now widely scattered to different museums or private collections might in fact have come from the same origins, sold in small pieces to multiple collectors who visited the same European dealers.

The upshot of my talk is that there is far more variation in these pieces than modern stitchers might realize. That these variations enable a fair amount of play for those wishing to replicate a style. I'm a firm believer in studying the samples in order to internalize the deeper aesthetic and method, then using those vocabularies to produce work that is true to the time, without being a clone of a period piece. I don't claim that my stitching embodies that ideal. My stuff is modern play-testing, assembled without regard for period aesthetic. Learning pieces at best, and not historical beyond the fact that they incorporate historical designs.

I got some good questions from the group. After TNCM2 is out, I'll look into ateliers and professional vs. at-home stitching, and see what the academic literature has accumulated in the six or so years since the last time I went on a hunt for that info. I'll also look more into materials, especially fingerspun floss silks. And I'll be reworking some of the slides from the talk into blog posts, with source references, so that the small audience here can chime in, too.

I think the attendees enjoyed the talk, although in retrospect, I probably had way too much content for just one hour. I motored through at ramming speed, for sure. By the end they looked exhausted, and a bit overwhelmed. But that could have been my own exhaustion projecting itself onto them.

Needless to say, I had a great time. It was fun to find others interested in this stuff. I met quite a few people face to fact that I'd either not seen in 15 years, or who I have only known through on-line interaction (Hi guys!). I'm not a joiner, and am pretty solitary by nature. I tool along on my own, and have done so for decades. Blogging and boards bring some interaction with kindred spirits, sparks I truly appreciate. But giving the talk and interacting with the attendees was like sitting by a bonfire. If they enjoyed it half as much as I did, I'll be extremely happy.

Oh. One last thing. Thanks to the group who put this together, running the event, scheduling the classes, manning the kitchen (very tasty!), and otherwise enabling the day. And thanks to Davey whose enthusiasm and encouragement goaded me into crawling out of my basement hole, and volunteering to do a class.

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Another strip well started. This one is a mixed stitch interlace, graphed out from yet another museum artifact, and another pattern that will be appearing in TNCM2:

As my dawn-lighted picture reveals, I'm working it in two passes - first setting up the double running stitch outlines, then going back and filling in the dark center stripes. After some initial experimentation, I've settled on using Montenegrin stitch for those stripes. Although it's a legitimate historical stitch contemporary with this style, and is spot on in terms of raised texture and density, I'm not entirely convinced that all artifacts labeled "punto spina pesce" use it (or in fact- employ the same stitch).

Contemporary work of that name more commonly refers to plain old long-armed cross stitch (LACS) but LACS doesn't give the raised, tightly plaited appearance of the older pieces. Plaited - yes, but the angles in LACS are more acute than those in the museum artifacts. Montenegrin is closer in terms of texture, but is also not spot on. I'll continue to experiment, but I will finish out this band using Montenegrin, and play further on later band.

To answer Ellen, this is done on 40 count using one strand of Soie d'Alger in color 1846. As you can see from the proportions of the work however, the ground is not exactly square. The 3x8 rectangles used to "bind" the interlaces together clearly show the skew. The bottom band of pulled thread work was done over units that are 4x4 threads. The double running band above it and the one I'm working now are done over 2x2 threads - approximately 20 stitches per inch.

To answer Rachel, yes - holding large frames is a pain. I much prefer working with my small round frame. But I don't want to compromise the silk I'm using. I use my frame stand as that extra "third hand" to hold my frame, and then stitch with one hand above and one below it. If I can get a comfortable angle, it's actually faster than stitching using the round frame, where one hand holds the frame and the other does all the work. The round frame does provide a more even tension in all directions. I suppose I could seam on a carrying cloth edge and then lace my piece left and right to improve side to side tension on the flat frame. I've done that before on others. But the Millennium provides much better overall tension than my old scroll frame, and I like being able to advance work at a whim, or collapse it for transport. I would not have been able to do this type of work on my old frame without lashing the sides.

To answer Anne, I don't as a rule endorse retail outlets, I don't accept recompense in money or kind for anything mentioned in String, and I don't accept "review copies" or gifts from makers/sellers hoping for positive exposure. However I will say that the source for the frame was Needle Needs in the UK. I bought my silk from Needle in a Haystack in California, and the ultimate source of my ground cloth was Hand Dyed Fibers (I bought it from the original purchaser). The needlework stand I'm using is a Grip-It, which I bought about 20 years ago at The Yarn Shop in College Park, Maryland - long out of business. I altered the Grip-It to accommodate the Millennium by replacing the original jaw bolts with longer ones. It appears that the Grip-It is no longer being made.

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Marching along. As you can see, I advanced the piece on my rollers. Due to the orientation of my chair and frame stand, I'm most comfortable stitching in the lower third of the available area. Plus, being a new gizmo, I wanted to see how full slack, restacking the bars and tightening worked.

My working thread is marking the center point for the next band. That one will probably be in long armed cross stitch, worked both horizontal or vertical, and on the diagonal to create the foreground. Some museums call this "Punto Spina Pesce." Modern stitchers probably know it better under the name Montenegrin stitch.

I've been having a lively discussion in another forum on useful needlework tools. In addition to the standards, I can offer up this:

Tweezers! Not just any dime store pair. I saw some specifically made for electronics assembly at work. They were so perfect, I went out and bought myself something similar. Electronics tweezers are long and pointy, with precision grip ends. The final half inch or so is nicely rounded, and is a good stand-in for a laying tool (for those who like the economy of a minimal tool set). Further up the shaft the profile switches to more of a D. On mine the 90-degree sides of the D are just sharp enough to cut through thread, so inserting the rounded end into a stitch and pushing ever so slightly will break the stitch without harming the ground cloth. Then the fine grip tweezers can be use to remove any thread detritus left over from ripping back. Electronics tweezers are available in many price ranges. Since nonmagnetic/non-conductive isn't important for stitching, the least expensive pairs work just fine for my purposes.

I also made a blindingly obvious discovery about needles. I usually use fine tapestry style needles on ground cloth that's 40+ threads per inch. But I often stitch those finer cloths with one strand of embroidery floss. One strand of floss has the annoying habit of falling out of the needle's eye, something that drives me batty. But over the weekend I found these:

Ball point hand sewing needles, made for use on tricots and fine knit fabrics. You can see in the un-thumbnailed photo above that the eyes are tiny - just big enough for one strand of floss. The points are not quite as blunt as tapestry needles, but they are far less pointy than embroidery or plain-sewing sharps. They slide nicely between the threads of my ground cloth. And the small eye retains the single strand, reducing the time and annoyance of re-threading mid-work. Not orthodox perhaps, but effective.

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More progress on Long Green.

You can see that I finished the mesh strip and have started on a simple double running band. The thickness of the darning on the mesh varies because I was trying out several stitching logics. I'm still working on the illustrations for the best of them, more on that to come. Also, there will be more on how these mesh styles were achieved in historical works. There look to have been several ways to do it - there is no "This is the only right way" method.

Here's a close-up for Kathryn, who wanted to see the mesh more clearly. This photo is back-illuminated by the sun, and was taken with a piece of printer paper held behind the stitching:

Today's double running band is yet another pattern that will be appearing in TNCM2.

It's adapted from a drawn (rather than graphed) strip pattern appearing in Egenolff. The drawing however is clearly intended to be geometrical, and as you can see - translates easily to linear counted stitching. I will say that this gauzy linen is far better for the mesh darning and possibly solid voided work than it is for delicate double running. It's tough to NOT distort the threads when stitching, which may be optimal for the pulled thread mesh, but is problematic for the other styles.

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I'm having fun with my new frame, and playing with the mesh background voided style. As you can see, I've started with a very simple pattern:

This style is totally two-sided. And I can now see why so many fragments representing it are present in museum collections. It's dense and tough as nails. Even with the mesh background, there are no loops or fragile surface to catch and no ends to fray (they're all easily buried by overstitching). From looking at museum samples, the mesh background of mixed line stitch/voided pieces is rarely damaged. It's usually the double running element that has breaks or skips. I'm very pleased with this and will do more with it. I'll even try it at a smaller scale on this cloth later downstream.

I'll also draw up some stitch diagrams on how I did it. I didn't use standard gridded-cross-stitch (Italian two-sided cross stitch) logic. By noodling around I hit upon something that I was able to both count with greater ease, and use to achieve a more "meshy" output. But more on that when I manage to sketch up what the heck it is I'm doing.

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Folk who know me either through String or in person know that I'm generally not prone to enthusiastic gushing. Passionate ranting, perhaps, but prancing around in delight is not part of my idiom.

Until today.

I've been pacing the floors since my last big embroidery project ended, keeping busy by knitting small things:

Two pairs of socks and a pair of Fingerless Whatevers. Socks are headed to Elder Daughter, whose pitiful pleas will now be gratified.

But finally, my Needle Needs Millennium Frame has arrived, all the way from the UK:

I've wanted to get a new flat frame for quite a while. My old one having been bought in the early '70s, using babysitting money when I was still in high school. Frame technology has advanced. I was very impressed by the review of the thing over at Needle 'n Thread. Her pix are better than I could manage, and I agree with her observations wholeheartedly. The frame is well made, and works exactly as presented. It's easy to load with the work (minimal frame dressing), easy to adjust, and a delight to use. All in all a quantum leap over my old one.

The only problem is one faced by all round frame enthusiasts when they "move up" to a flat frame. It's large. You need three or four hands to use it. One or two to hold the frame, and two to stitch. But I've faced this problem before. Behold my ancient Grip-It frame, bought about 20 years ago when I started working on my Forever Coif:

It holds my Millennium nicely in its omnivorous grasp. Just barely, though. I will take the three bolts that make up the fastening mechanism of the jaws to the hardware store this weekend, and look for some that are a bit longer.

And if having this miracle of modern needlework support infrastructure wasn't enough to hyperventilate about, I have more to celebrate!

If you're familiar with 16th and 17th century embroidery - the long red pattern strips that probably bordered domestic linens - you've seen that odd mesh background. Some museums call it "Punto di Milano". Others call it "Point Lace" "Punto Quadro" or "Tela Tirata."

This is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's artifact "Strip." Accession number 79.1.81.c

Stitch attributions range all over, in part because there are several ways that a mesh background can be achieved (withdrawn thread; withdrawn thread to make a grid, then darning; pulled thread, etc.) Some books specify that these patterns used Italian Two-Sided Cross Stitch, others say Four-Sided Stitch in addition (or instead) of using an Italian stitch/style name. At this point, I'll agree with them all because all are feasible. But after long experimentation I've finally found a method that's achievable.

I played with several pulled thread stitches before coming up with this:

It's the same pattern as the museum piece. I'm working the mesh in two passes. The first is an easy to count pass of double sided cross stitch, worked double and pulled very tightly. The second is a pass in which the bars formed between the cross stitch are whipped four times (two times on edges butting up on un-mesh areas). It's totally two-sided, identical front and back. While not exactly speedy, using the initial pass to establish the counted pattern is easy, and the fill-in whipping to create the mesh is far less think-intensive than working the same pattern in hard-to-see-the-count long-armed cross stitch. Is this Punto di Milano or Tela Tirata? I am not sure. But it's darn close!

Requisites for production:

1. Flat frame on a stand. You need two hands to do this.
2. Relatively loosely woven ground cloth. Most modern even weaves are too dense. This nice, airy piece of linen was provided by StitchPal Pam (Hi, Pam!), who found it too gauzy for her needs. But it's perfect for mine.
3. High thread count ground. Although the weave density on this is good, it's a bit coarse for this work. To achieve the compression that leaves nice big holes, stitches need to span 3-4 (or more) threads. I'm using 40 count here, stitching over 4 threads. 60 count would be MUCH better, although I'd have to find finer silk thread. I'll have to investigate this on a future project.
4. Silk thread. Cotton isn't strong enough for all the pulling. Linen would have the strength, but it would be thicker, filling the holes more (and it was also done in linen historically, for white on white stitching).
5. Slightly blunted slender needle with a small eye. This is only one strand of silk floss, and you need to spread rather than pierce the ground cloth threads. Still, a total tapestry blunt is too rounded for this delicate work.

Yaay!

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At long last I can present my finish photo. Not my mounted and ready to display shot, but my "all stitching done" pix:

and proof that I've signed the thing:

I finished it up within 24 hours of my last post. Where have I been since then?

Wallowing in post-project ennui. Knitting socks for Elder Daughter. Treating myself to a flat Millennium Frame for the next stitched project, which being silk, is not a good candidate for a round frame. Working on a lecture on embroidery patterns, to be given at the Hrim Schola XVI (also here)- an SCA event focused on sharing learning about needlework, to be held on 17 March. Working on TNCM2, which now looks to be topping out at 60 plates of source-annotated historical patterns, more or less. Handling work deadlines. Shuttling said Elder Daughter back to college, and Younger Daughter to fencing class. Mocking The Resident Male for being a latecomer to blogging. The usual.

Imminent Death of wiseNeedle

On a more serious note, I am also preparing to take down wiseNeedle. Some of the content will be salvaged and re-offered, like the patterns and the glossary. But the rest won't be.

Why do this after a on-the-Web run dating back to 1995? Mostly economics. I've supported the thing out of my own pocket since the beginning. It wasn't cheap because we need a commercial grade SQL service to support the yarn review collection, plus incorporation to protect family assets from potential suits by folks upset by yarn review content. Ad revenue made it a business, and taxes on that tiny income stream had to be handled, too.

Thanks to the advertising, wiseNeedle broke even for several years, but no longer. Yarndex made a slight dent in readership, but our independent non-sponsored stance preserved interest. Folk knew that when they saw wiseNeedle reviews posted, the information was all-volunteer and totally unsponsored. But when Ravelry broke loose, traffic here nosedived and never recovered. It's now at about 8 percent of what it was back then. They now take up the lion's share of knitting traffic on the Web, with their own advice boards and yarn review collection. It's clear that concerns beyond the hobbyist level - small time independents like wiseNeedle no longer have a place on the 'Net. Ravelry as a newly minted 500-pound gorilla, wins.

String and its URL will continue although we will be porting it to a lower cost service later this year. I am hoping to preserve String's back content, but I'm not sure how to handle wiseNeedle's sublinks. All of those (plus String's) may break. It's a shame that the yarn review back catalog of info will be lost. It covers lots of yarns dating back through time and is still a valuable resource for people looking to make substitutions. Unless there's an entity interested in buying and hosting the database (sans contributors addresses, to preserve their anonymity), it will be going away soon.

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O.k. Here I am:

Only inches away from total done-ness. Just a tiny bit more gridded void fill at the uppermost left hand corner, and to finish out two narrow strips in the final section:

I'll probably finish all of it up tonight or tomorrow. Then the only thing that remains is the signature strip.

I'm plotting that out right now.

Post-project separation sadness has already set in.

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This is new for me. I've had projects that spanned years (decades, even), but never before have I had one embroidery project that I worked on without stopping, that has taken more than a year. Even my blackwork underskirt was done in 10 months. But as of mid December, I have now spent an entire year working on my big blackwork sampler. I'm not quite done. Almost, but not quite:

You can see that I'm filling in the area to the left of the dragon. I've finished the first dark band, and am now on a lighter one just above it. Two more to go, balancing the progression of shade values on the dragon's right. Then it's a sliver of the voided leaf panel at the top of the work, to finish that off even with the edge of the strips below. And finally - I will sign the piece in the strip beneath the dark panel on the leftmost edge. And it will be done. Maybe two more weeks? More if work deadlines intrude.

Here's a close-up of the latest two strips:

The sharp-eyed will note that the voided one on the bottom is included in TNCM, on Plate 28:4. It's from Jean Troveon's Patrons de diuerse manieres..., published in Lyon in 1533. Those of long memory may remember that I've used it before. It's doubled, and appears on the left and right-most edges of my filet crochet dragon window curtain.

The Troveon's original is shown single width, but the halved fleur-de-lys motifs seemed to beg use as an all-over pattern. Also, the graph of the original is shown in reverse of mine color placement, with the foreground emphasized rather than the background, more like the treatment in the crocheted piece. (Come to think of it, that knot strip along the top of the curtain might be a candidate for the dark strip at the top of my current sampler section. Hmmm....)

The lighter strip I'm currently working on will be in TNCM2. It's adapted from a non-graphed (but oh-so-obviously-intended-to-be) design in Ostaus' La Vera Perfezione del Disegno..., Venice, 1561 and 1567. I've chosen to augment it here with the frilly edge treatment.

In any case, the holidays have departed here at String. The tree is undecorated, the cookies, panforte, goose, cassoulet, and other goodies have been consumed or distributed. And the long slog through the year commences.

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Pre-holiday bustle continues here at String Central. Cookies have been baked, cakes marinated, menus planned, the tree obtained (it will be decorated this coming Saturday), candles and chocolate coins obtained, presents squirreled away awaiting wrapping and distribution. You know the drill, or live it vicariously through others.

Speaking of presents - here's one. I was charmed by the stitchable iPhone cases available for both the latest and last model phones. I don't have an iPhone, but that didn't stop me from grasping the fun of such a thing. So I took three of the Ensamplario Atlantio patterns and fitted them to the case dimensions and stitch count. One caution - I did these the week that the iPhone 4 was released, and all three patterns are based on the stitch count for the earlier model's case. I would suggest if you're stitching for a newer phone that you start in the middle of the design, aligning it to the center of the case, and work out from there; rather than starting at one end or the other.

If you click on the image above, you'll get a full page size JPG to print and stitch for the iPhone fiend in your life. (Google iPhone Case Cross Stitch to find one of the many retailers who carry the plastic pre-punched cases.)

Enjoy!

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O.k., I've finished the upper right hand corner, shown here in a traditional String pre-dawn fuzzy photo:

And here is all that's left to go:

Just the upper left. You can see I'm finishing out the leaf strip that runs across the entire top. Then I'll find several smaller strip patterns for the area beneath it. I'll use two relatively narrow dark strips to set off the space, similar to what I did on the right, then fill in with lighter ones. But they will be different from the set on the right. I used five total there. I might use six on the left. It will depend on what strikes my fancy when I get there. After that the only thing that will remain will be signing the piece in the small blank area immediately beneath the mega-dark strip on the left hand center edge.

I get notes from folk marveling on my rapid progress. But it hasn't been all that speedy. The first note I posted about this project was on 2 January of this year. I had already been stitching on the piece since around the second week of last December, but hadn't written about it because I was in the middle of posting my tutorial on graphing line unit patterns using GIMP (November-December 2010). Here's the first snap of the thing, so you can see the progress since:

To be fair, just the small area I completed yesterday is larger than many contemporary commercial samplers, but even so, a project in a simple technique that takes more than year to finish even when working with daily diligence, isn't exactly being worked at light speed. Or is being stitched by someone with a day job...

In other news, there are major seasonal celebrations afoot. First is a happy birthday to Long Time Needlework Pal Kathryn Goodwyn -she of "Too many centuries, too little time." Long may she research and stitch! And I tease readers here again about her forthcoming Flowers of the Needle series, which I've had the opportunity to see in preview. It's worth every bit of slavering, panting anticipation.

Plus it's Cookie Season again in String Central's kitchens. That means the obligate ten varieties, plus Panforte again this year. I delight in having an apprentice baker now, and no longer having to staff the entire manufactory myself.

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A boring progress post today. I'm still filling in the upper right hand area, next to the dragon:

Three bands, about 60% of the height of the area filled. These patterns are all in TNCM2.

And speaking of upcoming books - I've been busy lending a hand to Long Time Needlework Pal Kathryn, helping her over some minor layout hassles as she readies her greatly spiffed up and recomposed Flowers of the Needle re-issue. I can't break official silence to say when and where, but I can assure you that it's going to be well worth the wait; and that I'll be sure to post links to Kathryn's site when it goes live.

In the mean time, off to bake pies and sterilize the house in preparation for the holiday.

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True to my word (although somewhat tardy) I post this week's progress:

I'm filling in the left edge area next to the dragon with narrower bands:

It's Question/Answer time again. These are from posts left here on String and from my various inboxes:

Rachel asks, "...the very bold patterns on the side, what type of stitch did you use to do those?"

Like the narrow border I just added to the piece, the dark bits in these patterns all use long-armed cross stitch:

I tend to follow this logic. Here's a close-up of the texture it produces:

When worked back and forth across an area it produces a plaited texture. There appear to be quite a few variants of long-armed cross stitch family, and a similarly wide family of names for it. I've seen very similar stitches called:

• Tent stitch - nothing to do with the common needlepoint technique of the same name. On the front this looks like standard LACS. I'm assuming that the reverse shows verticals. (Looks in vain for the one corroborating photo of this, to no avail.) On historical pieces this stitch tends to march back and forth to fill a voided background, with the stitching direction parallel to the strip's long dimension. But not always...
• Punto a spina pesce - obviously Italian in provenance. Hard to tell from the photos (and not being able to see the back), but the angle of the long-leap over may be greater than in tent stitch, but this may be an artifact of differences in warp/woof thread count of the ground. Or it may be possible that the reverse shows horizontals instead of LACS's verticals. It's interesting to note that the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston distinguishes between tent and punto a spina pesce. The photos do show however that stitching direction for this one seems to vary on the whim of the stitcher, combining horizontal, vertical, AND diagonals.
• Closed herringbone - also seems to closely resemble LACS on the front, but produces horizontals on the back. LACS forms a species cline (a related continuum) with the herringbone family.
• Portuguese Stitch, twist stitch, Slav stitch, twist stitch, long-legged cross stitch, plait stitch Greek stitch - all reported names for LACS. Some can be found here.
• Montenegrin Stitch - A related stitch, but with an additional vertical component. The stitch is used more for foreground stitching, rather than background fill, and the direction of stitching closely follows the design's lines - merging horizontal to diagonal, to vertical as dictated by the pattern being stitched. (It's hard to tell but the fifth band down on this sampler, with the strong blue up and down may be Montenegrin, or may be LACS).

There's a nice piece on historical use of cross stitches, including some members of the LACS family on Northern Needle.

Rachel also asks, "Are all the designs on your sampler going to be in your next modelbook?"

Most of them. Exceptions are the three direct quotations from Lipperheide, and the three small all-over patterns that can be found in Ensamplario Atlantio . Also some of the patterns appearing on my last two large samplers - Clarke's Law and Do Right - will also be in there. The exceptions being patterns that have already appeared in The New Carolingian Modelbook.

Lisa asks, "I've got Ensamplario. But where can I find outlines to fill in that book's designs? I really don't want to do a checkerboard."

The answer is "all over!"

To start, there are sources for outline patterns from blackwork's heyday. Around the same time as I got this question, Elmsley Rose reminded me that the on line edition of Trevalyn's Commonplace Book is still available at the Folger. It's a bit late for inhabited blackwork, but is not out of the question. It contains drawings in it that would be super for it (and even better for spot filled/stippled blackwork). This is the same resource that Kathy over at Unbroken Thread is using for her cap project. Of special note are the plates starting around the 7th page of the display (when 50 per page are shown). These peasecods would be killer; as would these plumes. Thanks from us all, Elmsley!

If you're not stuck on historical sources, all sorts of motifs and repeats are out there. I've done quite well using patterns intended for stained glass, and stencils as inspiration. I don't have pix (these being from the pre-Internet era), but I did a couple of pieces from a Dover book of Japanese stencils that combined simple florals with the geometric fillings, to excellent effect. Patchwork patterns are also very useful as framing devices for contrasting fills. Also I'd nominate coloring books as outline sources. Yes, coloring books. Maybe not a SpongeBob book or Disney special, but there are quite a few that show flowers, butterflies, seashells, or geometrics.

Late breaking update! I forgot to mention one source for historical and heraldic motifs, simply drawn. It's the traceable art collection maintained by a consortium of SCA heralds. They use it to simplify the process of drawing up heraldry. But there are all sorts of images in there that would make excellent small blackwork projects. Please contact the artists listed on the images before re-use.

So there are lots of places to look into - you needn't be forced to do a plain square grid.

Jane asks, "How many threads do you stitch over?"

To date most of my pieces have been on 36-50 count linen, worked mostly over 2x2 threads. But that's not the way historical pieces were worked. Their ground cloth weaves were in the 50-count and finer range, and they tended to stitch over anywhere from 3-5 threads. Three or four seems to be most common, and I can't rule out up to 6x6 either. Also, as I graph up more and more from artifacts, I do note that not all historical ground cloths were spot on even weave. Most are off just a hair in one dimension or another, usually compressed along the vertical compared to the horizontal (selvedge to selvedge). Also - and again I work from photographs, so I can't swear to the pinpoint count that up close and personal with actual pieces would bring - some of them do look as if they were stitched on skew counts. Taking one more thread on the vertical to make the output a bit more square in appearance.

I hope these answers help. Please feel free to ask questions. It makes figuring out what to write about MUCH easier. <grin>

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Amidst all the far greater havoc and destruction of the Halloween snow here in New England, we had our own minor incident. We lost the tri-trunked mountain ash in our side garden:

We noticed the trunk on the ground immediately after the storm, but it took a while for us to notice the second trunk reclining on our roof. I think it slowly sank to this position after the first day and did not land there in thumping violence, as did the one on the ground. There appears to be no damage to the roof, gutter, or thin stucco walls (lucky, that!). Unfortunately the arborist says that the last trunk is undermined and unstable, and the whole thing should come out before the next storm.

I really liked this small tree - dappled shade, spring flowers, tons of berries for the birds. To be fair, it can also be a bit of a nuisance to maintain because of its habit of thrusting sprouts and suckers, coppice-style. But in spite of the burden of snippage in the miniature spider-forest that springs up each May, the tree was appreciated all year round. For example, we host a robin flash mob each fall, because migration coincides with berry production. Some years late heat ferments them on the tree, so we get a drunken bird scrum instead of a polite lunch counter. But no more.

Later this week the tree guy returns with his crew to take the tree away, removing the trunk on the roof, the remaining standing trunk, and grinding the stump. I'd like to replace it with another mid-size tree, rather than waiting for a random one inch scion of the original to grow to tree size. But what to put there? Another small to mid-size ornamental, for sure. Another ash or rowan is a possibility. I've always been fond of hawthorns (but they're pest prone), and I've read some buzz lately about American hornbeams from "plant native" advocates. But not a dogwood, and not a cherry - both are pretty but over represented in this area. Whatever it is, it will be small and will take quite a while to preside over the side garden as did its predecessor.

Back to stitching progress:

Although I'm not quite at the right edge of this strip I will finish out my current background thread and stop. I'll move over to the blank area to the right of the dragon, and fill in some narrower strips, bottom to top. Once I've got that area completed, I'll finish the remaining right hand bit of the current strip. Why? While I do have my margins, centers, and quarters marked with lines of stitching, I've deviated from them ever so slightly as I have been working. Rather than risk being a thread or two off on completion on this piece, and being too lazy to count up and re-establish my line, I'll work from the bottom of my empty space, then when my edge nears the current strip, I'll eke it out to align with the now easy to see termination line.

Ulterior motive of course is that I find this particular strip very boring. The leaf double running outlines are fun, but there's a heck of a lot of squared background. Figuring out the little strips will be a breather before I have to return to do the other half of the thing.

Finally, shout out to a couple of folks who are waiting to see their gallery pix here. Apologies. I'm on it, but I'm way behind due to work deadlines and minor complications like trees falling on the house.

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Or in our case today, drifted leaves. Covered by snow during our unseasonable pre-Halloween snowstorm. Very odd to have to shovel a path for trick-or-treaters.

In any case, here are some leaves as yet untouched by the weather:

Progress on this current strip is slow. Like all voided background designs, it takes a lot of stitching to do the area cover. Still, I'm moving along. Here's the thing in full sampler context:

I'm still considering what to put left and right of the dragon, but have decided that whatever designs I end up using, both sides will be collections of narrow bands with short repeats, worked horizontally. But given the pace of the current strip, I probably won't be getting to them until January. Not only due to current production speed, but also because of holiday interruptions and some end-of-year knitting obligations.

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The dragon panel is finished!

I wish the shading on the tail end of the beast better balanced that on the head end, but what I have here is true to the original. If I ever stitch him up again, I may modify the pattern somewhat and either lighten the branch on the right, or darken something on the left. Still I've been fond of this guy since I first saw him in the '70s, and am delighted to have finally successfully charted and stitched him. He'll be the last two charts in TNCM2 (he's too big for one page).

What's next? A panel that will run the width of the piece at the top edge. This one will be another crib from Lipperheide, but unlike the last bits I borrowed from that source, it was too difficult to stitch it directly from the engraving. The background of that illustration is shown in the drawn squared filling (some museums label th stitch "punto milano", possibly Italian 4-sided stitch, drawn very tight). It sort of looks like a drawn thread ground, but it would have been VERY difficult to achieve all that thread removal given the scale and convolutions of the un-voided motif areas. In any case, I had to regraph it from the Lipperheide panel prior to work. Even though I drafted it up I do not think I will include this one in TNCM2 because it's available in another contemporary source.

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What have I been up to while posting the informational notes last week?

Fighting a long-standing battle - and at long last - conquering my nemesis.

I'm not sure if this is a dragon, or a lion, or some other beastie, but whatever it is, I've made failed attempts to graph it from its original source. I've gotten close a couple of times, but never close enough to do the panel justice. I think I've hit it this time - fifth time's the charm!

I've paired it with a border from the same source, but not shown in association with the dragon on the original sampler. Like most of the other strip patterns I've stitched over the past 18 months both of these will be in my Second Carolingian Modelbook (TNCM2).

How did the bottom panel turn out?

and how is the piece as a whole coming along?

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Following up on the last post on hoops and keeping work clean, here's another helper. This one is a custom dust/transport cover for flat frames.

I have to admit, with a hectic life and not liking to stitch away in a sequestered studio, I have little time or place for work that requires a large frame. In part that explains my forever project - a coif that's been in progress for (mumble, mumble) something like 14 years. Being silk, with raised elements (raised chain over cross stitch, plus silver), it would have been harmed if I had chosen to work it on a hoop. So I hauled out my ancient flat frame.

My flat frame is an old scrolling model, and weighs a ton. I'm not sure when or where I got it, but I do know that I had it since high school. It's so heavy that it overbalances many standing frame stands - a fact that got me in trouble in the early days of Usenet, when I posted that I had tried it out with a certain manufacturer's stand, and the result was about as stable as a toddler holding a bowling ball.

Here you see it with the coif project mounted. The tension is somewhat released for storage, but you can see that I haven't scrolled the stitching area yet:

You can also see that I've mounted my ground cloth with waste cloth edges, laced to the frame for additional tautness (when the lacings are pulled tight).

This huge piece works best on a frame stand, otherwise I need two hands to hold the work, plus one or two hands to stitch. Even so, I occasionally drag it out to work on, and have brought it to SCA events to stitch outdoors.

How to keep it neat and tidy? A custom frame cover:

I made it from some well-washed and well-shrunken heavyweight 100% cotton twill, not unlike the fabric used to make karate uniforms. There are no snaps or fasteners of any type on it to rust or to catch on the stitching. Here's how it works:

The cover is shown here with the top end near the viewer. There's a large 'buttonhole" in the top flap.

The frame is placed on the center, and the left and right flaps are folded in to cover. Note that in finished dimension they are roughly 12 inches tall and 17 inches wide.

Then the bottom of the cover is brought up over the folded flaps. Note that the bottom is longer than the frame is tall. There's a nice, healthy "envelope flap," about 8 inches deep. But at the line corresponding to the frame's edge, I've sewn a handle (a six-thickness tube of the same fabric, with the ends turned in, stitched lengthwise).

The flap turned in and tucked behind the frame, and the handle is poked through the slit in the top:

I do not have the exact dimensions for my piece, but the principle is pretty clear. My proportions work like this - ADDING SEAM ALLOWANCES (not shown on diagram and easy to forget):

I laid out and cut two of the big center strip, two of the side flaps, and a strip for the handle (not shown). I sewed the side flaps to the two center strips, then sewed around the entire perimeter to make a big cross shape, leaving room to turn the piece inside out. Once the seams were on the inside, I pressed it and hand-sewed up the gap. Then I made the handle, and the extra big buttonhole through which the handle is poked.

Now this cover isn't perfect. It works well enough for my frame in its current configuration. My round top and bottom stretcher bars are always going to be the same distance apart (the verticals have only the one "poke through" point", but my work might sometimes be narrower or wider. Wider shouldn't be a big problem although there may be gaps in the corners. Narrower though would require that I make a new cover. But the thing has worked well enough, protecting this piece in spite of neglect, and (when stitching time comes) serving as a lap cover while I work on it.

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Thanks to Jane and Alicia we have questions. I paraphrase and answer:

Why don't you use a flat frame?

I like to schlep work around with me. Unless I have a compelling reason to use a flat frame I always use a round one held in hand. But that's not optimal for most stitching. Unless the entire stitching area is small enough to fit inside the hoop without repositioning here are some reasons to skip the hoop and go with a flat frame:

• Dimensional work with raised stitch elements that can be crushed (examples include knot stitches, raised chain or plaited stitches)
• Areas of flat stitching (includes satin stitch, long and short stitch)
• Long length stitches either on their own or secured with ties (like laid work, Bokhara or Romanian couching)
• Friable or crushable threads with delicate surfaces (silks, wools, ribbons, metals, shiny or textured threads)
• Ornaments or surface embellishments (beads, buttons, padded work of any type, or couched threads)
• Delicate ground cloth with a shiny surface, or an easily distorted weave.
• Threads with colors that crock (come off the thread via abrasion or dampness)
• Extremely hot weather that makes hands very sweaty

I mostly stick to counted thread styles worked with very short low-profile stitches (18 stitches or more per inch (2.54cm)), done on nice sturdy linen or linen/cotton blends at 36 or more threads per inch, in tough-as-nails DMC or comparable single-dyed cottons (no over-dyed or specialty dyed threads). Those conditions are perfect for hand-held, in-hoop stitching.

How do you use a round frame and obtain good tension without crushing/stretching/distorting the work between the outer and inner hoop?

Even my flat, matte work can be hoop-squished. I have a couple of hints for minimizing damage.

First is unless you are using a floor or other stand to hold the hoop for you, use a smaller diameter hoop. Yes, this sounds counter intuitive because a larger frame looks like it needs less frequent repositioning. However I've found that for me at least, hoops larger than 6.5 inches (16.5cm) maintain tension poorly and are harder to hold and work on in the hand. This leads to more tugging of the fabric and reseating the hoop, and more hoop-related damage to the work in progress. Also, wider hoops - meaning the height of the hoop's barrel - hold better than skinny ones, although there's a point of compromise between frame height and hand-comfort.

My all time fave hoop for counted work on medium weight linen is a Hardwicke Manor 6" diameter hoop that's 5/16" wide (15.24cm x .8cm) The stitching area is ample, the wood is well polished and smooth, unlikely to snag threads; and it's easy to hold. I got mine from Hedgehog.

But just the hoop alone isn't enough. For optimum holding power and gentleness to the fabric under tension, my second hint is that the hoop needs to be padded:

That's plain old white lightweight cotton twill tape, 0.75 inches wide (1.9cm). I've wrapped it around the inside hoop on the diagonal, taking care to maintain an even thickness all the way around. Because of the wrapping angle and carefully laid overlapping, the bottom hoop is covered by the equivalent of two thicknesses of the tape. The join is at the lower left, near the outer hoop's screw. I've turned the edges under and close hemstitched the twill tape's end to the inside of the bottom hoop, where it will not get in the way.

Now, why not pad the top hoop too? Two reasons: the screw fastener, and abrasion. The Hardwicke Manor hoop has a much longer, more robust screw fitting than "dime store hoops." Even so, you can see that it's just long enough to accommodate the now-padded hoop plus my stitching. If I were to pad the top hoop too, the screw would not be long enough to engage and tighten. Also a smooth top hoop is less likely to "rough up" the my finished work. Forcing a high-friction padded top hoop over finished stitching would harm the stitching. The padded bottom, coming in contact with the work's reverse side won't scrape the viewing surface. So I pad just the bottom. One caveat - on a couple of occasions, I've protected my work in progress with a top layer of very thin white cotton muslin, cut into a big toroid (think donut shape). The hole is centered in my frame's center, and the hoop engages on its sides, rather than touching my stitching. Then I stitch in the center "window" of the donut's hole. The sweaty hand holding the hoop touches only the protective cover, not the ground cloth or the stitching. I'm not fond of working this way, but have found it useful in very dirty places, or when working on a delicate ground.

What about plastic hoops? I don't like them. I find the a wood hoop is less likely to leave shiny "too squished" spots on my work. I also don't like their fastenings. Plastic hoop screws are rarely tight enough for me, and they're also rarely long enough to allow for a padded inner hoop. And the spring mount plastic hoops? Others may enjoy using them, but again I do not find them worth the bother. Both styles of plastic hoop don't maintain tension as well as wood. A quality wood hand hoop is not a major investment. Yes, it is much more expensive than a plastic hoop, but if you're going to dedicate hundreds of hours to your project, spending less than US $10 on tool that will last a lifetime is well worth it.

On to the distortion part of the question. Put the frame on loosely then yank the fabric taut, and you're likely to disrupt the weave. Less so with Aida or Hardanger grounds than with plain weave, but the risk is there. Also, pulling fabric taut can injure finished stitching when it is forced between the top and bottom hoop. If you work in hand and use a smaller frame you'll have to re-adjust your fabric in-frame less often than if you use a large diameter one. Less fussing = less distortion. (If ground cloth threads do become skewed due to yanking, try laying the cloth flat on a table, upside down, then gently stroking the distorted area on the diagonal with a bodkin or needle tip. That usually re-assorts the weave nicely.)

I put my work into the frame with care, preferably on a table or flat surface. I minimize yanking and tugging to achieve tautness, trying to achieve as tight a fit as possible without supplemental stress on the fabric. If I'm hooping over a stitched area I try to position the frame over that area first, then lower the opposite side frame into place with any sliding/squeezing being over an unstitched area - the idea being NOT to put additional stress on the stitched part. I try to minimize repositioning, stitching my frame full before moving on. And if I am going to put my work down for more than a day, I remove it from the frame entirely.

How do you keep the rest of the work clean while you are stitching, especially if you will be embroidering outdoors at a Ren Faire or another dirt/stain prone place?

There is that trusting to luck thing. Also, I don't take stuff I can't wash to dirty venues. And yes - I do wash my cotton on linen stitched pieces when I'm done with them. In some cases I've worked on them an entire year, and no matter how clean my hands are when I sit down, grime accumulates. (Silk pieces get special protection, more on that in the next post).

And avoid eating/drinking while stitching. I have to admit I disobey this more than I abide by it, since my evening stitching hour is usually accompanied by a glass of wine. But the glass sits far from the work on a table, I put no needlework tools near it and move the work off my lap when I sip; then wipe my fingers on a napkin - all in an effort to avoid drips, spills, dampness, and stains.

A clean work bag, with nothing else stowed in it is another help. No pencils, no bottles of water, no energy bars, no wallet, no kid toys, no cigarettes, no newspapers or magazines, nothing except the work, a pattern (if needed), a small lap cover, and a pouch for scissors, threads or other tools, and another for glasses (if needed). Keep the paper pattern in a plastic protector, so that ink doesn't rub off on the project. If I'm working from a printed pattern, I make a working cop of it, keeping the originals pristine - then destroy the working copy or stapling it to the original when I'm done, treating both pages as one entity - practices permissible under fair copyright use.

The cover comes in if my piece is large enough to drape across my lap, especially if I might be dirty. I've got a couple of small well washed plain linen or cotton tablecloths, barely big enough for a two person brunch table that make perfect lap covers. I'll spread the protective cloth over my lap so that the stitching stays nice and far from grimy jeans or a soot-stained skirt, then when I'm done fold the cover over my work in progress like a big burrito before stowing it back into my bag. The lap-cover/work wrap method (with separate work bag) is especially valuable when camping or at Ren Faires.

Sometimes if the piece is very large I might take some well washed light weight muslin and roll the part I'm not working on in it like a jelly roll, securing it with some extra large jaw-style hair clips - taking care that the clip only contacts the muslin wrapping and not any stitching. I find that if I'm working a big table spread, rolling up the non-working sections can help tame the project and make it more portable.

I described the toroid mask treatment above. This can help in particularly dirty or sweaty places, protecting the ground cloth from skin oils, so that the piece doesn't end up with little frame-sized halos of filth where the hoop used to be. And sometimes luck doesn't work. If you see this piece in person up close (click on it to enlarge), you'll spot a barely detectable halo that washing never could remove in the lower right hand corner, near the right hand mermaid's tail - legacy of stitching around a Pennsic campfire, long ago.

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Incremental progress here must be excruciatingly boring to read about. But undaunted, I continue to post:

You can see that I continue to work the current Y strip across the bottom of the piece.

Now one of the few remaining readers here has asked about the narrow slice left bare - indicated above by the yellow arrow. It's not a mistake. It is an artifact of squaring out the repeats, but I intend to put it to good use. That will be the last little bit I stitch on the piece, and will be the spot where I sign or initial the work, along with a date of completion.

Still working on the graph for the next slice...

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More progress!

The new band is marching across the bottom nicely, bringing a dark footing to the thing. Here you can see that I outline first, then fill in the voided long-armed cross stitch (LACS) background:

Trust me, it's MUCH easier to work LACS inside an outline. I did it "feral," (without outlines) on the large dark panel in the center of the left edge. Plain old cross stitch is easier to count than LACS with its braided surface texture. That one panel probably took twice as long to do in LACS as a result. This band is moving along much faster. Another two weeks tops, and I should have the entire bottom edge finished. An aside - there's a mistake in the current strip. Pat yourself on the back if you can spot it!

In other news, The Resident Male has a project to showcase this week. In the spring we finally replaced our Carter-era washer and dryer with ones that work. Because we had to fit them into an existing alcove, and I wanted efficient front loaders, that took a bit of shopping around. Most front loaders on display in this area are giant capacity/top of the line units or are mini capacity apartment size stackers. Big ones wouldn't fit in the space we had available, and with kids, we wanted more capacity than the smaller, stackable models. We finally tracked down some mid-size GE units, well reviewed with good repair records, and ordered them.

Now one problem with these front loaders is that the openings are knee height, and users have to stoop to put the laundry in. This is why the makers offer height-raising pedestals as options. Unfortunately, pedestals for our smaller size units are not offered in the US. So the Resident Male, freshly inspired by countless evenings of home improvement TV, tackled the project himself:

We now have two drawers for storage of once-a-year type kitchen impedimenta - like the big turkey roasting pan. And no more reaching in for that last sock on hands and knees! I declare this project a success. Now how does the new washer perform? It cleans much more thoroughly than my late 1970s/early 1980s vintage Kenmore did, even removing stains I thought were lost causes. The washer/dryer pair sip water, detergent, and energy, noticeably decreasing our consumption of each. And they're quiet. We can now sit in the kitchen (behind the photographer) and have a conversation while the machines are running. But there are also a couple of minor drawbacks. Cycles take twice as long to complete; the mid-capacity model holds less than the old top loader, so there is one more wash per week; and for some reasons, sheets twist themselves into Gordian knots in the dryer, and do not dry well, unless I take the time to re-assort them several times mid cycle. Drawbacks aside, the new set-up is far superior to the old one, and the raised platform is the icing on the cake.

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Yes, through the crowdsource project and minor work chaos, plus hurricanes, child transport to and from college and camp respectively, I've managed to keep plugging away at my big blackwork sampler. I finished the small strip I was working on that evens out the edge of the stitched area. The pattern I just finished has an amusing motif in it that looks like a very fat owl to me. This one would be a killer edging for clothing, especially with the with the background done in a bold color, with the motif outlines in contrast. The drama of a deep crimson background and couched gold overstitching for the outlines would be over-the-top fabulous.

Now I'm working on the voided band that will be the piece's bottom edge. Although I like the way this strip looks, it's not my favorite to stitch. I like the eccentric nature of the diagonal wrapped bar that connects the up and down motifs. I also like that there is more than one version of this in museum collections, each different but obviously renditions of the same source pattern and that both versions I've seen have been worked in dark green. One version pairs strips of the repeat, mirroring them along a center axis. The other is just one strip, like I've stitched below. There are enough other minor differences between the details of the oh so similar motifs that make me think that they may have come from the same family or workshop, but were not part of the same original artifact. On my piece I've chosen to work one of the mirrored strips as a single rather than the stand-alone version.

What don't I like about this pattern? The miserable little squares. They offend my "right-side/wrong-side as much the same as possible" bias. The narrow Lipperheide strip just finished and the wide Lipperheide panel both with myriad "island motifs" - bits of stitching not attached to the main design - were bad enough. You can see some of the isolated flowers in the snippet to the top left, above, and the each-motif-separate narrow strip to the right. But the current pattern with its zillion little squares will leave me totally detesting it by the time I've spanned the width of the work. (The sharp eyed will not a mistake made and then picked out and restitched that was spotted after the detail shot was taken but before the larger progress photo was snapped.)

Now that I'm at the bottom, what's next? Why, the top third of my sampler, as yet unstitched! There's a particular figural panel I'd like to center in that space, surrounded by narrower strips to fit. But first I have to graph it up from the artifact. It's big and complex, and has been my graphing bugbear for the better part of two decades. Time to roll up the sleeves, grab the magnifying glass and get to work.

On Crowdsourcing

The just completed crowdsourced pattern was an interesting exercise. I hope folk enjoyed it. I am both grateful to and delighted by those who chose to participate. I really like the result. I might not stitch all of the contributed motifs on the same piece (opting to do themed subsets of them instead) but all were prime and all would be stellar stitched up.

However gathering up and regraphing them did take me away from work on TNCM2. About 1,200 people to date have downloaded one or more of the crowdsource installments over the course of the five week project. About 14 people contributed - Twerp, Jennette de Beauvoir, Sandy, Laura Kathleen Barashear, Kathryn Goodwyn, Jane Wyant, Alexandra Rule, Susan Davis, Pam, and 5 anonymous donors (again thanks!). It did take weeks more than I expected to fill the page.

Even so, I am thinking of running another one. I'm contemplating either another inhabited ground frame but with slightly larger motif areas, or narrow strip repeats suitable for a band sampler. I know I have two people who have expressed interest in contributing to a future crowdsource project. If you'd be interested in either contributing to or seeing one or the other formats, please let me know (no obligation - I won't hunt down folk and demand creativity.)

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It's my fault for directing all input to an alternate mailbox instead of my main address, mostly to avoid spam. Another great pattern got away from me in the cross-inbox shuffle.

I present our collection, now an even 40 patterns!

Where's the one that went missing? Just below flower #5, now moved to the top row of half-diamonds you will see:

• 40 - Beetle, from Alexandra Rule, who responded to my call for more insects last week with this beauty!

Groveling apologies to her for letting her beetle crawl off through inattention and sloth. And thanks to Anonymous, who graciously consented to let her symmetrical pattern be moved to an edge diamond, to make room for Alexandra's design.

That should be all of them. I've scoured my inboxes now, including my spam filter folders. If there are any more out there that haven't been posted, please let me know. And if there's interest in another crowd-sourced project - also please let me know. I'd be happy to collect/collate, provided folk still trust me not to lose input.

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Taa daah! I present our finished crowdsource pattern page! 39 different and distinct patterns, from Twerp's Starbee to Pam's Knot, designed by you - readers of String!

To round out our count we have:

• 32 - Gum Blossom #1. From Susan Davis, posting all the way from Australia
• 33 - Death's Head. Susan continues our piratical sub-theme. The eye patch and nose are done off-count.
• 34 - Doodle. Also Susan's. The tightly packed stitches at the arms' ends will present like satin stitch.
• 35 - Gum Blossom #2. Susan again, sharing flowers from Oz with the rest of us.
• 36 - Gum Blossom #3. More Susan. Very sweet!
• 37 - Gum Blossom #4. Susan's final flower.
• 38 - Snails. Mine. I can't resist working these snails into every project I can. Your initials can be swapped into the center oval instead of the flowers.
• 39 - Celtic Knot. Last but far from least, from Pam, who ties our totally insane collection up with a nice, final knot.

So there you have it - one full page of crowdsourced contributions. This was fun! If folks want, I'll start another of these. Let me know. Also if you stitch up something using one or more of these fillings, please send me a picture to post here, so we can all share the joy.

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Although it is in the periodic nature of comets to come and go, I owe apologies to The Person Who Wishes to Remain Anonymous for inadvertently omitting her tribute to the Bayeux Tapestry from the crowdsource project updates. The inbox management blunder that made that mistake has been taken out and shot.

This week brought five additions to the project, including the belated comet:

• 27. Comet - a tribute to Halley's Comet as it appeared in the Bayeux Tapestry - Anonymous (with apologies!)
• 28. Mesmer-Flower - A mind bending cross-style flower from from Alexandra Rule
• 29. Anchor - A continuation of our maritime sub-theme also from Alexandra Rule
• 30. Bumblebee - We need more insects if we want to pay homage to the spirit of historical era stitching. This one is from Laura Kathleen Brashear.
• 31. Strawberry - Another for the traditional motif sub-theme, again from Laura Kathleen Brashear.

I'm having way too much fun with these. You can see that we've still got room for eight more full-diamond designs, and for about five more that are symmetrical and that can be represented in the half-diamond boxes at top and bottom.

With some overlap among categories, our sub-themes so far seem to be piratical/nautical (1, 16, 20, 21, 3, 29), science fiction (26, 23, 24, 11), sweetness-and-light (31, 22, 6, 10, 18, 13, 4), traditional (31, 30, 26, 5, 6, 3, 25, 13, 7, 16, 9, 12, 14, 10, 12), astronomic (27, 20, 31, 11), beasties-and-bugs (30, 19, 16, 6, 17, 3, 2, 16), and floral-fruits (26, 5, 25, 13, 7, 9, 12, 14, 10, 8). This leaves poor ennui (15) sitting in the corner and sulking, unless you think that by virtue of "Meh" being a popular Think-Geek t-shirt, he belongs in with SF.

If anyone has started stitching something using these, I'd love to hear about it.

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First, thanks this week to our crowdsource design contributors - the patient Jane Wyant, and (as always) Long Time Needlework Pal Kathryn Goodwyn:

• #25 - Grapes - Kathryn's own needlework sigil, offered up to our collection. (Kathryn's deep love of grape motifs is legendary).
• #26 - TARDIS - From Jane Wyant, a Whovian tiny inter-dimensional call box should we wish to stitch in two places at the same time.

We've still got a few open diamonds. With some repositioning I think I can fit in seven more motifs. Feel free to send yours along.

On my own blackwork sampler, progress is being made. My Lipperheide panel is proceeding apace.

I am not going to have room for the entire repeat. There's a head of one of the four winds (possibly Boreas), and a horn tooting satyr that will have to wait their turn on a future piece. Unless Kathryn gets there first. :)

After I finish out this strip to the left hand edge of the stitched area I will fill in a narrower band below the sprigged chimney pots. Then I'll edge across the entire bottom with something nice and dark - probably worked voided style. I haven't picked out the designs for either of those strips yet, but as folk following here know, I enjoy bungee jump style stitching. Once the dark area is done that will leave only the top. Believe it or not, the part you see stitched here is only about 65% of my total piece. I'm not sure what I'll do up there, but that's still down the road.

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A few more submissions this week. It's not too late if you want to play along!

All of these are from anonymous donors.

#20 - A very aggressive sun.

#21 - A mustachioed moon.

#22 - A spiral mint candy.

#23 - Tiny robot!

#24 - Frankenstein's Monster/

The sun, moon, robot and monster are from someone who doodled these up on the floor of a recent science fiction/comics convention that shall also remain nameless. The candy comes from someone who was charmed by the ladybugs, unicorn and the bunny, and was inspired to continue the counter theme of sweetness and light. (As opposed to poison, pirates, and ennui).

I welcome more input - traditional flowers, non-specific geometrics, animal, vegetable, domestic, wild, fantasy or reality.

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Designs for the crowdsource blackwork project continue to trickle in. All are welcome! I won't close out until the stream stops.

Here you see last week's all-pattern page, augmented with the new submissions:

Credits for numbers 1-16 are in last week's posting.

17. Bunny - from Laura Kathleen Brashear

18. Peacock - Also from Laura Kathleen Brashear

19. Sparkle Unicorn Pony - Yes, there's a 13-year old living in this household who when asked, "What would you like to see me draw" came up with the obvious.

If you want to play along at home, copy the blank square above and edit it in any graphics program, or do like these folk have done - print it out, draw on it, and send me a scan or a photo ( kbsalazar (at) gmail (dot) com). I'll graph up the final and include it on the master chart.

By the way, don't miss clicking on Laura's name. She's got a nifty series at her blog, redacting geometric embroidery patterns from a set of Russian language ethnographic arts photo plates from before 1900, currently on digital display at the New York Public Library's on line site. I've been eying those for a while because some of them have roots in my favorite age of embroidery. Thanks for supporting the crowdsource project, Laura!

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Thank you all! As you can see, our crowdsourced blackwork pattern page is starting to fill up:

I've made no attempt to balance these or place them in any particular way. Numbering starts in the center, and works (more or less) in order of receipt. Half stitches, and stitches off the grid are shown in red. I've also taken the liberty of naming these, and including comments if provided by the donors. So we have:

1. Death's head - mine, fromDancing Pirate Octopodes
2. Octopus - also mine, from Dancing Pirate Octopodes
3. StarBee - sent in by the fabulous Twerp, our first submisison!
4. A Cup of Tea - from Sandy
5. Crosshatched Flower - from Anonymous
6. Ladybugs - from #5 Anonymous' 10-year old daughter
7. Shaded Flower- from the prolific Jeannette de Beauvoir
8. Geometric - "It starated life as a flower, I don't know what it is now..." - from Jeannette de Beauvoir
9. Acorn Sprig - "The acorn looks a bit big but a smaller one was too small." - Jeannette de Beauvoir (I think the size is just fine).
10. Pomegranate - Jeannette de Beauvoir is on a roll!
11. Zap! - :"Kind of reminds me of a circuit diagram." - another from Jeannette de Beauvoir
12. Flower Sprig - Jeannette de Beauvoir again.
13. Four Flowers - Jeannette de Beauvoir
14. Mistletoe - "I think this could stand to be moved down a space or two in the frame" - Jeannette de Beauvoir
15. Meh. - This one came in earlier but fell to #15 due to lack of enthusiasm :) - Another (totally different) anonymous donor
16. Blue Crab - "To continue your ocean theme." - from Maryland Stitcher, who managed to fit in the requisite number of legs!

I'll release the whole page as a well-behaved PDF as soon as it's full. It's not too late to add your patterns to our pile. I'm more than happy to finish out this page, and to start more pages if needed. The instructions are here.

And if you landed on this page looking for Ensamplario Atlantio my free book of blackwork fillings - do not despair. You can find it here.

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Patterns for the Crowdsource Blackwork Pattern project continue to trickle in.

Sandy (no link) sends a cup of morning tea.

And a family wishing to remain anonymous sends a flower (from the mom) and ladybugs (from the 10-year old daughter):

This anonymous donor was inspired enough to register his or her lack of enthusiasm:

Got an idea - simple, elaborate, silly, or serious? Here's the blank frame again:

Copy it local and edit it in any graphics program, or do like these folk did - print it out, draw on it, and send me a scan or a photo ( kbsalazar (at) gmail (dot) com). I'll graph up the final. When we have a pile, I'll compose them all together into a page or two of patterns and post them back here.

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Back from vacation! A week of Cape Cod sun, sand, salt water and doing as little as possible except enjoying those things.

This year my mom came with us and we had a great time. We spent most of our time on the sands right at our hotel, sitting, swimming, kayaking, even watching Provincetown fireworks from our room's deck. We did our now traditional beach paella, salmon teriyaki on the grill, and flank steak kabobs. I am rested but could be easily persuaded to do a wash-rinse-repeat of the whole week's experience. Seven days is not enough.

Arriving back home, I checked gMail to see if anyone had volunteered a graphed pattern for the crowdsource project. Lo and behold! There was one:

I present Design #1 - Twerp's StarBee. The first design in the series. Red lines indicate straight lines "off the grid" or not at 180/90/45-degree angles. I like this cheeky little fellow. A nice one, Twerp!

If you want to draw up one of your own to be posted here, please feel free to download the JPG at the project's kickoff page, then draw on it by hand or using any graphics program. You can email the resulting file, a photo or a scan of your design to me at kbsalazar (at) gmail (dot) com. Let me know whether or not you want your name or a link posted with your offering. I do reserve the right to do light editorial selection (this is a family-rated website).

Now, what progress have I made on my own stitching?

Some, mostly prior to our departure. I concentrated on two pairs of socks while we were on the beach.

I knit a pair of guy socks, with a simple broken rib ankle and k1p1 ribbing to finish. There is only one in this picture. The other is now at parts unknown. At best guess, I dropped it at dusk on the beach and didn't notice that it was gone. Either seagulls or the sea made off with it. Somewhere there is either a lobster or a tern sporting a new brown habitat. And I need to get another ball of the same yarn and knit a third to make a pair. (Grrrr.) The other pair has a lacy pattern in the ankle. More on that another day.

And here's the latest strip on my sampler:

To which I will return once the socks are done.

One last note - to date (using the click-through count of the fourth part) - over 1,000 people have downloaded the complete Ensamplario Atlantio since I posted it two weeks ago. If you are looking for it, it's here. It's a PDF file - you need a recent version Acrobat Reader to open it. You can get Reader for free, for both Mac and Windows. Although I've gotten some thank-you posts and a couple of questions from people unfamiliar with Acrobat, I've had very little other feedback, and only one bug report - of fonts not displaying properly on an iPad II running the latest version of Safari. I'm looking into that problem and may repost the files later this week.

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At long last, and as promised.  Ensamplario Atlantio: Being a Collection of Filling Patterns Suitable for Blackwork Embroidery is here in PDF format! 

I have to admit that my ambition ran away with me.  The entire thing is 40 pages long, with 35 plates of designs - over 220 or so individual all-over or filling patterns for double running stitch embroidery.  Some are very large repeats and would be better suited for free-use, others are smaller in scale and would work well as fillings in traditional outline/infilled blackwork (like on the pix of the cover, below):



The book ended up being SO large that I was unable to upload it, and downloading would be problematic for most people.  So I have cut it up into four parts:

• Ensamplario-1.pdf (2.03 MB)
• Ensamplario-2.pdf (2.92 MB)
• Ensamplario-3.pdf (3.19 MB)
• Ensamplario-4.pdf (3.21 MB)

I would dearly love to see any projects that use fillings from the collection.  Since I'm making this available as a free download, seeing what my pattern "children" are up to in the real world is my biggest reward.

And also a reminder - just because this is being made available freely doesn't mean that I have relinquished my author's rights.   This book may not be re-issued, re-posted, or sold by others without my specific permission.  I ask that needlework instructors wishing to use the thing get in touch with me so I can keep a log of by whom/when the book has been circulated.

The gauntlet was thrown. I was challenged to produce a chart for The Flying Spaghetti Monster, in all his noodly glory. At the risk of destroying any crumbs of credibility I might have as researcher, I respond.

Hah!

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Once more I go web-wandering, looking for counted thread inspiration from around 1500 through 1620 or so. This time I present some lesser known examples of counted stitching.

What I really wanted to find were examples of household linens - towels, sheets, pillows or other bedding, cushions, tablecloths, and the like. You'd think with all those innumerable domestic scenes so common in iconography there'd be some. So I looked for Annunciations, domestic scenes of the infant or young Jesus, plus other Bible and Saint's lives scenes or parables; and tableaus from mythology. Anything that might show a made-up bed, a dining table, someone drying off, or someone getting dressed.

Given the popularity of counted edging patterns and huge number of household linen artifacts in museum collections, one would think these items would be common in paintings and prints. But they're not. Perhaps the detail of these patterns was too tedious for most artists to attempt to reproduce. And it's possible that for some of the religious art, the absence of decorated linen is of meaning. Lives of humility might not be graced by otherwise ubiquitous domestic embroidery, and it's possible that the audience for these paintings noticed the omission. But I leave such interpretations to art historians. (I'm sure there's more than one dissertation out there on household contents shown in classic religious art scenes.) Here is what I found in my troll of the Web Gallery of Art.

Domestic linen:

Here's a nifty Bathsheba, she's bathing, unaware of the peeping King David. She's wrapped in either sheets or towels - some of which have elaborate embroidered red trim, with just enough detail to make out that the designs are regular enough to be counted. Although this work is undated in the collection, Jan Masseys other paintings are dated from 1550s and 1560s:
http://www.wga.hu/art/m/massys/jan/bathsheb.jpg

Masseys had a thing for David with Bathseba in disarray. Here's another with towels or linens, although the detail is a bit more ambiguous that the last. This one is from 1562:
http://www.wga.hu/art/m/massys/jan/david_ba.jpg

And the barest hint of a bit of blackwork on a napkin from a Last Supper painted by Jacopo Bassano in 1546:
http://www.wga.hu/html/b/bassano/jacopo/1/08lastsx.html

A painting by Carvaggio - Supper at Emmaus, 1601. This one looks like it may be a table carpet, upon which a plain white cloth is spread. Even so, the pattern on the carpet is interesting:
http://www.wga.hu/html/c/caravagg/06/35emmau.html

This is by the same artist and same subject the one above, but is a later work (1606). The table cover under the white cloth looks a lot more like a voided pattern stitched on linen:
http://www.wga.hu/html/c/caravagg/08/47emmau.html

Bath linen(?) in lower right corner, edged with geometric. Master of the Fountainebleau School, Diana at the Bath, around 1590:
http://www.wga.hu/html/m/master/fontaine/diana.html

An embroidered pillow with a dainty counted edging along the seams, in Ambrogio Bergognone's Madonna del Velo, from the 1500s:
http://www.wga.hu/html/b/bergogno/virgin_v.html

Personal linen:

Lots more of these in portraits, although not every painter took the time to do more than indicate the presence of intricate patterns. Certainly not with the graph-able precision of the famous Holbein Anna Meyer portrait on his Darmstadt Madonna panel. Still, detail on scale, placement, and colors can be harvested from these pix. Also I do note that while outer garment styles change and vary from region to region, and placement of the embroidery varies from piece to piece, the styles of the borders patterns and edgings used on chemises and shirts remains surprisingly stable across time and geography.

Black wide geometric stitching on chemise's high collar neck band. Also edging embroidered on cloth worn as a turban style hat. Carvaggio, The Fortune Teller (detail) 1596-1597
http://www.wga.hu/html/c/caravagg/02/11fortu2.html

Geometrics on man's wing-style collar. Portrait of Henri II, 1547:
http://www.wga.hu/html/c/clouet/francois/henri2.html

Chemise heavily embroidered in black, but probably not counted. Hans Eworth, Portrait of Lady Dacre, 1540
http://www.wga.hu/html/e/eworth/l_dacre.html

Geometric stitching in red on narrow high collar. Catarina va Hemessen, Self Portrait, 1548:
http://www.wga.hu/html/h/hemessen/caterina/selfport.html

Wide man's collar and cuffs, in geometric patterns with center panel and complimenting narrow edging bands, worked in red on white linen. Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of Don Gabriel de la Cueva, later Duke of Albuquerque, 1560:
http://www.wga.hu/html/m/moroni/portduke.html

Woman's chemise with broad center panel and collar band, in black on white linen. Peter Bourbus, Portrait of Jacquemyne Buuck, 1551:
http://www.wga.hu/html/p/pourbus/pieter/portrai2.html

Narrow geometric band at top edge of woman's low chemise (also may be detail in red on hat). Vittore Carpaccio, Portrait of Young Woman (artist dates are 1472-1526)
http://www.wga.hu/html/c/carpacci/5/021woman.html

Boy's shirt - narrow collar band, voided in black on white. Jean Clouet, Dauphin Francois. (Artist dates are 1485-1541)
http://www.wga.hu/html/c/clouet/jean/dauphin.html

Man's shirt - narrow panels with black on white geometric stitching, divided by heavier narrow strips of gold or yellow silk embroidery. Lucas (the Elder) Cranach, Portrait Diptych(detail). 1509:
http://www.wga.hu/html/c/cranach/lucas_e/11/05dipty2.html

Man's shirt- narrow panels parallel to center front slit. geometric black on white. Lucas (the Elder) Cranach, Portrait of a Clean-Shaven Young Man, 1522
http://www.wga.hu/html/c/cranach/lucas_e/12/03young1.html

Man's shirt - horizonal panel of either two color stitchery, or one color on brown, appliqued over narrow cartridge pleats to keep them in place. Albrecht Durer, Self Portrait at 26, 1498:
http://www.wga.hu/html/d/durer/1/02/05self26.html

Woman's chemise, with small black edging allt he way around. Martha and Mary Magdalene, 1596 by Carvaggio:
http://www.wga.hu/html/c/caravagg/02/16martha.html

Another scoop neck chemise in the same style of the one above. St. Catherine of Alexandria, 1598 also by Carvaggio:
http://www.wga.hu/html/c/caravagg/02/15cather.html

A different style of higher neck chemise, this one decorated by wide double bands down the center, plus a band around the neck, and narrow strips of stitching, possibly
on seams. From Portrait of the Artist's Sisters Playing Chess, by Sofonisba Anguissola, 1555:
http://www.wga.hu/html/a/anguisso/sofonisb/chess.html

A man's high-neck shirt this time, with a wide band of black geometrics on white. Portrait of a Man, dated 1520-25 by Girolamo Romanino:
http://www.wga.hu/html/r/romanino/manportr.html

Edging on a veil, black on very fine, almost transparent linen. Not too many paintings that show stitched veils! Portrait of Martha Thannstetter (nee Werusin), dated 1515 by Bernhard Strigel
http://www.wga.hu/html/s/strigel/bernhard/portrai2.html

Another stitched veil - this one in multicolors, and possibly dual sided work. Andrea Previtali's Madonna Baglioni, 1515-1520:
http://www.wga.hu/html/p/prevital/baglioni.html

Multicolor bands on boy's shirts, done in a style that looks counted to me. Bernhard Strigel's Portrait of the Cuspinian Family, 1520:
http://www.wga.hu/html/s/strigel/bernhard/cuspinia.html

Voided work edging around a neckline, in black. (Reminds me of the bit at the far right of my current piece). Sanzio Raffaello's angel - a fragment of the Baronici Altarpiece, from 1500-01:
http://www.wga.hu/html/r/raphael/1early/02baron2.html

Two different narrow edging patterns, both in black, both very simple and easy to duplicate right from the portrait. Sanzio Raffaelo's Portrait of a Woman (La Muta) from 1507:
http://www.wga.hu/html/r/raphael/2firenze/2/36lamuta.html

Raffaello was very good at clearly depicting intricate stitching. I really like this St. Sebastian (1501-1502) - the tshirt elaborately embroidered in yellow (gold?) with little black cross stitches is clear enough to chart:
http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/r/raphael/1early/01sebast.html

Very clearly counted work - a man's shirt with a wide, heavy two-tone neckband. It looks applied to the shirting underneath to me. Hans Maler's Portrait of Moritz Welzer von Eberstein, from 1524:
http://www.wga.hu/html/m/maler/welzer1.html

And a lady with a high multicolor stitched collar. This looks like highly embossed stitching to me, not jewelry. And regular enough to make me think that the underlying cartoon was worked on the count, with the embossed stitching done over the cartoon. I have no basis for this opinion other than observation, so feel free to disagree. Willem Key's Portrait of a Lady, undated, but the artist lived from 1515 to 1568:
http://www.wga.hu/html/k/key/willem/portlady.html

A particularly good view of upper body construction of a woman's chemise, embroidery framing center slit, following around the collar and radiating out from it. In this case, with one single pattern maintained uniformly throughout. Black on white. Bernardino Luini's Salome from 1527-1531:
http://www.wga.hu/html/l/luini/father/2/salome1.html

Another killer high neckband on a man's shirt. Again multicolor with red and yellow (gold?), worked on the count. Jan Gossaert's A Noble Man dated 1525-1528:
http://www.wga.hu/html/g/gossaert/2/baudouin.html

and finally

Ambrogio de Predis' Portrait of a Man, from 1500. The pattern on his sleeves is in the forthcoming collection of blackwork filling patterns:
http://www.wga.hu/html/p/predis/portra_m.html

I have references to at least as many again pix as are presented above. Let me know if you'd like me to share them too.

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As you can see, the narrow scrolling border I used mirrored to fill in the empty area is only a few stitches shy of completion:

The eagle-eyed will note two small omissions I have to go back and complete. I blame working on the thing while watching a subtitled movie.

In other news, the PDF of the book of filling patterns is complete. I hope to post it here some time in the next week or so as I iron out some technical difficulties in posting a 10M file. I present the cover as a teaser:

Also - and just for fun - I present a pattern that did NOT make it into the filling book or the upcoming TNCM2. This one was done up as a silly present with several constituencies in mind - my eldest, who wanted more pirate skulls; a co-worker who cherishes the octopus as his totem beast; and my youngest, who has embarked on a world-wide quest for greater acceptance of "octopodes" as the proper plural when more than one cephalopod is sighted. (click on chart below for full size copy).

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As you can see, I've finished out the dark, narrow strip on the right of the oak leaves. (I put a US penny on the frame for scale.)

It was a quick one, especially compared to the extra wide bands of long-armed cross stitch I've been working since March.

I like this design quite a bit, and I think it would be an exceptional choice for the top edge of a chemise (undergown), just barely peeking out at the neckline, as in Bronzino's famous portrait of Eleanora of Toledo. Eleanora had a killer wardrobe and sat for many paintings. I'm hard pressed to choose a favorite because each one is spectacular. (Thanks to the Elizabethan Portraits website for collecting these links.)

Now I'm filling in the strip on the left. You can't make out the design here, but it's already clear that I'm mirroring along a horizontal axis.

Now, how did I know to leave enough room for these strips? I didn't. I'm building this piece as I go, with little or no forethought on pattern choice other than a general idea of where darker and lighter strips should go. I still don't know which way is up. To date all of the designs are non-directional, with neither up nor down. That will change soon. I'd like to include some patterns that feature mythical beasts, but I haven't chosen them yet, and I haven't figured out where they will go. But my fave beast strips are not up-down agnostic, so once I've picked one and stitched it, my up/down decision will be final.

Back to shoehorning designs in. To fill in these odd spaces, the first thing I had to do was to determine their width. Easy. I counted the stitches available in the target space. That's design height, not length. I am not going to worry about centering these fill-in strips left-right. The just-finished area turned out to be 26 stitches tall. I had the center double bud design in the upcoming book. I also had a different pattern that used the little wiggle ancillary frame. I decided to use them together. However, each wiggle in its original form is 6 units tall. The center strip was 16 units tall - 28 stitches. Too many. I decided on a gambit often used in these period strips when borders are married to a main design. I stripped out a solid row of stitches between the wiggle and the main pattern but kept it at the outermost edges. This reduced the count to my target. An easy fix.

For this current strip, I've got a space that's 27 stitches tall. But I don't want to do another dark strip here. Something a bit less dense is in order. So instead of looking for (or drafting up) a single 27-stitch-tall pattern, I decided to take a 13 stitch tall meander from my first book and mirror it. (TNCM Plate 27:3). I'll write more about this one as more stitching gets done. Mirroring in this manner is another perfectly common way 16th and 17th century stitchers used to to build wider repeats from narrower ones. I may play a bit though. There are a couple of bits where I could work in a gratuitous interlace to join the two mirrored repeats. We'll see if that happens as I go along.

The blackwork fillings book...

I haven't forgotten. I'm putting the finishing touches on it right now. I've asked some native Italian speakers for advice on the proper form for the name. Some say that Ensamplario Atlantio is the correct form. Others say it should be Ensamplario Atlantico. I'm leaning towards the former because the latter looks to be a form of Atlantic, not Altantia, and the book isn't going to be named after the ocean. If you're knowledgeable on proper Italian (especially Renaissance Italian), please feel free to chime in. It's now up to 35 plates of designs, plus five pages of intro material. Ten of those pattern pages have NOT been previously posted here. So even if you've been downloading over the winter, there are ample new goodies for you in the final collection.

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I have been reliably informed that if this amount of stitching represents only 40% of the total surface area of my finished project, than I am most assuredly in the middle of a BAP:

So I guess I am...

In any case, here's the latest strip - the darker bit at the right hand edge, that I'd mentioned as being under consideration before:

Compared to some of the other strips, it's a toss-off, minor thing. But I like it.

The blank area to the right of the heavy black bit on the left side of the piece is next. That will also be in long armed cross stitch, but will be much less dense than the major bit of darkness I just completed:

As ever, I'm not entirely sure what will end up being there. Does anyone else do these exercises in bungee-jump stitching? Or am I the only loon who starts a year long project without planning the placement of every wisp of thread?

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Steady progress on the latest strip:

Now that life is beginning to get back to normal (or what passes for normal in this house) I can also report progress on the book front(s).

First, on the PDF collection of blackwork filling patterns, to be named Ensamplio Atlantaea, I apologize for the delay. This one will include all of the filling patterns published here over this winter past. And as an extra bonus for everyone's patience, I will toss in several more pages of additional patterns, not seen here before. It will be free, and will be available for download here at this site. Right now I have 27 pages of patterns (the original 150, plus a dozen more), and hope to make it an even 30. Plus cover and some sort of intro essay. It will NOT include free drawn outline patterns for use with these fillings, nor will it include detailed working methods, although I may abstract some of the double running stitch guidance previously posted here. I hope to have this one up and ready sometime in the coming month.

On the big book - my sequel, to be named A Second Carolingian Modelbook: More Counted Patterns from Historical Sources, I've got about 45 pages of patterns drafted out in whole or in part. Each pattern has annotation, noting its origin artifact or source, or if it's one of the few originals, that attribution. That's about 100 individual patterns, some of which are main strip plus accompanying border. I also have all over patterns suitable for cushions and body linen, narrow strips for cuffs and collars or seam decoration, and wide pieces that would make nifty tablecloth, sheet or towel borders. Right now about 2/3 of the patterns are for double running stitch, although there are some that are good for Italian two-sided cross stitch, long armed cross stitch, lacis, or other square-unit styles. There are also quite a few that were worked voided, some with straight or double running stitch defining the foreground from the background, and some not. Working methods/colors of the originals are also described, and full sources are provided for all graphs, so stitchers can look them up. I do not anticipate finishing this one any time soon. Feedback is that readers want essays on techniques, materials, and methods of employ. All that will take time. As will figuring out how to do the actual publication. (Right now an on demand service like Lulu or one of its competitors looks most likely). This book will not be free, but I am hoping to keep it affordable.

And in other news, it's the beginning of Birthday Season here at String. A much recuperated Smaller Daughter celebrated her 13th last Saturday, mostly by laughing with evil intent at the thought that others had decided that her becoming a teen was the cause of the end-of-the-world predictions for that date. Larger Daughter is now back from college for the summer, and celebrates mid-week. I note the passing of yet another anniversary of my 21st birthday at the end of this month. Today's home-cooked lobster feast was in recognition of all three fetes. The Resident Male, the odd man out in so many respects, does not have to share his natal day with adjoining festivities. We will recognize that occasion later in the summer.

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It's hard to come up with pithy or even vaguely interesting statements to accompany these progress posts. You can see I'm marching along. No new insights to share other than "long armed cross stitch takes almost as much time as it does thread."

As to the provenance of this one - the museum original I found was undated and without a stated place of origin. There are several works with pattens very similar to this, all collected in the late 1800s/early 1900s by several textile enthusiasts who harvested a vast amount of related work from the 1500s through 1700s. Some of the pieces clearly related to this design are all-over patterns, some are single width bands, and some are double width bands. To me (novice that I am) these have an Aegean look about them. The point of origin could be anywhere washed by that sea, including the areas prominent in trade with that region. The Italian states were aggressively trading in that area throughout most of history. As to date - again I haven't a clue. The working method - long armed cross stitch (very evident in the pictures, but sometimes mislabeled "tent stitch" by the holding institutions), in crimson silk on linen would not be out of place in the 1600s.

The band I stitched up has the most evenly proportioned detail of the group. I especially like the little side buds on either side of the center tulip shaped flower. Some of the other bands omit that detail, replace the evenly spaced grape like flower centers with writhing tendrils and birds, and simplify the rest of the pattern. It's common for these counted designs to become somewhat debased over time. Sequential copying can lead to garbling of the original, much like the game of telephone, in which a whisper passed down a long line of people can emerge totally different at the end of the queue. It may be a totally biased assumption, but when presented with several clearly related but slightly different iterations of the same pattern, I tend to see the one with the clearest, best proportioned composition and most detail as probably being among the earlier representations, and the more simplified, more haphazard versions as being later. Again - I'm generalizing, and not every pattern can fall into this continuum. But I have a hunch that entropy rules, even in embroidery design.

To answer some other questions - Christina asks if she can use some of the patterns from the filling collection on a blackwork cloth she's stitching for her daughter. I answer:

Absolutely! That's why I posted them. My restrictions are there to keep people from taking my pages and republishing them as their own work - something that's happened to me before. In almost all cases I bend over backwards for legitimate professionals, too, who request permission to use the patterns in their own kits. Please do not think I wish to hobble individuals who are stitching for themselves, especially those who are exploring the medium on their own. Please feel free to use the things! And if you like, since I'm in this for love, not money - any pictures or links you wish to share of works using the filling collection patterns are most appreciated. I get mega-kicks out of seeing what the kids are up to, out in the wide, wide world. (I'll even repost pix or links, with your permission.)

How's the kid?

She's doing much better, thanks! She's home now, and about to go back to school, although she may begin with half days to start. She's been slowly regaining stamina and strength, and has worked with a tutor on catching up with her classes. I am confident that she'll be back to her old non-stop self in a few weeks.

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Thanks to everyone who sent get well wishes to Younger Daughter. I can report that each day she feels a bit better, but it will take a while.

This weekend's kid recuperation gave me ample time to work on my stitching:

I've got the repeat established now, and all mistakes have been corrected. Now it's just a matter of finishing out this strip.

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"Don't burst your appendix if you can avoid it."

Younger Daughter is back home, after 19 days at Children's Hospital in Boston. She's still got a way to go before she's school-ready, but she's happy to be home with quiet, limited interruptions, and familiar food. Thanks to everyone who sent get well wishes!

I'd like to especially thank the staff at Children's, not all of whose names I caught. They're a very caring bunch, and did all they could to make the kid better and more comfortable. Here's her much cherished souvenir - a little squeezy ball they gave to Morgan to exercise her fingers.

We asked the nursing staff we were assigned to, to autograph our "game ball." We managed to get most but not all of them. Special thanks to Chris Mac, Sharon, Michelle, Josh, Maria, The Original Chris, Meredith, Rachelle, Caitlin, Paola, Cleanne, Cara, Audrey, Dr. Arnold, Dr. Hamilton, all of the residents on 10NW, and all of the other folk whose names slipped me by when I was in a sleep-deprived fog. The kids still has to go back to have the tatters of her appendix excised, but that's a one day bit, not another extended stay.

As you can see, while we were there I had lots of time to stitch. I finished out the oak leaves and acorns at the right, and started another band at the left. That one is very dense, in long armed cross stitch, so it's not exactly zipping along. Also stitching when sleepy led to tons of mistakes and ripping back, so what's here is probably only about half of what I actually stitched.

Even with all of the rework, stitching was a much needed self-administered sedative while I was being a bedside mom.

The plan is to make this strip the same length as the oak leaves. Eventually I'll either find or noodle out an even denser band for the narrow area immediately to the right of the oak leaves, and a less dense but similarly black band to put between the current strip and the established horizontal bands. I might take a break from dense work for a while though, and opt to work something in double running elsewhere on the piece before attempting those two strips. There's tons more room both north and south of these.

One thing to note. So far, all of the finished strips are bi-directional. At this point there is no up or down on my sampler. Either end could be at the top. I could even opt to finish this out in landscape rather than portrait orientation. Jury is still out on what I will do, but I do have a couple of strips I'd like to include that are figural, with clearly defined ups and downs. Stay tuned to see how I work them in.

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...should grow. Vaster than empires and more slow.

This week's progress is brought to us by an in-Barony performance of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, enacted by The Baron's Players. The troupe is made up largely of friends, and the performance was quite enjoyable, played as a farce it had some laugh-out-loud moments. And as I watched, listened, and laughed, I stitched. This is not considered a faux pas in the SCA, where diligent quiet needlework is an acceptable audience activity, provided the attendee is not so absorbed in it as to be insensible or unappreciative of the performance.

Here you see a sideways view of the accumulated stitchery to date, so you can get an idea of scale and placement:

One more full leaf, plus an acorn sprig and part of a second, and I'll be done with this strip and on to the next.

To Adelle, sorry to disappoint. I won't be drafting this project up as a kit and selling it, but all of the designs in it will figure in my forthcoming book.

For those of you who follow such things, barring major crises - I have every intention of being at the Carolingian 40th anniversary at the end of the month, where I will be part of the "dim memories from the ancient past" contingent. I will be wearing my dress with the blackwork underskirt, and in all probability will be seated somewhere comfy where I can watch the fighters and embroider. Stop by and say hello.

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This week's progress largely brought to you courtesy of a kid orthodontist appointment. The removal of Younger Daughter's braces was good for a leaf and a half:

In the photo above you can see the room left for the next narrow band. It's going to be darker than this one. But what to put there hasn't been decided on yet.

On the SCA side, I will be at the 40th anniversary of the Barony of Carolingia later this month, where I will be part of the "Long Forgotten Artifacts of Elder Days" contingent. Provided I can rustle up a dress.

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Deadlines have totally consumed me. No time to do more than post this minimal progress; and smile at the plaited look of long armed cross stitch, up close.

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A bit more progress since my Friday last snap (blogged on Sunday). Now you can see the leaves and acorns, plus the beginnings of the twining stems:

I've departed a bit from my original graphing, norming the acorn caps a bit.

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I'm finally finished with the grape strip. Yaay! Now on to my next pattern:

As described, this one is perpendicular to the esablished stitching direction. It will run north-south instead of east-west. I know it's hard to see from just two evening's stitching snippets, but this one is a fat center branch, with oak leaves and acorns growing off it and entwining it. Part of the leaf is at the upper left of the framed circle, and the beginnings of the acorn cap can be seen at the extreme right.

I'm working this one in foreground, using long armed cross stitch. I am not outlining beforehand (which I point out makes working LACS much easier because long runs of it can be difficult to count). I've already made a mistake which I won't be taking out, and I will probably live to regret my no-outline decision.

This is another of the patterns that I intend to include in the next book, and it is a bit interesting. I've spotted three examples of it stitched up, in three different museum collections. All three are described as being Italian. Two are monochrome, stitched in crimson on plain linen and feature the same matching border. The third is stitched in two colors and is unbordered. Dates range from 15th century through 17th century, and the working methods (although the look very similar in the photos) are described differently. The designs of the three pieces are extremely close, clearly all drawing from a common source. The two monochrome pieces differer in only the smallest of details, but enough to make me think they were not parts of a single original "separated at birth."

To date I have not seen a modelbook page with this pattern on it. But not every printed source survived, and in addition to full books of designs there were also single sheet broadsides. Maybe someday I'll see the ur-source for this oak branch pattern. Or maybe one of my readers knows of it and will chime in.

As to how long this strip will be, I'm not sure yet. At least as long as the stitched center area. Maybe longer. Because it doesn't fill the entire right hand stitching lane, there will be another narrower strip to its right. I'm not sure what that one will be but it will be darker, probably stitched voided style. If I can't find something spot on or close to my available width, I'll do an adaptation, or just make something up. But from the stitching pace of LACS, that will be months from now...

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Some progress and some answers. First, the progress:

As usual, not as rapid as I'd like, but work limits the amount of time I have to stitch. Now on to the answers to questions in my inbox:

What stitch are you using for the dark areas in the current band?

I settled on Italian double sided stitch (aka Arrowhead stitch), as shown on page 32 of The Proper Stitch by Darlene O'Steen . (I found my copy years ago when it first came out, at the now long gone Yarn Shop in College Park, Maryland.) However, I'm finding that over 2x2 threads I can't pull it tightly enough to emphasize the holes and make the appearance as mesh-like as I want. There's just not enough room to compact the weave of my ground cloth sufficiently. If I do another piece using this technique, I'll work over 3x3, or find a more loosely woven ground.

This is a squirrelly looking band. Is it original?

It's a redaction of a 16th century artifact in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number 79.1.59 . It's one of the many patterns that will be in The Second Carolingian Modelbook.

Which end is up?

I haven't decided yet.

Why is the current band so big?

No particular reason. I saw it, charted it out and decided to play test it. Yes, it's at a larger scale than the patterns I've worked so far, but it won't be the largest pattern on the piece, nor will it be the least dense. When it's done this strip will span the entire width of my stitching area. I'll run some other patterns perpendicular to the established direction, framing the part I've already worked. On the other side of this current band will be several more wide bands of various types. They may also be worked horizon to horizon. I'm improvising as I go along.

Have you done any planning at all?

Yes, in a way, but not by orchestrating the entire piece beforehand. Instead I set ground rules. I established stitching bounds and guidelines. I marked the outline and centers of the total stitching area, and added some additional guidelines at 1/4 width and length intervals. I am leaving four threads bare between all stitched units. I'm trying to balance density as I go. I'm working with only one color (good old DMC 310 black), using either one or two strands, depending on the effect I want to achieve. Eventually there will be spots in the ground for which I cannot find or adapt strips or spot motifs of suitable width or height. For those places I intend to use additional fillings from the Blackwork Fillings Collection. And I'm trying to use all-new patterns - stuff I haven't stitched before, with the goal of experimenting with as many of my new book's patterns as possible. So you can think of this as a preview of things to come.

Why aren't you jumbling these up instead of making reproductions? There are tons of beautiful repro samplers out there you can stitch. Why go to all this trouble?

Because stitching someone else's repro isn't something I'm interested in doing. I do admire those pattern drafters and stitchers who chose to do those things, but I find the concept has no appeal for me personally.

I've written about this before. (It's the base stance that makes me a "rogue Laurel" in the SCA.) Exact replication is an extremely high form of craftsmanship to be sure, but it doesn't manifest the highest level of understanding. Just as in a martial art, being able to reproduce the kata - the formal training exercises - shows extreme skill, but it's something else entirely to be able to take the kata's movement vocabulary, and improvise if attacked. Not everyone who can demonstrate kata in the dojo can turn that knowledge into effective fighting. Being able to go beyond kata skills is what differentiates the master from the adept. It's the same for needlework. Reproductions are kata. Making an entirely new piece from the same vocabulary, such that were the new item to be transported back in time it would fit right in - that's mastering true understanding. Now my current piece is NOT something that could be transported back in time that seamlessly. I do not make that claim. It's only a training and teaching exercise. But it is one that's stretching me in new ways - directions I could never achieve by working a stitch for stitch artifact reproduction, or from someone else's chart or kit.

I intend to keep learning, and I invite you to learn with me. Needlework is a very safe subset of life in general. But make it exiting. Face uncertainty and possible failure. Think about taking inspiration from whatever you find, wherever you find it. Go for broke, combine old forms in new ways (or new forms in old ways). Start with a blank cloth and bungee jump with me. The ride can be scary at times, but it's tons of fun.

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As usual, work is blasting my personal time, but I do try to engineer at least a half hour of decompression into my day regardless of the absurd hours I put in on the job. Continuing along with the current strip, you can see that I've finished out the right hand side, and am now at work on the repeats that are left of center:

The strip will extend the same distance on the left past the center area that it does on the right. In answer to questions from the frazzled, who saw that I had blown past my established margin and wondered why - I intend to work some darker strips at 90-degrees to the established ones, to provide some framing left and right of the center. I'm not sure right now which ones I'll pick, but that's part of the fun of bungee-jump stitching.

And I have plenty more room for leaping. The area stitched right now represents about 20% of my total available area. I'm still leaning towards having no text on this one at all other than a tiny sig/date in an inconspicuous spot. But I am looking at some of the larger beastie-bearing repeats and spot motifs. All in black, of course.

Oh - on the blackwork fillings collection - there's someone working a few of its patterns into a project, posting progress on line. Kathy from Unbroken Thread is doing a small but beautifully planned piece, combining blackwork with gold. I'm very impressed at the way it's turning out. Way to go, Kathy!

If anyone else is working from the collection (or any of my other patterns for stitching or knitting), please let me know. It's obvious I'm in this for love, not money; and seeing what the patterns are up to in the wide-wide world makes my day. I'm also delighted to post pix of finished items, with links back to the stitcher's or knitter's home.

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Now that there's more stitched it's probably easier to see the pattern repeat style that I wrote about last week (click on thumbnail below for larger version):

After working with lots of historical graphed strip and border patterns, I can say that the overwhelming majority of the form repeats in three standard ways:

The first one is a straight repeat - no mirroring, and no flipping. It's common for edging components on larger patterns, like the little acorns on the larger strip below (adapted from V&A T.133-1956), and (no surprise) for totally symmetrical pieces like the multicolor one (adapted from a Siebmacher design from a post 1600 edition that's not on line):

The second order repeat is a bounce-mirror. There are two vertical centerpoints and the design bounces back and forth between them, but never inverts. Lots of these feature mythical beasts, people or animals - motifs that have a strong up-down identification. Here are two examples from an earlier Siebmacher collection that's available on line, one with a nifty yale, and one with an abstract heart and flourish.

In the pattern with the yales (heraldic goats) the mirror columns are the center of the flowerpot behind them, and the center of the fountain like object between them. Even this pattern, for all of its complexity is a type 2 - a very wide type 2, with the two mirror columns being the center of the trefoil interlace near the right hand side of the photo, and the center of the heavy stem interlace about a third of the way from the left edge:

The third order repeat can be the most confusing to stitch, but is extremely well represented in historical artifacts. It's an elaboration on the two mirror bounce repeat in the second example, with alternating iterations flipped north/south for good measure. Although these repeats employ that flip, they're actually simpler than type 2s, above.

Why am I calling this one simple? Because there's really only one mirror column: the centermost axis of the flowers. The north facing and south facing flowers are identical. The design may be visually more complex because of the flip, but when stitched there is less variation - less following of unique chart elements - than in a large type 2 pattern.

Here are some more examples of type 3 repeats:

Now to loop around to my current strip, this one is a hybrid:

The entire four leaf grapevine unit repeats as a type 1 - verbatim, with no flipping or mirroring. BUT inside each unit we've got type 3 mirroring/flipping. The mirror column (which the mathematically inclined might call an axis of inversion) runs down the center of the unit, and to make things more complex, is skew, rather than a nice bisecting 90-degree line from top to bottom. This is the same symmetry that my current pattern shows.

Both are rather like sideways Z or S units, with a strong diagonal element down the center (in this case the heavy geometric beads, and for the red grapes, the main stem), with items mirrored and flipped to either side of the axis of inversion. The difference between this and red grape pattern is that the individual units in this one are connected. If I chose to, I could have worked the red grapes with every other unit mirrored (in fact, in the original the pattern is shown with a companion center cluster and the clusters I use repeated on each side of it, but mirrored around the center unit). I don't have that choice in my current strip of black grapes. The repeats are anchored to each other by those stems.

To sum up, there are many ways that repeats are formed in historical patterns, ranging from the simple to the complex. All are legitimate, with sourced examples of employ in historical artifacts (or in my case, pieces stitched from sourced historical designs). Understanding the symmetry helps deconstruct the complexity of the pattern, and (I find) makes working it easier.

So. Why else should we care? Frankly, I haven't a clue unless you're a historical embroidery dilettante like me. I find the way that patterns are used, the way that repeats are made, and the way that symmetry is harnessed for general effect to be endless sources of fascination. But I'm a pattern geek. Your mileage may vary.

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Here's the latest bit -

You can see the three fillings from the blackwork filling collection immediately above this new strip. It's very different in feel from the previous pieces. The proportions are huge. It will span edge to edge (half again as wide as the already-embroidered area, with 25% extra to the right and left of the stitched area. This pattern is one of the ones that will appear in the upcoming book. I've charted it from a 16th century artifact in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The original is strip worked in red silk on linen, probably a band of edging on domestic goods - a tablecloth, cover, towel, or sheet (the museum has about 31 inches of this pattern - a bit over four full design repeats). The repeat itself is one of the less commonly seen constructs - more of a large sideways "S" than the standard mirror around two centers bounce repeat.

Here's a simple two-centers bounce repeat, with a minor bit of complication in the "bindings" that unite the two sprigs between the acorns:

There's an "up" acorn and a "down" acorn. The design is mirrored to the left and right of each acorn's centermost spine. The directionality of the bindings is a very minor departure from the bounce-repeat symmetry. Here's another, more elaborate example of the same type of simple repeat:

Again, there's a center line down the middle of the main motif flower, and the design is mirrored left and right of it. This one is a little bit more complicated because the "up" and "down" versions of the pattern are different, but it's still a simple two-center bounce repeat:

The pattern I'm working on now has a center, and does feature a limited mirror repeat It's an axis that runs through the bunch of grapes. You can see that I started there, at the not well-defined visual center - it aligns with the center of the pattern immediately above it. I don't have enough stitched yet to show you how this pattern falls out, but if you zip over to the artifact page, you will see that the grapes and flowers section is in fact a mirrored repeat, BUT the bead line columns do not mirror. (You can see I've started one to the right of the trumpet flower). All of the bead-columns in the original slant in the same direction. This method of building a repeat is quite uncommon. Which is one of the reasons why I'm playtesting this particular snippet.

The other reason is the sold black stitching. As discussed, I'm trying to work out the method used to produce the mesh like grids so often used in period voided work. I don't believe that the originals I've been looking at employ a withdrawn thread method to produce the perforated ground, so a pulled thread stitch is most likely. This piece used what looked like the same method, but limited to little accents. I have to say that I do like the look of what I've stitched so far in Italian Two-Sided Cross Stitch (ITSCS), pulled as tightly as possible, but I'm not satisfied that I'm using the same stitch as the artifact. Problems of thread thickness and tensile strength for pulled work aside (I'm using two strands of standard DMC cotton floss on 36 count linen), I can't get enough of a "pull" over my 2x2 thread background to produce the mesh-like ground effect. I'll finish out this strip with ITSCS, but will continue experimenting, seeking that mesh-like look.

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Thanks for the lively discussion! Last week's post was the most commented upon String has ever had. It's nice to know that others meet enjoyable people (and poorly socialized idiots) through stitching and knitting in public. And that many of us think alike during these encounters.

I'm moving along on my projects, both on fabric and paper. Progress has been severely slowed as of late due to work related deadlines and a bout of the Evil Flu that's been going around. But there is some slim progress none the less:

You can see that I finished the eye-boggling interlace, and am now working a relatively tame flower in frame segment. All three are patterns from the blackwork filling collection. I should be finished with this segment by mid-week at the latest.

Next up is a new one though. It's a double running stitch design graphed out from a photo of a period artifact (part of the upcoming book) but I haven't tried it yet. The new panel will feature some small areas that are filled in. In the original they are stitched in the same stitch that is used to make a totally overstitched mesh like background on many other contemporary pieces. This style of stitching is most often seen worked in red, so densely stitched that in the mesh like areas no background linen is seen, and it's most often used as the background on a voided style work, although there are examples of it being used as foreground, and (as in my upcoming trial - a spot accent).

Here's a good example from the Manchester Art Gallery - you can see that some of the foreground detail is filled in using plain old cross stitch, but the background and the solid fill detail areas are clearly different. This style is a pulled thread technique rather than a withdrawn thread one (neither warp or weft threads of the background material was removed during production of the stitching). Needlework authors cite several stitches as the working method to achieve these mesh like backgrounds including

• Italian Two Sided Cross Stitch
• Four Sided Stitch (aka Quadra, Punto Quatro, or Simple Fagot Stitch)
• Russian Drawn Ground (but this is a withdrawn thread rather than pulled thread technique)
• Double Fagot Stitch (sort of Four Sided Stitch on steroids, with each pass taken twice)

The first two are the most commonly cited. My limited experience with those two makes me lean towards the Two Sided Cross Stitch because Four Sided Stitch usually leaves a little dot of background fabric exposed in the center of each bundled stitch unit (here's an example - beautiful and regular, but the centers aren't covered with thread.)

Embarrassing as it is to admit - I've not tried any of these in context. Long Armed Cross Stitch, yes. I use it all the time. But the family of pulled thread stitches has always intimidated me. I've played with them a bit, but aside from an occasional spate of Italian pulled thread hemming, I've never employed them on a "real" work. But there is first time for everything, and I intend to try out the Italian Two Sided Cross Stitch. Stay tuned for more developments!

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Toodling along on my current sampler...

...working on another pattern shared in my blackwork fillings collection, just stitching along. Once the base repeat is established, I find I can copy off my own work, rather than referring to the printed pattern. Sure, this one is on the complex side, but it's a regular repeat and not what I'd consider particularly difficut; and without having to refer to a printed sheet, the project is totally portable. So I brought it with me to my kid's school chorus concert. There's always a long wait between the participants' early drop-off time and the public concert's start. Lots of parents stay rather than going home and returning later. I was not alone.

I'm used to knitting and stitching in public. I've gotten all sorts of comments over the years, ranging from real interest to veiled hostility. The overwhelming majority of people are interesting to talk to, and my project is always a convenient conversational icebreaker.

There are the folks who ask after the item being worked, or volunteer stories of their own about knitting or stitching. They're usually pleasant and I enjoy talking to them. There are invariably people who say things like "Oooh. I could NEVER do that." (What runs through my head is the reply, "With that attitude, I bet you're right" but I rarely voice it.) Depending on how dismissive they are I either smile sweetly and don't reply out loud, or try to explain that it's not anywhere near as difficult as it looks.

There are kids who are fascinated by what I'm doing. Knitting socks especially seems to boggle them. I have fun with them, explaining he project and chatting about the craft in general.

Unfortunately, not everyone is pleasant. Some people say that they hate wasting time. I usually point out that at this very moment (mid commute, in the doctor's office - whatever) I appear to be far more productive than they are. A couple of decades ago there were more derisive and ideological comments. Mostly from women, who were eager to point out that domestic tasks like knitting and stitching were ineherently demeaning, and should be shunned, especially in public. I would usually engage with them, responding that "freedom from" also means "freedom to," that I had a highly technical career thank you, and that I found relaxation in traditional crafts. We usually parted on less divisive philosophical grounds.

But this week, just sitting there stitching, I found a whole new public comment beast. The ones who decide that anyone doing something alien to the commenter is clearly nuts, deranged, crazy, a lunatic, or otherwise mentally abberant; and should be pointed out to everyone else. It also seems that these folk (aside from their insenstivity towards the differently abled) delight in being loud and obnoxious. Maybe it was the ambience of the high school in which the performance was taking place, but I felt like I'd fallen back among locker room bullies again.

What did I do? First of all, I didn't move my seat. I'd come early and sat underneath one of the few lights bright enough for stitching. When it became clear that glaring and not responding wasn't working, I asked the commenters to kindly be quiet, that they were disrupting the people around us - in my best Miss Manners icy-haute tone. "Bitchy, too" was the reply, and they went away. Like vultures everywhere they probably flew off to circle over someone else's carcass.

I won't stop stitching and knitting in public. Idiots are everywhere, and I refuse to let them win.

Have your own stitching/knitting in public story? Positive or negative, feel free to share.

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Yaay! The first evidence of a project using fillings from my blackwork filling collection!

Kathy of Unbroken Thread is posting a series about her current blackwork project, a hearts and flowers theme. You can find her full archive of blackwork related posts here, including a nice piece on the minutae of setting up a project (something I habitually gloss over). Kudos to her! If you are working something using these patterns, I'd love to hear about it, and even to see it. If you give me permission I'll post a photo of your piece in my gallery of stuff worked using my knitting and embroidery patterns.

Kathy's latest post, referenced above, describes a mis-count and the subsequent unpicking. Her post made me think about what makes a specific pattern written for double running stitch (aka Spanish Stitch, punto scritto, Holbein Stitch) difficult to do.

Now some people say that large patterns are harder to stitch than small ones. That patterns like those on my current sampler are difficult. I say they're not especially harder than small patterns. Accomplishing them is a matter of care and perseverence, but a the size of a large pattern doesn't automatically make it difficult. To me, three things make a pattern difficult to stitch, the type of repeat, length of unadorned runs over bare ground, and the presence of off-count elements.

Eccentric "knight's move" (multiple of X units over, X units up) type repeats require more attention on my part than do straight symmetrical repeats. Here's a "knight's move" repeat next to a symmetrical one:

The one on the left is a very simple pattern with a relatively simple skew, but even so, takes me far more concentration to work than does the seemingly more complex symmetrical pattern on the right.

I also find that long runs of straight stitches over bare ground - especially over diagonals - are a challenge. When I find a part of my design not aligning when my stitching roams back near an established area, it's almost always because I messed up on one of the long runs. I suspect that historical stitchers had the same problem, and that's why so many patterns feature little hatching type shading stitches or "hairs" that stick out from long straight lines - these being easier to count. The shading lines around the edges of the motifs in the design below (from my Clarkes Law sampler) are a good example. In addition to provding texture and the appearance of roundness, they make it FAR easier to keep on target:

Finally, off-count elements can drive me batty. This pattern is a particularly egregious example. Not only is it a knight's move design, the skew-to-the-count little boxes where the four rotated squares meet can throw me off and make me forget where I am.

So thank you Kathy for posting your piece, and best wishes for project success!

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I've been working on the book, so my spare time is eaten long before I get around to posting here. There are now roughly 24 plate pages in process, either partially or fully complete and I'm working on the annotations.

In other progress news, I'm most of the way through this band:

Me-Zoe-You asked about the scale of the work, so included a penny and a standard foot long ruler. I'm working on a relatively coarse 36 count linen, at about 18 stitches per inch. The voided flowers in the current strip are slightly smaller than the penny. You can see that the four strips are each about a foot wide. This is going to be a BIG piece!

The cloth is quite a bit larger than the part shown - with enough room for four six-inch zones side by side. This pattern grouping occupies the centermost two. I'm not sure which pattern to do next. I'm also not sure if I'll work the rest of the thing all in parallel, or if I'll run some bands perpendicular to these. A couple of the patterns I've been playing with are so large that they'll need two or perhaps all three sections to show their repeats.

Plus with symmetrical bands and no words on this one yet, there's nothing so far that says which end is up. I still haven't found a motto I want to enshrine in this piece. It may end up being mute. Suggestions are most welcome - especially secular, non-political, slightly geeky (yet pithy) sentiments that are not the sort of thing one would expect to see embroidered.

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Another band on my new blackwork sampler. This one is graphed from an artifact.

This one is graphed from an artifact. I'm using the same background fill and edging as the original, and I haven't corrected the proportions. If I were to do so, the branch's straight run at the top of the flower would have been worked one unit shorter, reducing the leggy leap from flower to descending sprout like thing. This one is in the new collection, with full source annotation.

To answer Anna from the Netherlands - I can't say exactly when the book will be out. I will be self-publishing it through one of the various print-on-demand services. I wish I could work on it full time, but little things like earning a living have gotten in the way. I have about an hour each evening to research, graph, transcribe, write, and do lay-out. So I suspect that a final product won't be ready before a year is out. Sorry to disappoint. You will however get to see a few of the patterns in it as I play test them on this sampler and post my progress. I won't be able to do them all (there are lots) but you'll see a few of my faves.

In terms of change in the pix and presentation here - I've upgraded blogging software and the camera. The new one is much higher resolution than the old, and I'm still figuring out how to work with it efficiently, and how to keep that odd moire like effect from obfuscating the weave of my ground cloth.

Finally, just for fun, here's another snow shot from this week's storm:

This isn't the plow berm at the end of the driveway. It's what happens when (at least) 22 inches of snow drifts. Smaller Daughter (about 5'4" - 1.6m) shows off just one end of our excavation project. However Massachusetts doesn't reel long from these things. School is back in session and everything's narrower, but back to normal.

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Tooling along on my new sampler, on the TNCM sequel and on the PDF version of the blackwork fillings booklet I've been publishing page by page here on String. Here's my sampler progress:

Up to the next strip - another opportunity to try out a pattern destined for the new book. On the book, I've got about 14 pages (about 43 individual patterns) drafted out in whole or in part now and am working on finishing them and on the source attributions and annotations. I'm going to mark all patterns against this scale of authenticity:

• Republication, source unknown - Material republished from earlier works of the author, exact source unknown.
• Original, new - Original by author, no period source or inspiration.
• Original, inspired - Original by author, inspired by period aesthetic. No one single source can be identified.
• Original, attributed - Original by author, inspired by identifiable historical source(s)
• Transcription, adapted - Identifiable period source, transcribed by author with some modifications. Modifications identified.
• Transcription, verbatim - Identifiable period source, transcribed verbatim by author to the best of her ability

The majority will be of the last two categories, with a smattering of new works, mostly to eke out partial pages.

I'm not sure right now how long this book will be. The last one was 75 plates, with an equal number of source pages, plus indices and working notes. The new book will have the source pages, plus some indices, but will be lighter on the other material. Still, if it ends up being 50 plates long, that will mean a finished book of approximately 130 pages, once indices and bibliographies are added on. That's a lot of patterns, and a lot more transcribing from my notes, plus drafting and annotating for me before it's ready.

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I always try to finish off something from my in-progress basket on New Years Day. This year it was my Don't Panic sampler:

Not the best framing job, but for hanging in my office cube - it will suffice.

For those of you who wondered what became of me after posting the last page of my blackwork filling collection, I was a victim of the holidays, several uanticipated work emergencies, and a major computer hardware upgrade (and the attendant re-install/restore of my world).

I am working on organizing the 25 plates of blackwork patterns into a presentable document for download, including working up a cover and an introductry essay. I'm also working on the sequel to TNCM. I've got a start on the first 8 plates of that, plus annodations. The computer upgrade has delayed both of those projects, but they are progressing.

And in my copious free time (not), I've begun stitching more of the patterns that will be appearing in the new book:

I don't know if this sampler will include words or not. Probably not, unless inspiration leaps upon me in a dark alley.

And for those of you who wondered about what usually goes on here over the holidays, most of the normal things happened: 10 kinds of cookies (plus Ms. Jean's fudge); panforte; extravagant home-cooked dinners, a thoroughly enjoyable Christmas Day dinner at long-time pal Tom's, and the like. Now it's all over except for a vanishingly small amount of leftovers, and a house to put back in order for the long slog through the new year.

If anyone is stitching from the fillings collection, I'd love to hear about it.

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Taaa Daah! The last page of my pattern collection - page 25:

All are new for this collection. #146 was inspired by an original pomegranate border I published in TNCM. #148 was similarly inspired by the beaded border from TNCM that I have previously shared here (repeated below, click on image to get it larger):

#149 was inspired by an edging in Schonsperger's 1526 Ein New Modelbuch. His was a strip. Mine takes the main motif from his strip and inserts it into a lozenge. #147 builds on the interlace construction principles in pattern #67 of my first booklet, although this one is rendered as a line unit design instead of in block like square units.

So there you have it. 150 different blackwork filling patterns; some simple, some complex. And I could easily come up with another 150. But it would be more fun to see what others devise. I hope to have the PDF format booklet, with cover and intro essay out by the end of the holiday season. It will be available for free download here.

GIMP 107 - PRINT HINT

Printing or Saving: If you print out the pages constructed by the method in my tutorial you will probably find that the designs are rendered too small for easy use unless you use an enlargement factor via your printer driver dialog (the print settings dialog invoked when you issue a print command). BUT if crop your pattern, removing any unused page area, then you save your piece as a *.jpg or *.gif, like I did for the individual squares, the pattern won't shrink down to teenytiny, and will be as readable as mine.

IN SUMMARY

Please let me know if you've found these pages or the GIMP tutorial to be useful. I'd especially enjoy seeing works done using one of my 150.

However, I do request that all users abide by the restrictions noted in my kick-off post. If you are using these patterns for your own personal enjoyment or as a gift, have fun!

If you are intending on selling works derived from them - including stitched finished pieces, or issuing kits or publishing your own patterns using any of these designs - either for profit or charitable sale or donation for eventual sale - please do me the courtesy of sending me a note prior to doing so. In all probability I'll be delighted and ask nothing more than a bibliographic source statement in your pattern's literature or hang tag noting the source of some of your fillings, and providing link back here. As soon as the book is up and the link is stable, I will be happy to provide the bibliographic citation's format. But asking permission first would be a positive, noble and honorable act, for which I thank you in advance.

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The penultimate page! Here's page 24:

All are new on this page. #139 and #140 are close cousins, sharing a central motif. The strawberries in #143 have their pips marked by little circles. I'd use very tiny knot stitches, an X over a 1x1 thread intersection or possibly even seed beads for them.

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Just two more pages after this one. Here's page 23:

All of these are new doodles, although #137 is a truncation of the framing device I used in my Buttery pattern. #133 and #134 are almost identical. The only difference between them is a second double running stitch line, turning the diagonals between the eyelet stars from steps to little squares. You can never have too many interlaces. #137 and #138 aren't the last one in the collection, I promise.

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Getting close to the end. Here's page 22:

All of the patterns on this page are my own. Two of the smaller fillings in #131 are in my coif. Like my snails which I've recently found have crept all the way to Finland, the gnats in #128 were inspired by the period English embroiderers' love of insects (related thought - look into this worthy cause). I'm also fond of #130, which would be a wonderful all over or strip panel treatment for chemises, perhaps mirrored down the center of the garment.

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Here's page 21:

Pattern book junkies will recognize #124 and #125. Yes, that's Schonsperger's acorns (1524) in #125. I've altered the scale of #124 to make it more compact for use as a fill.

Thanks to all who have sent me thank-you notes, posting here, on various chat forums, or by direct mail. It's a delight to know that others are finding these patterns useful, and that delight is my chief motivator in sharing all of my patterns - stitching, crochet and knitting alike.

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And on to page 20:

Yes, more interlaces, and there are more to come, too. #119 appeared on my underskirt, but the others are new for this collection. #115 and #116 share a fundamental architecture. Try #116 either with the squared corners on the "in between" links, or with the softer edges resulting from a single diagonal stitch instead of the two that meet at right angles.

To echo Jenny, who posted on the Blackwork Yahoo group - simple geometrics are simple geometrics. They transcend any one craft. People who quilt; who build mosaics, marquetry or stained glass; or who crochet, knit or weave will all recognize commonality in these designs. I sincerely hope to see some wholesale cross-pollination here, with folk reporting back that they've found inspiration in this pattern collection for all sorts of uses I never imagined.

Use one of these designs in your original piece? I'd love to see it. I always enjoy seeing what my pattern "children" are up to out there in the wide, wide world.

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And page 19:

More doodles from my notebooks, both old and recent, but I have not published any of these before.

The interlace in #112 reminds me a lot of some of the more famous portraits of Henry VIII, but there's nothing on any of them that is a direct parallel, and nothing about it that would limit its use to Henry's lifetime. It would be killer done either infilled in gold, or on a voided background, perhaps on a book cover, pouch or sweet bag. Sweet bags were sort of like Elizabethan/Stuart gift wrapping. They were little decorative purses used to convey small presents. Similar small stitched bags were sometimes used as needlework tool kits (occasionally they come with a matching pincushion), or to hold mirrors or other grooming aids.

On the charting tutorial, other than a couple of install queries and a nastygram noting that I'm an idiot for giving away the pattern pages, I've had almost no feedback, so I am unsure of what problems folk are facing. I can't say I can answer every question and I certainly am no computer expert, but I'll try. And I do have evidence that people are finding these posts useful, so nastywriter - take a hike.

In fact, if anyone is or has done stitching based on these patterns, please feel free to send me a picture or a link. With your permission, I'll repost the image or the link here in the gallery of works done based on my patterns.

GIMP Charting Tutorial 106 - More Drawing Hints

By now everyone playing along should be able to draw. Here are some more methods and hints:

A way to erase: Select the Pencil tool from the Toolbox. In its settings window, choose

Mode: Color Erase

Now draw a new line on top of the segment you want to disappear. This is very useful for small touch-ups rather than wholesale deletions.

Another way to erase: Select the Eraser tool from the Toolbox (looks like a little piece of pink bubblegum). Set the brush size to something larger than the Circle(01) setting we use for drawing. Make sure the Hard Edge box is checked. Drag the eraser over the part that needs to go. Not quite as fine-tuned as the method above, but effective.

Yet another way to erase: Use one of the selection tools (the square, circle, lasso, wand or color select icons at the top of the Toolbox) to highlight the offending bit. Hit your delete key.

To flip (aka mirroring):

Select the bit you want to flip. <ctrl>C to copy and <ctrl>V to paste. The area selected will look all twinkly, and you'll note the creation of a new temporary layer in your layer toolbox:

Now with the area to be flipped all twinkly, click on the Flip icon in the Toolbox:

Note that I've got the first option under Affect selected - that flips the entire (temporary) layer where the bit I just pasted lives. That flips my image over. Now comes a tricky bit. One would think that once the bit has been flipped, it can be easily dragged into place. Not reliably so. I'm not sure why, but switching to the Move icon (the four-way arrow) and trying to drag the bit around doesn't work. What I usually do is after flipping the image so that it's in the orientation I want, and while it's still twinkly, I use <ctrl>X to cut it into the paste buffer, then paste it back into the drawing with <ctrl>V. NOW I can mouse over it until I get the movement icon (looks like a four-way arrow) to drag it into position.

Here's the result of copying, pasting, flipping, then re-cutting, pasting and finally nudging into place a simple heart:

It sounds complex, but since most of the work is control-key or arrow presses (see tweaking, below), it's really quite quick and easy.

To tweak alignment:

Sometimes when a pasted, rotated, or moved bit is inserted into the drawing it ends up being out of alignment on the grid. This is because the selection box is constrained in size so that even if its origin is on the grid, its termination is one pixel shy. However, fixing minor alignment problems is easy. Select your offending bit (the lower heart in the sample below), and use your keyboard arrow keys to nudge it into place. Again, like in Flip, I have the best success doing this by selecting, <ctrl>X to cut, <ctrl>Y to paste, then using the arrow keys to nudge the pasted bit into place. Please don't ask me why the Move command doesn't seem to work reliably for this. I haven't a clue.

Rotating:

Again similar to Flip. Select the bit to be rotated and copy/paste it to create a temporary layer. Click on the rotate tool, then on the twinkly selected pasted area. The rotate dialog box will appear:

Rather than drive myself nuts trying to freehand rotate, I type my desired angle into the Angle box in the rotate dialog. In our case that's an easy 90, 45 or 180 degrees. Usually 90. Then I click on the "Rotate" button in the Rotate dialog box.

The selected bit will appear in its new orientation. For whatever reason, moving the image post rotation is better behaved than moving it post-Flip. I can usually click immediately on the rectangular selection tool (first in the Toolbox), then mouse around to get the move indicator, and arrow the still twinkly rotated selection into place. Here's the just rotated image, prior to final tweaking:

And here's the same image, after I've nudged the two new petals (at 9:00 and 3:00) into final position using my arrow keys.

Anchoring temporary or floating windows: Sometimes I end up with a floating or temporary window that I want to merge into my main pattern area. Easy. <ctrl>H nails it down.

Deselecting all selection boxes: Sometimes I want to pencil in a line, but click as I might, no line appears. What's usually happened is that I've got a selection box active somewhere. <Shift><ctrl>A will turn off any that might be in use.

So ends this basic GIMP charting tutorial. We've only touched on some of the simplest options and commands available in GIMP, but covered most of the tools needed for this type of charting. I will leave color selection to you, but I'll report back when I've figured out cloning via the Stamp tool. Please let me know if you have found this to be useful.

Technorati : GIMP, blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

Here's page 18:

#103 and #108 are fillings I've stitched before on my underskirt, coif and other projects. The rest are new. To be immodest, I'm quite fond of my acorns (#105). I think that will have to end up on my current work in progress. Yes, I do have another work in progress, and no - you haven't missed it. I haven't previewed here yet.

GIMP Charting Tutorial 105 - Finally! Drawing The Design.

If you've been following along, you should now have a GIMP document with four layers in it, a background, a dots layer, one called PATTERN HERE, and one entitled Donuts.

We're now ready to draw.

Using the Layer Navigation window, click on the PATTERN HERE layer. Obviously, all drawing will happen here. If you've saved, quit then re-opened your work you've probably noticed that Snap to Grid has turned itself off. Double check and make sure that it's selected: VIEW-Snap to Grid.

I prefer a thicker rather than thinner line when I draw my pattern. I think it's easier to see and count. To get it, I select the Pencil tool in my Toolbox and use the following pencil settings:

Mode: Normal

Opacity: 100.0

Brush: Circle (01) <-the same tiny dot we used to build the Dots layer

Scale: 1.30

(None of the other settings should be checked off)

Making sure that my Color Specification boxes are set up so that the color I wish to draw with is in the top (overlapping) box, I can now draw.

With the pencil selected, I click on a dot, then holding down the shift key to constrain my line to be straight, I click on the dot marking the end of my run of stitches. What I end up with is one straight line, divided up into individual stitch units. In the example below I've drawn a four-unit stair step by making six clicks:

So we're now off and running. Some things to remember as you draw your designs:

1. If you've got the pencil tool selected and you think you're drawing but no line appears, check to make sure that you don't have an active selection window. To close any that might be open, use <ctrl><shift>A.

2. To cut, you can use the selection box in the upper left corner of the Toolbox window or any of the other selection tools. The box is easiest to use because you can constrain it to snip out pieces even with the grid, making pasting on the grid easier.

3. It's a bit easier to copy an area, then paste it immediately (using <ctrl>V) and then drag the result to its final resting place than it is to copy an area, reselect the original and THEN paste. If you do this, the new bit will end up in the middle of the active screen and grabbing it can be difficult.

4. If you paste something and wish to move it, mouse around until your cursor turns into a four-way arrow. If you don't see the four way arrow and try to click and drag the newly pasted bit, you'll excise and paste a small area of it in the current location instead. If this happens, remember that Undo <ctrl>Z is your friend.

5. OH NO! My drawing disappeared! No problem. You probably killed the entire PATTERN HERE layer by hitting <ctrl>X instead of <ctrl>Z. Undo with a real <ctrl>Z.

6. Moving using the Move tool (the little four-way arrow in the Toolbox) is manipulating the layer rather than the bit I just pasted. If this happens, check the options box for the Move tool. There's a row of icons across its top. One is labeled layer, one is labeled selection (mouse over to show labels). Make sure selection is highlighted, not layer.

Tomorrow we'll cover image manipulation - flipping, mirroring and rotating. At that point we'll have pretty much covered all I know about using GIMP for charting these patterns. If you have any questions on the material in this series, please feel free to post them here.

Technorati : GIMP, blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

First, page 17:

#97, #101, and #102 are recharted off previous embroidery projects. The others are new, more doodles devised while I was preparing this collection. Most of the coming pages feature at least one fill as elaborate as #100. They'd be good for using in large, outlined areas, or as stand-alone fields on a sampler like those in the lower half of the famous Jane Bostocke sampler.

GIMP Chart Inga Tutorial 104 - Building the Design and Mask (aka Donut) Layers.

In the last post we learned how to start a new layer. We need two more. First use LAYER-New Layer to create another new one. Name this one "PATTERN HERE".

Now it gets interesting. You'll see three layers in the Layers navigation window. Background, Dots and PATTERN HERE. PATTERN HERE is shaded. Click on the layer named "Dots." It should now be shaded. We want to create a new layer, cloned from this one. So, making sure that the Dots layer is shaded in the navigation window, use LAYER-Duplicate Layer. You'll notice a new one named "Dots Copy" added to the navigation window. In that window, click on Dots Copy and drag it to the top of the stack. Your Layer navigation window should now look like this:

For the sake of our sanity, let's rename "Dots Copy." In the navigation window, right click on Dots Copy and choose "Edit Layer Attributes. This will open a window that will allow you to give the layer a new name. I suggest "Donuts."

You now have four layers: Donuts, PATTERN HERE, Dots and Background.

Let's create our donuts. Make sure that Donuts is highlighted in the Layer navigation window. Then choose the Select by Color Tool from the Toolbox window. This is the one that looks like little stack of blue, red and green blocks, with a finger pointing to the red one. With that tool highlighted, click on any dot. ALL of the dots will begin flickering. (That's good). You've now selected all of them.

To draw the donuts, we're going to use a couple of special command. With your dots select use SELECT-Grow to get the Grow Selection dialog box. Type 1 in the "Grow Selection by" fill-in:

Now let's exclude the dot at the center by using SELECT-Border to get the Border Selection dialog box. Type 1 in the "Border selection by" dialog box:

Now I suggest you zoom in more: VIEW-Zoom-8:1 (800%). This is what you'll see:

We need to fill the newly constructed borders with white. Up in the Toolbox in the lower left corner of the top panel, you'll see two overlapping Color Specification boxes, with a little 90-degree two-headed arrow next to them. Click on the little two-headed arrow. This will swap your previous background color (white) with your old foreground color (black). You are now ready to use the color white to fill the donuts. Choose the Flood Fill Tool (it looks like a spilling paint bucket) and place the tip of its arrow cursor inside one of the highlighted donuts. Click, and ALL of the donuts will be filled with the color white.

Now we need to get rid of the black dot in the center of each donut. Go back to the Select by Color tool (the stacked blue/red/green block and hand in the Toolbox), and click on one of the black dots. The outline around your donuts will disappear, and the dots will be highlighted again. With the dots highlighted, hit <ctrl>X. You will still see dots (they're on the Dots layer), but the ones on the Donuts layer will now be gone. You can test this by clicking on the little eye next to the Dots layer in the Layer navigation window. Click the eye next to Dots, and the dots on your screen should disappear. Click it again and they'll return. Remember to save your work.

We now have our base grid structure and mask all set up, and we are now ready to draw a design. But more on that tomorrow.

Technorati : GIMP, blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

On to Page 16:

We've got ribbons (#91, use ganged like this or as a single border); another twirly (#93), and a bunch of wildly obvious tiny spot patterns (#94, six in one plate). I've used all of these teenies in my old projects, they're very handy for filling in spaces too small to use other, larger patterns to any good effect. And they're also very useful for background fields in voided work. It's interesting that #96 at a distance reads like a basket weave. You can see that in the thumbnail.

GIMP Charting Tutorial 103 - Building the Dot Layer

O.k. Yesterday we opened the program, opened the Layers window and set our grid spacing constraints. Today we get to use those things to add a layer called "Dots":

LAYER-New Layer

You should see this dialog box:

Type in "Dots" for the layer name. Width and height should both be 320 pixels. The fill type should be "Transparency." Except for the dots we're going to draw, this layer should be see-through. Once you confirm that the settings are correct, press "OK."

You'll see that the new layer has been added to the layer management window:

The shaded area on the layer management window shows you which layer is currently active - the one on which all changes you are making will be stored. You can hop among layers by clicking on them in this window

Now we can add our dots. To make the dots I'm adding easier to see, I've taken the highly optional step of making my original grid indicators appear in red (this is back on the EDIT-Preferences-Default Grid dialog. Foreground color = red).

To add dots, I select the pencil tool on the Toolbox window. Tool-specific options will appear below the cluster of tool icons every time you activate a tool.

To make our dots, we want to use the following pencil settings:

Mode = Normal

Opacity = 100.0

Brush = Circle (01) - that's chosen by clicking on the little square and picking the SMALLEST available dot.

Scale = 1.00

Now we can begin adding dots. Again to make life easier, zoom in on the active image:

VIEW-Zoom-2:1 (200%)

You can also increase the size of your drawing window so that the entire editable area is visible.

Now using the pencil tool, click on EVERY ONE of the background grid dots. "Oh no! This is tedious", you say. You're right. We're going to cheat.

Click on a bunch of them, drawing about 3 or 4 rows of 6-10 dots. Now we're going to copy and paste them. Because we've got our grid set we will be able to see exactly where to paste them.

Select the square selection tool (the dotted line box in the upper left corner of the toolbox. Center the cross hair cursor it provides on your upper/leftmost dot, and drag the purple selection box to encompass all of the dots you wish to copy. (Make sure that the upper left corner is exactly centered on one of your drawn dots.) Hit <ctrl>C to copy.

Now hit <ctrl>V to paste. The new dots will appear exactly on top of the old dots, making everything look "twinkly."

Move your cursor back over the area that's twinkling until it turns into a little four-way compass arrow, now click and drag the twinkly dots on top of your grid dot indicators, taking care that they align exactly. If for any reason this goes wrong, do not despair. GIMP offers (near) unlimited <ctrl>Z undo.

I repeat this process, grabbing ever larger areas of dots and pasting them until my entire field is filled. Needless to say, for a whole page this can get tiresome, but once that page is set up and saved it's there for infinite re-use. Speaking of which - make sure you save your work before going on.

In the interests of making these posts manageable, I'll end here. Tomorrow we build the drawing and donut mask layers.

Technorati : GIMP, blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

Here's 15!

All of the patterns on this page are new, doodled up as I was transcribing the older ones from previous booklets and previous projects. I'm a sucker for interlaces. Try #87 with other small spot motifs (or nothing) in the centers of the intertwined wreathes. #88 is fun. It's all 90-degree and 45-degree angles, but it gives the impression of close packed globes. #89 is not quite as mind bending as some of the other eccentric repeats. Younger Daughter sees two different design shiruken in it, but I think she's been reading too many manga.

GIMP Charting Tutorial 102 - Getting Started

To start, obviously you're going to need to download the software. As I mentioned before, it's free, and its available here. You're on your own installing it on your particular machine. I don't have access to a Mac or Linux machine here at home, but I'm assuming that look/feel are very similar across all platforms. Also, I'll be covering this pretty slowly, aiming at folk who are totally unfamiliar with this style of program. I know lots of you are further along the learning curve, and will be tempted to skip ahead. "Go right ahead! Get messy! Make mistakes!" That's the fun of learning.

Upon opening the software you'll see something like this (the red/orange is my desktop background, not part of the program):

The small, empty window is the program's main work area. The long narrow window contains the toolbox of available commands. It may be smaller than this to start - I happen to have the detail control for the pencil tool displayed. You'll note that unlike many programs GIMP's various subcomponents can be opened or closed, or put anywhere that you find convenient. My first step is always to open the Layers subwindow. You'll find it under the "Windows" command in the main window, under the menu entry "Dockable Dialogs." I'm going to abbreviate the command tree like this:

WINDOWS-Dockable Dialogs-Layers

All caps will always refer to a menu item in the top line toolbar of the main GIMP window, with the items after that being in order of selection from that command's sub-menus.

Now we have three little windows open. The main GIMP window, the Command Toolbox, and the Layers window (shown on the left of the Command Toolbox for now, but you can put it anywhere):

Next is to establish the settings and preferences we need to make drawing on a constrained grid quick and easy. I tried out many grid spacings before settling on these recommendations. Feel free to experiment, but start with this combo for the same look/feel I was using:

Open a new drawing: FILE-New

This will open a dialog box in which you can specify your new file's size, and the measurement units used in it. I suggest something small to start. My little filling pattern swatches were squares of 320 pixels. And yes - I do advocate you use pixels as the measurement unit for now.

Specify the grid spacing: EDIT-Preferences

This opens up a large universe of settings to play with. We're only concerned with grid spacing. Look for the Default Grid icon in the Preferences pop-up box. Click on that.

Under Appearance, select Intersections (dots) - this will render the reference grid in dot form so you can see where to draw your own later. For Spacing, enter 10 pixels width and 10 pixels wide. Under Offset, make sure both values are zero. Click OK. We've now got our grid, now we need to show it and constrain drawing so that we (mostly) end up creating dots and lines aligned with it.

To show the grid: VIEW-Show Grid

To constrain most drawing to the grid: VIEW-Snap to Grid

Your drawing canvas should now look like this:

Save it. Good job. In the interests of keeping these posts manageable we end here. Tomorrow we'll explore creating layers, configuring the pencil tool for making dots, and making the dot layer.

Technorati : GIMP, blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

We forge on to Page 14:

Of these, #79, #80 and #84 appear on my skirt. The others are new, doodled up as I was working on this collection. And here's the start of the promised tutorial on using GIMP to do exactly that. Please note that Elder Daughter noodled out this method, which we then confirmed that others were using as well. (There are few things as useful as a home-bred brain trust.)

How to Use GIMP for Line Unit Charting - Drawing Metaphors

For starters, let's talk about drawing metaphors. Piece of paper and a crayon. Nice opaque paper. Nice (mostly) opaque crayon. That's what many drawing programs feature, and what almost all of the stitch painting programs use. You draw something on the page, it's there in one spot. It can be erased, rotated or moved, but it's embedded on the page once it lands. Draw a cow next to a barn with an open door, and the cow stays there. It can't be peeled off, razored out or slid over to stand in, on, or behind the barn without leaving a cow-shaped hole where it used to be (or taking a bit of the barn behind the cow along if you select and move the cow).

MS Powerpoint and other lower-end drawing packs go one better, by adding a cut-paper collage type element to the crayon metaphor, with things that can be placed on top of other things. But even these "pieces of paper" ride not as independent layers but as daughter elements on a single page. And the stitch charting programs mostly stick to the crayon or collage models, although they do enable selection by a discriminating feature - in their case usually stitch type or color. There's always room for quibbling, but by and large, these programs all reside in a very flat world.

GIMP does not work like this.

GIMP like many other higher end graphics programs offers multiple opaque, semi-opaque or transparent layers. Sounds confusing, but it isn't. Think of it like an old-fashioned animator working on a cartoon. Animators worked in layers, painted on multiple sheets of a transparent plastic like material. When finished, those layers were stacked up, and the viewer looked down through the entire stack, seeing through the transparent bits to the drawings on the layers below.

For an animator the lowest level would have been the background. In our farm scene, perhaps the green of the grass, darker green of the trees in the distance, and blue of the sky. Nice and solid. Then the animator would layer one or more transparent cells on top of the background. The next layer might be see through except for a painting of one big open-doored barn on it, and only the barn. There might be a third see through layer on top of that with a fence that sits in between the viewer and the barn. Now for a top layer, also transparent, and again with just one design element drawn on it. That one may have nothing on it except the cow.

The animator could move these cells around. She could slide the one with the cow over so that the cow could graze on either side of the barn. She could change the order of the layers. If the cow layer was on top, it looked like the cow was outside the fence (between the viewer and the fence). If the cow layer was between the barn and the fence, Bossie was safe in her paddock. And if the cow layer was behind the barn and the cell was positioned just right, our pet could peek out of the open barn door.

This is how GIMP works. It allows you to use multiple layers to isolate individual design elements, and to mask the layers below. Layers can be totally independent, or they can be ganged so that if one is moved, its pals move too, preserving the spatial relationship among them. They can be moved, reordered, rotated, flipped, hidden, or rendered more or less opaque. Instead of thinking flat, crayon and paper style, to use GIMP you need to think in onion-like layers.

To draft my patterns I used four layers:

1. A plain white background

2. A layer of evenly spaced dots (the background dot grid)

3. A layer containing the line drawings that make up the designs

4. A layer containing little white "donuts" - very small white halos aligned to the dot grid in layer 2.

The dot grid in Layer 2 established my layout - the grid spacing for my stitches. Layer 3 contained UNBROKEN lines, constrained to the established grid. Donut-bearing Layer 4 "eclipsed" the black lines, making them look like they were drawn as dashes. The hollow center of each donut let just one little dot of the underlying black line (or naked dot from way underneath in layer 2) show through.

Once my basic four layer "page" had been constructed, the only place I did actual drawing on was Layer #3. I never touched the background, the dots or the donuts again.

For the record, I suppose I could have condensed this into three layers, with the dot grid appearing ON my background, but it's much easier to delete and replace a non-background layer, so I went with four. I never underestimate my potential to make a dumb mistake, so I always try to leave myself a graceful way to recover, just in case it becomes necessary.

That's the basic logic. The why of what I did. More on how to use GIMP to set up a four layer grid-constrained pattern page, starting in the next post.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

Lucky Page 13:

This is the last of the pages that mostly contains patterns from my first booklet. You'll recognize #73 as having been on my Eve Was Framed unfinished sampler as one of the collection of strip patterns. The others are all on my blackwork underskirt.

Let's start talking about how I did these.

I'm using GIMP. It's an open source drawing/drafting/graphics editing program. I won't got into the technical details of the thing, but the important points to know are that it's available for free, it's implemented for Windows in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese and several other languages. It's also widely used by Linux people, who often have it as part of their standard software set. GIMP also can run on Macs. You can download it here (click "show other downloads for Linux and Mac). User and tutorials manuals are here.

To be honest, GIMP is a little bit intimidating if you're not used to programs like Photoshop or Illustrator. If you've only used Powerpoint type graphics or dedicated stitching programs, I'd suggest saving sitting down with GIMP until you have some quiet time, no deadlines, and a calming cup of cocoa. I don't profess to know this program at more than entry level. I have only tinkered with a very limited number of features, for only one specific purpose, so please don't write to me asking for help. Pretty much everything I know will be contained in the next several posts. But these should be enough to get others started using it for graphing line unit patterns.

Lesson One tomorrow.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

Here's the 12th page:

#69 is a new one, doodled up as I was working on #68. Very similar structure, but as you can see from the thumbnail, a very different distance "read." These thumbnails are quite useful for evaluating the overall effect of a pattern when seen from far away. The rest on this page are either in my old booklet or graphed up from my blackwork underskirt.

I could keep going with these forever, but I sense that most folks have a more limited attention span. Right now I have 25 pages finished - that's more than 150 individual patterns (some of the later pages feature more than one pattern in a square). I'm going to keep posting them one page a day until all 25 are up. Then I'll release the booklet. In the mean time, I won't be idle. My pattern drafting boot camp exercise has been very effective. I've now mastered the method and have moved on to work on my sequel to TNCM.

In other news - it's cookie time here at String. Long time readers know that each December the kids and I bake 10 kinds of cookies. Today we started, with the improved-by-long-curing Bourbon cocoa cookies taking their traditional place as our kick-off. This year's line up (subject to change at our collective whim) includes these standards:

• Chocolate chip
• Mexican wedding cakes
• Peanut butter
• Buffalo rum balls
• Chocolate crinkles (aka Earthquakes)
• Oysters (a hazelnut spritz/chocolate sandwich)
• Decorated sugar cookie cut-outs
• Gingersnaps

New this year, we go for a multicultural pair to round out the ten:

• Benne Wafers - a sesame, brown sugar cookie loved in the Southern US
• Koalcky - A Hungarian cream cheese/jam cake/cookie, sort of like a fold over rather than rolled Rugalach.

Oh. And Ms. Jean's fudge.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

Page 11:

#65 is another eye-bender, calculated to drive stitchers insane. #66 is a new doodle. Other than that, all appear on my previous projects or in my first booklet.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

Page 10.

#59 in this set is a bit odd. If you look at it, you'll see that the basic unit is a square, with a boxed X in the center, in alternate rotations. Where four of these squares meet, there's another boxed X, worked skew on the grid. The rest present no special challenges - no half stitches or other oddities.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

Plate 9. Lots more to go!

More interlaces! Three on this page. No special notes about working any of these. These are still patterns first published in my 1978 booklet.

If you're new to blackwork, it's not so much a single monolithic style as a collection of styles popular over about 150 years, and in many cross-pollinating countries and regions. It's a term loosely applied to monochromatic or limited palette embroideries. Black was very popular. So was deep crimson (although I have no examples below). Other colors were not unknown and works were often further enriched with metal embroidery or spangles. The one main unifying characteristic seems to be an aesthetic of strong contrast, a white or near white linen ground.

Some examples are clearly done on the count, others freehand. In one sub-style florals or geometrics are described with a solid color, often heavy outline, and then infilled using one of several techniques. The patterns I've been presenting are representative of the small diaper patterns typical of one of the filling techniques.

If you're looking for a nice visual survey on the various types of stitching that are commonly clumped together under the blackwork label, one source is the Blackwork Gallery maintained at the Medieval & Renaissance Material Culture website by Karen Larsdattir. There are many other good sites out there and I hope to share links to some of them over time, but this site has assembled links to a very representative artifacts and artwork showing blackwork on clothing and accessory items. If you have hours to lavish on the subject, I'd start there.

If you've got less time to spend and want the 200-foot overview, I present these links, gleaned from Karen's page, along with minimal commentary.

First, the style that my pieces are in, sometimes called "Inhabited Scrolling Blackwork," the heavy outlines, geometric fillings variant. Unknown lady, 1587, Queen Elizabeth, 1580

Here's a similar style, but with a single very simple filling stitch -Forehead Cloth, 16th, 17th Century,

And one done with totally freehand fillings, shaded and mottled like shading with ink stippling - V&A T.4-1935, 1620s

And ones done with what may be a mix of counted and freehand fillings - V&A T.113-118-1997, 1575-1585 (also here); Mary Cornwallis, 1580

Scrolling blackwork in two colors - Unknown lady, 1595, Coif attributed to Anne Boleyn (but it looks later to me)

Totally freehand scrolling, no fillings at all - Lady Kytson, 1540-1546

Then there is the more linear strip or strapwork blackwork style. The strip patterns on the samplers I've done over the past year are of this broad subfamily - Young girl, 1525-1540, Portrait of a Young Lady, 1520-1530, Mrs. Pemberton, 1540.

Of course there are Jane Seymour's famous cuffs, 1536

This man's shirt is the source of one of the patterns I used on a recent sampler, V&A T.112-1972. Also you'll note that it greenish blue. I don't believe that it has faded from black because the color is uniform all over the piece. (Note the simple twist on the cuffs - look familiar?)

I really like this lady's underskirt or smock skirt. You can just make out the large scale strapwork, crisp enough to have been countwork - Courtesan, 1530-1535

But not all of the strip type patterns were worked on the count - Man in Red, 1520

Proof that not every collar seen from both sides was worked double sided. This one clearly has different patterns on the inside and outside of the same garment - Lady in Green, 1528-1532.

Some blackwork is hard to identify as being either done on the count or freehand. I'd say that this lady's sleeves and cuffs were probably done counted, but her collar is harder to pin down. It's a nice example of a scrolling pattern though, that may or may not be infilled, inhabited blackwork style - Lady of the Bodeham Family, 1540-1545

And then there are pieces that show all over patterns, either scattered or, well - all over. These look counted to me - Coif, 1600, Lady, 1593

Chronologies are hard to pin down because fashions migrated and slowly from region to region, mutating as they traveled. Still it's safe to say that the strip type styles tended to be popular earlier and longer than the scrolling styles, and were popular across a wider range of geography, spanning all of Europe. Eventually some of them came down to us through both the Old and New World sampler traditions; with a multigenerational, transoceanic game of Telephone blurring their patterns slowly over time.

The scrolling stuff doesn't seem to be well represented before the 1550s or so, but really came into vogue over the ensuing 50 years. The inhabited scrolling styles seem to have achieved their greatest popularity in England and areas of English influence. Finally, the stippling style of fillings seem to have evolved at the end of classical blackwork's reign of popularity, although freehand fillings sit happily side by side with counted ones from the earliest appearances of the scrolling outline style.

I'll post more on this as time and space allow.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

Page 8, as promised:

This one features a nice assortment of contrasts. The lattice interlace in #43 is a simple pattern I use again and again. You'll see as this collection moves on there will be LOTS more interlaces, some open like #48, some more twisty and dark.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

And here's page 7:

A rather boring one for sure. But lots of highly useful smaller repeat patterns, good for small areas or contrast with the busy, larger ones.

I'm having fun drawing these up, combing over the stitched pieces and drafting out what was stitched. And making up new ones. But not these. These are all from my notebooks, and all appear on my big blackwork underskirt and Forever Coif. #39 and #40 are especially useful for small areas. My coif has lots of those:

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

On to page 6. Remember - you can click on the page images to get a US letter size full page printable JPG. A PDF compendium of the whole set will be issued after the last page is posted here.

I'm also fond of #31, #34, and #35. #34 is calculated to drive you dizzy while stitching. It takes a bit to wrap the brain around the eccentric spacing on the repeat. But it's worth it. I've used it dozens of times, sometimes with little crosses sporting a centered cross stitch when I wanted something more uniformly visually dense. I'm not wild about the interlace in #33. It's too skinny, although at a distance (mocked up by the tiny thumbnail above) it looks better than it does close up.

If enough folk are interested, I'll post an illustrated tutorial on using open source/free GIMP for this style of charting.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

Page 5:

This is turning into quite a holiday present. I've now posted five pages (30 fillings), and because I'm continuing on to graph up other patterns I've improvised as I stitched my projects, plus others in my notebooks, I can safely say that I'll be posting a page a day through the mid-December at the least. Possibly longer.

On today's page you'll see a couple of my favorites. #27 and #29 I've used again and again. I like the voided flowers formed by #27, and I like the movement in #29. #28 is also an old fave. That same spiraled band appears in all my booklets as a simple border, sometimes published with a corner. You can see it (with corner) on my ancient pre-SCA "Eve Was Framed" unfinished sampler, circa 1975 or so:

More about this old, unfinished piece here.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

As promised I return to the keyboard and post the fourth page of blackwork filling patterns. Again these are patterns originally published in my 1978 booklet, redrafted and re-issued here.

More thanks to those not mentioned yet who have offered encouragement and thanks, including (but not limited to) local Carolingian Ygraine; String readers TexAnne, Pam, twerp, Cailee, fourdny2, PamC, and Annanna; and Yahoo Blackwork Group members Sherry, Linda, Annabelle, Anita, Esther, Sharon, Gail, Millie, Nicole, Viv, Elspeth, Georgia, Susan, Audrey, Rebecca, Nancy, Heather-Joy, Gaz, Viji, Magda, Elizabeth, Sorcha, Isabella, Maria, Liadain, Jean, Millie, and Shirley. Apologies if I've left anyone out.

More tomorrow!

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

Here's the first page of the Blackwork FillingsCollection, as discussed in my last post. I intend to publish a page each day or so until I run out of pages. (I may take some time off over the upcoming US holiday week though.)

The doc below is a full page JPG (click on it to view/download it at full scale). Eventually, when all the pages have been shown here (and I expect that to be in the neighborhood of 20 or so), I intend to also offer the entire collection as a single PDF, for home printing or viewing on any PDF-capable reader.

As far as the provenance for these patterns - my notes from 1978 aren't complete. Some I found by examining historical blackwork samples. Others I doodled up as I worked on what became my underdress. And a few (though none on this page) are fresh, invented as I played with graphing up the others.

I did try to constrain the angles employed in all of my filling patterns to 90 and 45 degrees in order to maintain a visual symmetry among all of the geometrics used, and to restrict all lines to the native grid of the fabric (no half stitches or stitches displaced one thread over from the standard 2x2 thread matrix). However, there are a couple of exceptions. One is Pattern #5 on today's plate. The stitching logic for that one is to work the diagonals of squared cross stitches; then take the long stitches from each of the "shoulders" of the stairstep diamonds formed by the intersecting lines of cross stitches into the centermost point of each diamond. It's easy if you're using plain even weave linen - that center hole is very evident. But if you're using Aida, or another ground cloth a bit of fiddling may be in order.

As to what I mean by the copyright restriction on the page - if you're working up your own sampler, have at these patterns. Enjoy! If you're planning on making works for sale or donation based on these fillings - either finished stitched pieces or published designs, please contact me. In all probability I'll freely grant permission, but the courtesy of notification and formality of reply is respectful to all parties involved. And if you're looking to republish or reproduce these pages or the patterns on them, please contact me for specific license to do so before reposting, reprinting, or republishing my work.

Thanks to all who voiced support for this venture. I hope the forthcoming pages prove useful, and whet everyone's appetite for other full scale works to come. Questions, comments, criticisms and other feedback is most welcome.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery

Given Chris Laning's confirmation of our independently devised charting method, and my own impatience to get started, I've decided that using GIMP in the multi-layer mode is the way to meet my graphing challenge. That means one layer for background grid, one for pattern, and a "mask" layer of little white donuts around each grid point to separate the solid pattern lines into stitch units. Thanks also to Ariel who had a very innovative suggestion about using MetaPost, but the complexity of some of the patterns I will be doing will quickly exceed the practicality of her solution.

To practice up for these more complex designs I decided to regraph the collection of 72 blackwork fillings I published back in 1978, plus some more from my own notebooks that didn't make it into that booklet. These are the fillings I used in the blackwork underskirt I stitched back in 1976-1977.

Not being able to resist a doodle-capable medium, I've done up a few more, too. I've got about 100 of these fillings now graphed out in neat little squares and ready to share, but I've not decided on the most efficient sharing method. I'm leaning to composing them into pages, and sharing the pages one by one, so that they can be seen before they're downloaded. An alternative would be making a new PDF booklet and post that. In either case, my intent is to publish them here for free download under my own copyright, rather than try to sell the thing.

Here are two samples to whet your appetite. Any feedback? Suggestions?

And special thanks again to Chris, who has asked that I spread the word among both SCA and non-SCA stitchers about a valuable embroidery resource. The SCA's West Kingdom's Needleworkers' Guild maintains a very useful on-line library of articles on historical stitching - all from the hands-on perspective. You can find it here. I guarantee hours of fascinating reading and inspiration!

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery, patterns

I'm still trying to work up my favorite mode of double running graphing. I've pretty much dismissed all of the dedicated charting programs. They don't allow the dot/stitch metaphor that I find far easier to stitch from than heavy lines superimposed on a background lighter grid.

Again, here's that jester snippet from TNCM. I find this clear enough to stitch direct from the thumbnail, even at its tiny size/poor resolution.

It's small, but it's clear. The lines are stitches, the dots represent the "holes" in the cloth being stitched. In something like Aida, Hardanger or Fiddlers Cloth, each dot is an actual hole in the weave. If one is using plain weave linen, each dot corresponds to the interstices between each two (or three, or more) threads over which the stitches are taken.

Here's the same pattern, graphed out in one of the stitching programs (click on this, to see it better than it is shown in the thumbnail):

Yes, there are some aids built into the stitching program, like decimal bars on the graphs (every 10th bar indicated), and stitch counts along the margins, but those can be added to my style of illustration.

My main beef with ALL of the stitch graphing programs is that they treat back stitch, double running or other straight stitches as an afterthought. Sometimes the back/double running notation can't be easily mirrored or manipulated (as in KG-Chart LE, which I used for the bit above). In others it always appears as an undifferentiated or symbol-represented line, with no indication of individual stitches. And in all of these programs, scale is limited. They've been invented for folk who stitch at larger gauges than I favor. My 18 stitches per inch (36 count linen) is a bit smaller than the 7, 10 or 12 stitches per inch many modern stitchers favor. Patterns plot out waaay too large for easy display or reproduction on book size pages. So far I've taken the demos of quite a few of the dedicated stitching programs for a test drive. To date I've tried and discarded PCStitch 9; WinStitch, SitchR-XP, DigiStitch, KG-Chart, Easy Cross, Easy Grapher Pro, STOIK Stitch Creator, and Cross Stitch Professional. I will say though that most of them do a fine job at turning photos or drawings into cross stitch. (I am a bit frustrated with programs that allow very limited trial periods. I work. Lots. My hobby investigations take place over months, not days. I would have liked to have gone back and re-tried some of the earlier programs I encountered later on, but was unable to do so because my 3-day trial had expired. Their loss, not mine).

Now I've turned to general purpose graphics programs. I need one that lets the user manipulate grid density and representation, that allows mirroring and rotation, and grid-constrained line drawing. Ideally I want one that allows either patterned lines, or that allows some sort of logic-based display controls (black pixel overlaid with white pixel = white pixel as displayed; black pixel overlaid with black pixel = black pixel as displayed; white pixel overlaid with black pixel = black pixel - you get the idea).

I'm not quite at the optimal yet. But I'm getting close. I did the bit below using GIMP - a general purpose open source graphics manipulation tool. Elder daughter (the one jumping up and down, waving madly over there in her dorm room) gave some vital assistance with layer manipulation and masking. Here's the result (click on this one too):

I'm not quite happy with the dots/voids. I find my original method from TNCM much easier to parse out visually than I do the new version, with dots in the center of each void. But that may be just me.

I'm going to soldier on, looking for something - anything - that can get close to my original. For the record, that was done on my long gone Mac IIcx using Aldus Superpaint. A program that has no direct cognate today.

All advice/leads on possibles are gratefully accepted. In fact, if someone manages to put me onto an effective solution to produce the look in the first snippet above using Windows software, and I end up using their method for my next book, I will reward them with a highly suitable stitching related gift.

Technorati : Spanish stitch, charting, counted cross stitch, double running stitch, embroidery, graphing, holbein stitch, punto scritto

I seem to have picked up some new readers here this week. I answer questions and comments from Kabira, Annanna, H. from Japan, and others. Recognizing that upon completion this heads to my pile of "finish me for display", is unlikely to emerge before the holidays are over (and may not be seen again before spring) I post my wrap-up now on the almost-completed piece. Apologies for the length of this post.

First, thanks for your kind words. I've had a lot of fun stitching this piece. My sampler is more of an exercise in perseverance than anything else. The wide pattern strips, though complex, are not appreciably more difficult to stitch than are the narrow ones. All follow the same basic logic, and once a stitcher is used to following that logic the only thing that can go wrong is miscounting threads. (Bright, indirect light helps with that).

My sampler is worked on 36 count even weave linen, using one or two strands of standard DMC embroidery floss, colors #310 (black) and #498 (deep crimson). Worked over 2x2 threads, it's done at 18 stitches per inch (about 7 per cm). The entire embroidered area measures out to roughly 16 x 32 inches (40.6 x 81.3 cm). I did not work it double sided, but the double sided logic does prevail.

The Clarke's Law sampler, like all embroideries on this site, is an original composition. However the individual strips are adapted from or inspired by historical sources. I comb period modelbooks (mostly pattern books printed before 1650) and photos of museum artifacts, looking for goodies. Then I graph them out and stitch them up. I've been playing with patterns this way since the early 1970s, and over the years I've amassed a collection of designs. I put out a couple of leaflets within the Society for Creative Anachronism, the first one being issued in 1977/1978, and reprinted a couple of times thereafter. I released a second, better documented leaflet in 1983.

Then in in the '90s some friends convinced me that others would find my notebooks useful (the leaflets containing only a small bit of what I'd been collecting) and introduced me to a publisher. The result was The New Carolingian Modelbook: Counted Embroidery Patterns from Before 1600 (TNCM). Sadly, the publisher turned out to be either exploitative or incompetent, or both, and to this day I've seen almost no return for the effort. But the book is out there, and continues to sell on the used book market for absurd prices. New copies continue to trickle in via eBay and a used book seller in New Mexico, so somewhere out there beyond my reach, there is still a source.

Be that as it may, I continue to collect and "play test" patterns on samplers like this one. Here's an index to the sources for the 22 patterns used on the Clarke's Law sampler:

1. TNCM Plate 32:1 "Twined Blossom and Interlace Meandering Repeat". Known affectionately as "The Brooklyn Pattern." Ultimate source - Domenico daSera. Opera Noua composta per Domenico da Sera detto il Francoisino. Venice, 1546 - one of my all time favorite modelbooks.

2. The alphabet for the main quote is from Sajou #55, posted by pattern archivist Ramzi at his Free Easy Cross, Pattern Maker, PC Stitch Charts and Free Historic Old Pattern Books blog site. Thanks, Ramzi! I played with it a bit, working the curlicues in red and weaving them over/under the letter forms.

3. TNCM Plate 69:1 "Grape Motif or Border Repeat". I graphed it up originally from a photo in Drysdale's Art of Blackwork Embroidery that showed the Victoria & Albert Museum's artifact T.14-1931. The picture available on line is MUCH better than Drysdale's black and white photo. Many of the other patterns on this piece come from this same source. Drysdale cites it as being Spanish, from the late 16th/early 17th Century. The V&A's attribution is Italian, 16th Century. I'd go with the museum's judgment on this one, and if given the chance to republish, would amend TNCM's listing accordingly.

4. Plume Flowers. Victoria & Albert Museum's artifact T.14-1931. I've charted this out on paper but other than stitching it here, I haven't published it yet.

5. Hops. Victoria & Albert Museum's artifact T.14-1931. I've charted this out on paper but other than stitching it here, I haven't published it yet.

6. Column and Wreathe Repeat. Victoria & Albert Museum's artifact T.14-1931. I've charted this out on paper but other than stitching it here, I haven't published it yet.

7. TNCM 68:2 "Seam Decoration or Border Repeat". Graphed from photo in Pascoe's Blackwork Embroidery: Design and Technique. Pascoe cites this as being from 1545. The original was worked along the shoulder seam join line of a butted sleeve man's shirt, stitched in all black.

8. Another alphabet from Ramzi's Sajou collection. This one is from #172. It's interesting to note that several of the late 1800s/early 1900s booklets he's got quote some early modelbook patterns closely enough to recognize the direct line of heritage.

9. Meander Repeat. Victoria & Albert Museum's artifact T.14-1931, BUT this one appears on at least one other source, also on display at the V&A. The keeper of the www.drakt.org website shows a display case with what's clearly a close kin to the T.14-1931 pattern, but worked voided style.

10. Yet Another Meander Repeat (I'm running out of descriptive names). This one is also from Victoria & Albert Museum's artifact T.14-1931. I've charted this out on paper but other than stitching it here, I haven't published it yet. I worked it voided, although the original is in double running only.

11 a-d (top to bottom)

a. TNCM 55:1. "Snail Border Repeat". My original, inspired by period designs.

b. TNCM 51:1 "Brier Rose Twining Border Repeat" My original, inspired by period sources. Also in my second booklet, Counted Thread Patterns from Before 1600, published informally in the SCA circa 1983.

c. My first booket, Blackwork published in 1978. Pattern #j, which I cited as being Italian counted thread work from the 1500s. No citation though, which is why it didn't make the cut for later booklets.

d. TNCM 52:2. "Flower and Bud Meandering Border Repeat". My original, inspired by period designs.

12 a-d (top to bottom)

a. My first booket, Blackwork published in 1978. Pattern #gg, which I cited as being English, very early 1500s. No exact source though, and I didn't include it in TNCM for that reason.

b. TNCM 54:3 "Pomegranate Meandering Repeat" and #53 Counted Thread Patterns from Before 1600. Another one of my own, inspired by period sources.

c. TNCM 49:2 "Acorn Meandering Border Repeat" One of the early set I graphed from the photo in Drysdale's Art of Blackwork Embroidery that showed the Victoria & Albert Museum's artifact T.14-1931.

d. TNCM 44:2 "Acanthus Meandering Border Repeat" also #55 from Counted Thread Patterns from Before 1600. Yet another from the Drysdale photo of Victoria & Albert Museum's artifact T.14-1931. (I do adore that source!)

13. Wreath and Columns Repeat. Victoria & Albert Museum's artifact T.14-1931. I've charted this out by hand but other than stitching it here, I haven't published it yet.

14. Columbines(?) and Twists Voided Repeat. This one also appears on the same Drakt website photo taken at the V&A as one of the sources for #9, above. I can't make out the artifact's accession number though. And yes - I graphed it direct from the on line photo, as seen on the screen.

15. TNCM 58:1 "Strawberries and Violets Meandering Border Repeat." Also #61 in Counted Thread Patterns from Before 1600. This is the pattern adapted from the very famous Jane Bostocke sampler, also resident in the V&A. But my source materials were photos in Gostelow's International Book of Embroidery and King and Levy's The Victoria and Albert Museum's Textile Collection: Embroidery in Britain from 1200 to 1750. If you're familiar with those sources you'll understand why my squinting at them came up with the odd raspberries in between the flowers, instead of what can now be plainly seen as simple twists on the V&A's own photo page. I'd amend the description to "After Bostocke.." were I to republish TNCM now.

16. Black strip pattern. From page 57 of Louisa Pesel's Historical Designs for Embroidery, but I worked it outlined and voided instead of foreground stitched.

The patterns I tested on this piece will probably make their way into a sequel to TNCM - once I find a graphing program capable of handling double running stitch with ease, and that can chart out giant repeats at a small, but useful gauge. I want to be able to present largest of these patterns on a single page, and to do it using a background dots and voided line style of presentation which I came up with for use in TNCM, and which I find much easier to follow than regular dark line on background graph paper charts:

(Snippet of Jesters pattern, TNCM 69:2)

What's next? I'm not sure. I'm certainly not stitched out. I'd like to do another big sampler to try out more patterns, but I haven't decided on its size or form yet. There's also the possibility of a set of matched but not matched napkins - six all using the same colors, but all different. There's also a pile of holiday knitting to achieve between now and the end of the year. Rest assured - I won't be idle.

Technorati : Holbein stitch, Spanish stitch, blackwork, counted thread, cross stitch, double running stitch, embroidery

It's been a while since I posted a whole-sampler shot of my Clarke's Law piece:

As you can see, I'm on the last little bit of the final strip at the very bottom. I like this one (but I like all of them). I think it would be exquisite as a narrow edging band around cuffs and collar of a Renaissance era woman's shift or man's shirt, like those on these Veneto paintings circa 1502-1531.

Even with my anticipated workload this week I should be able to knock out that teensy bit by Thursday, latest. All that's left after that is to fill in some of the shorter line ends with a bit of blackwork fillings; to sign the thing somewhere; and to finish it off with a black fabric mitered edge. Jury is still out on whether I'll frame or scroll mount the thing for final display, but once it's up my wall will be home to one of the universe's ten most nerdy samplers.

Technorati : Embroidery, Holbein stitch, Spanish stitch, blackwork, cross stitch, double running stitch

If you follow here you know I do try to keep personal bits out of this blog, but my absence over the past two weeks was due to a family funeral. My mother's husband passed away. He was an upright guy, an affectionate and attentive companion, an avid reader, splendid raconteur, bon vivant, and just fun to be around. He made her very happy for all too short a time, and will be sorely missed by our family and his.

In spite of being away, work has been progressing (ever so slowly) on my Clarke's Law sampler. I finished the strawberry band, and started in on the narrow strip at the very bottom:

Apologies for the dark photos. It's a dark morning. Click on either one for a more legible enlargement.

The design of the narrow black strip is based on a pattern published in Louisa Pesel's Historical Designs for Embroidery, but I worked it outlined and voided instead of foreground stitched.

Knitters, be enheartened. I also started a pair of socks on the plane. I'm about half way through sock one, working Knitty's Outside In by Janice Kang in a screaming russet - the orange favored by Elder Daughter. Who will be thrilled to read this post.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, cross stitch, embroidery, sampler

Still crunching along on my strawberries band on the Clarke's Law sampler. But last night I stumbled across this simple and sweet little pattern while web-walking through various museums' on line collections, and I had to graph it up.

This chart was inspired by a photo detail shot of a coif and forehead cloth in the Manchester Art Gallery's collection (thanks to Needleprint for calling my attention to their website). If you head over to the Manchester Art Gallery website and search on item 2003.63/2 you'll find it. The photo itself is copyright and can't be reproduced here.

The description cites the original as being linen, embroidered with silk, with the stitching being worked in back, buttonhole and knot stitches. It also notes that the original was worked on the diagonal. I particularly liked the one unit offset in the repeat arrangement of the sprigs. It brings life and movement what might otherwise be a very static pattern.

It's unclear in the original where the stitches cited are placed. From the photo it looks like little accent dot to the lower right of each flower is a group of four knot stitches as shown in the upper row of my charted repeat. The holes in the cloth where the stitches have eroded seem to support this (if the dots were formed by straight stitches, there would be a fifth stitching hole in the center of the dot unit). Still, I present an alternate interpretation in the lower row, using a group of 8 straight stitches in a diamond shape to define the dot unit. This pattern would also look nifty if spangles were sewn on in place of either the knots or the straight stitch diamonds.

Enjoy!

Technorati : Embroidery, Holbein stitch, Spanish stitch, blackwork, counted thread, double running stitch

A look at how far I've gotten on this last strip, sans frame:

I still think a narrow dark black strip is needed below this panel to establish a visual border along the bottom edge. After that the only stitching left is to fill in some small doodles at the motto's line ends where my text didn't span horizon to horizon. And to finish off the thing I need to edge out the piece with mitered fabric strips (sort of a self-matting made from cloth), and figure out whether to frame or rod-suspend the final piece. I've been working on this now since the first week of December, averaging between 30 and 45 minutes per day. Not particularly fast, but about what I thought it would take when I embarked on my project.

To answer my far-flung offspring - What's next? Not sure. I owe a ton of holiday socks, so I may take a knitting interlude. But I haven't broken the stitch itch yet, and will probably start another randomly executed band sampler, although I haven't decided it it should include a saying, some alphabets, or be just another collection of patterns I'm auditioning for future publication.

Another possibility is the immense dragon from my favorite source (seen at the left of center in the photo). I've already begun charting it up. It's gigantic. Just the little pepper shaped blossom object at the lower right spans more than 40 stitches. Given that few people appear to be interested in this stitching style at the level of complexity that fascinates me, I'm not sure if a multi-page dragon graph would be of use to anyone else. Still, I might do it just for the fun of just doing it. We'll see.

Technorati : Embroidery, Holbein stitch, Spanish stitch, blackwork, counted-thread, double running stitch, strapwork, voided embroidery

Evidence of progress on my penultimate (possibly ultimate) strawberry panel, way down at the bottom of my Clarke's Law sampler:

A strip this wide with a voided filling does take a bit of time to complete. Still, I'm chugging along, about a quarter of the way through, perhaps a bit more. And I'm thinking on what to do next. I do owe a ton of holiday socks that need to be knit between now and the end of the year. But I'm just not engaged to produce socks right now. What I want to do is to keep stitching. It's always a bittersweet moment when a project is within sight of the end. There's impatience to be done with it and be on to the next. There's indecision about the direction of the next work. And there's dissatisfaction with and pride in the current piece mixed 50/50. I can see what I'd have done differently on this one, and I can also point to bits that turned out even better than I expected.

In the mean time, I hope someone got use out of the three part tutorial on stitching logic. Here are recap direct links to all of the posts:

Double Running Stitch Logic 101 - Two Sided Work and Baseline Identification

Double Running Stitch Logic 102 - Working from the Baseline

Double Running Stitch Logic 103 - Accreted and Hybrid Approaches

I also took an earlier and less organized stab at the subject here:

Double Running Stitch Logic

Technorati : Spanish stitch, blackwork, counted-thread, double running stitch, embroidery

Accreted Section Double Running Stitch Logic

I promised to discuss a second logic for double running stitch. I call this one "accreted section" and use it for the more complex patterns, especially non-linear ones.

What's a linear pattern? Pretty much any of the banded strapwork style strip patterns I've been using on the Do-Right and Clarke's Law samplers. However the phoenix from Do-Right is distinctly non-linear:

I could work the phoenix using the baseline method by identifying one of a zillion possible baselines and following it in the usual way. The outline would make a good baseline:

If I were to use baseline, I'd start at a point on the outline, then work in the indicated direction, following the little detours as I came to them. But in this case there are LOTS of detours. It's too easy to get lost. For example, If I were to start at the indicated spot at the base of the flight feather, then continue up to the wingtip, it looks like I'd be following the little striations on the first feather. Not too hard. Little lines and hatchings like these make the pattern easier to follow because they can be easier to count than straight runs of stitching with few reference points to use for location verification. BUT I have a lot of possible detours. It's very easy to start the feather with the stitch from the feather base to the first striation, then verge off down that bit of shading to the lower part of the wing and from there get lost in the body.

I find it easier to break up patterns like this into logical units:

Purists will note that the blue segment might be considered a baseline, with the other elements as detours off of it, but that's quibbling. For me at least, parsing the pattern into three units helps keep me on track. When I stitched this I started with the blue unit, working the bird's neck and breast detail as departures from that line. I did have the luxury of not needing to do this piece double sided, so I did begin a new strand to work the green section, stitching the feather striations and other connected bits as I went along. The same with the orange section. I did that last, again working the feather stripe and flame detours as I came to them. The flame section at the pattern's bottom left is a closed loop departure off of the orange line.

Baseline First/Hybrid Logic

So far I've established a visual baseline, then worked along it, stitching all departures from that baseline. The last step has been to stitch back along the baseline to complete the work. But sometimes it's better to stitch the baseline first. Occasionally I work a pattern that way - making my first pass along the baseline to outline or otherwise establish the location and veracity of pattern placement, then working the details or fillings on the second pass:

You can clearly see that I did that on this strip from Do-Right. I started with a baseline that outlined the flower, then on the second pass, filled in the petal details. In this case I worked using a hybrid logic. Instead of establishing one baseline for the entire repeat, I worked it more along the lines of the accreted method above - isolating the flower, then the branch from which it buds, and then the branch segment that connects this flower to the next (flipped) repeat.

For some very wide patterns, this mixed approach works best, especially if you're using an in-hand tambour style round frame. With a round frame the area that's taught and ready to work is quite small. Large repeats easily occupy more than the space at hand:

Being limited to the frame's real estate lends itself to this compartmentalized, hybrid approach.

Having the luxury of using a flat, slate, or roller frame that provides acres of taughtness makes a sprawling approach easier:

In any case, this concludes the series on double running stitch logic. Please feel free to ask questions. I don't pretend to know it all, but chances are I've faced some of the same stitching problems that might be challenging you, and I'd love to help.

Technorati : blackwork, counted-thread, double running stitch, embroidery, holbein stitch, spanish stitch

I'm still working on the accreted section post, but I'll hop in to answer my own questions from my last note.

First, here's progress to date on the current strip.

The baseline anomaly in this one may be easier to spot now. If you click on the image above and look closely you'll see that the pattern is composed of two identical sections that never meet. There's a void that runs through the entire longitudinal stem. Therefore since the upper and lower sections are totally separate, there are TWO baselines in this one, an upper and a lower one. Here's a suggested baseline for the upper section:

And the baseline for the lower section:

Sneaky to be sure. But the sneakiness is my fault based on a misinterpretation of the sources I had available.

This pattern is graphed out in TNCM as my (early) interpretation of the center-most design in the lower section of the ultra famous Jane Bostocke sampler in the V&A. At the time I did this I was working from a tiny 2" square photo in a book, and did not have the luxury of the magnificent photos now available on line. I did the best I could under the circumstances, fudging the little violets in the center somewhat, missing the ornament running down the center of the main vine (which may or may not connect the top and bottom halves of the pattern) and missing the true nature of what looks to be mulberries between the strawberries in my piece. In the original they're more like little spiral tendrils. I've also missed a couple of other fruits/leaves branching from the main line. If I were to re-issue this design now I'd play up "inspired by" in my description. Still even with my clumsy amendations, the pattern is recognizable as a scion of the Bostocke design. Or perhaps not since no one identified it over the past week.

Technorati : counted-thread, double running stitch, holbein stitch, sampler, spanish stitch

Another quickie. First apologies to the mathematicians and topologists among us. I should have more correctly stated "any continuous wall maze can be solved by following a right hand (or left hand) wall." Discontinuous mazes are like double running stitch patterns with breaks in them. They can't be stitched (traversed) 100% double sided.

I've made some progress since the last picture which was taken this Friday past. I've selected the penultimate strip for my piece. This one is wide, and I'm working it two-tone.

You get extra points if you can spot (from this partial repeat) something about its baseline. Hint: It's not that the strawberry pips and texture on the pansy type flower keep this from being a candidate for 100% identical double sided work. With a little bit of cleverness, the two sides could be made to read mostly similar, although the pips and textures would by necessity not be identically placed.

Double points if you can identify the source I used as point of departure. TNCM owners, ssshhhh!

In other news, I'm still working on a follow-up post with more info on baselines, and on the accreted section stitching method.

Technorati : blackwork, counted-thread, embroidery, sampler

While writing and graphing the last post took up the better part of a week's discretionary time, I did make progress on my Clarke's Law sampler. Here's the area to the left of the center motif - the area that balances a similar section to the right. You'll note that the pattern I used for the tutorial is the lower of the two narrow red double running stitch bands.

Lovely photo courtesy of Younger Daughter, who is much better with a camera than I am.

This week's follow on post covering the accreted section double running stitch tutorial will be late. I've begun it, but some obligations this week will make it hard for me to finish it by Friday.

Apologies!

Technorati : Spanish stitch, double running stitch, embroidery, holbein stitch, voided embroidery

Well, with luck this mini-series will be useful to someone out there. There is someone out there, right?

Continuing from the last post, now that we've figured out that our design can be worked double sided, and we've identified the baseline, how do we go about the stitching? What logic can we follow to ensure that no areas of the pattern are orphaned, and that all lines are covered?

The method most often followed is the baseline method. The other I'll call "accreted section" and deal with it in a later post.

BASELINE

I find baseline to be pretty easy - nearly foolproof, provided the stitcher can remember the nested logic of detours-within-detours encountered along the way. Some stitchers keep a paper copy of the design, and overtrace it to keep track of where they've been. Some use a paper copy to try out their logic before committing needle and thread. I have to admit I do neither. I just go for it.

Let's look at this pattern. It's from my very first booklet on Blackwork, a hand-drawn photocopied piece done in my teens and distributed entirely within the SCA. I know I got this particular design from a historical source, but my original annotation wasn't complete enough for me to include in later books or in fact to find the source again, so this design has sat on the shelf ever since. I'd consider this one to be a pattern of intermediate complexity, but well within the reach of most beginners (click on pix below for enlargements).

To parse out the stitching logic, let's look at a half repeat. I'll illustrate the entire stitching path for one half repeat. The logic to complete a whole repeat is very much the same. In the pix below, green indicates my first pass of double running, and blue marks a return path, in which I retrace my steps. The first stitch and its direction in any pass or return is marked by an arrow. Click on any of the drawings to enlarge. And please keep in mind that the method below is just one of a huge number of possible paths through this particular pattern. Path planning and trying out different strategies is what keeps this style of stitching fresh to me. Which is to say there's no guarantee at all that I work every repeat in exactly the same manner. YMMV.

To work this design double sided, I'd start along the baseline leaving at least three inches of thread extra on the back (no knots). I find it helpful to wind the excess around a pin placed in an inconspicuous spot. I travel along the baseline (1) in double running stitch until I encounter a branch. My preferred logic is to then follow the branch to its end, then turn back and fill in the "every other" running stitch, to eventually return to the baseline (2). Then I continue on to the next branch decision and follow that detour (3).

In this case I've gotten to the first of the double bracelets on the main stem. Unless a branch is a turn left only branch, given a choice, I tend to turn right. Gamers, the mathematical and those who study behavioral sciences or robots/autonomous navigation will recognize this - it's a classic. Any maze can be successfully navigated by putting one's hand on the right hand (or left hand) wall, and following it, without taking one's hand from the wall. The path traced may not be the most efficient, but sooner or later, the wall-hugging, maze-wandering mouse, robot, or high school topology student will emerge from the exit.

So here I am at the top of the brackets. I could continue down and wander around the bracelets, or I can turn right again and follow the main stem back to the half-heart motif on the left edge of the swatch area. I take a right hand turn from my line of travel, and stitch back up to the main motif (3). When I get there, I notice one little tiny detour - the single stitch between my current line and my starting point. (4) makes quick work of that. Then I continue around the necklace at the base of the heart motif. Again I turn right (5), then double back on my path and continue down and around the wing at the base of the heart (6).

After completing the first pass at the base of the heart and ending up at my "bounce line" - the centermost point of the strip repeat - I do a mini-step back to the heart's outline (7), then I continue around the heart's perimeter, eventually reaching the detour point to complete the small inset detail in the heart's center (8). Again I stitch to the bounce point, and then return to the heart's perimeter (8).

Once I'm back at the edge of the heart, I can do the antenna that sticks up from its top (9). Heading back from there turns out to be a long run all the way back to my baseline, filling in all of the "missing" stitches to complete the first half of the left hand heart motif (10). Now for a minorly tricky bit - one that folk unfamiliar with double running stitch logic occasionally miss - the little detours that fill in the bracelets around the stem. It's easy to miss stitches in these, and very easy to get lost, not remembering which way to turn next. We'll step through.

The first bit is to progress along our baseline. The initial stitch is marked with the arrow. I work it, then the two stitches along the bottom of the upper bracelet, followed by the stitch that completes the three that define the top of the bracelet (12).

Time to head back to the baseline, but it's not very far away. One stitch brings us back to it (13). On the next step because it's extra confusing, I've marked two stitches with arrows. First I head south from the upper bracelet, then work around the lower one (14). There's now one stitch left to finish defining the box between the two bracelets. I take that one stitch (15).

Now I'm ready to return to the baseline again. A couple of quick stitches takes me there (16). If you look at the work now, you'll see only one "unfilled" path through the two bracelets area. That's the path of our baseline. All of the other stitches have been completed, and none are orphaned, unworked. Now to progress along the baseline again. I detour for the little side curl, worked there and back again style just like I did before (17, 18) landing me back on the baseline again.

The logic should be a bit more obvious by this point. I progress along the baseline, making a detour back up to complete the outline of the stem unit (19). And back again to the intersection just below the necklace at the base of the next heart flower (20), and up around it (21).

Now I move on to the wing section that defines the lower edge of the flower (22). As before, having hit the center point, I head back to the outer edge of the heart (23), then continue around the heart's perimeter, and down into its center detail (24).

Almost done now, there's just heading back out to the edge of the heart (25), and doing the first half of the antenna (26). Our grand finale is here! Starting at the antenna, we work all the way back around the heart's edge, and then all the way back to the beginning of our pattern, following the established baseline. At this point there's no more counting, just following the snail trail laid down before (27):

It's done! The entire half repeat - worked 100% two sided in double running stitch, with no little orphaned areas left unstitched. We worked through the baseline concept on a pattern of moderate complexity, stitching along detours as they present themselves, always returning to the baseline before moving on, and leaving one long final unifying run along that baseline to finish off the pattern. Yaay!

O.k., some of you ask. "Smarty pants, that all works great for the half-repeat shown above, but what about the full repeat?" I answer - the logic is the same. With the exception of the antenna which needs to have both "ears" worked one after another the first time they're encountered, the stitcher can follow the "to the center" logic above, verbatim, or can work each heart flower as an entire unit when it is first encountered, following around its entire perimeter up to the point of return to the baseline before doubling back around the heart to arrive at the original spot of departure from the baseline.

If you've got questions about this logic, please post them. I've already gone on long enough for one post. The next post will be on the accreted section method and when to use it or the baseline approach. The series will end with how to finish off ends invisibly for double sided work. Hope this is helpful!

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, double running stitch, embroidery, holbein stitch, spanish stitch

Surfacing...

There's been a discussion of late on the Yahoo Blackwork embroidery discussion group about stitch order, direction and stitching logic in double running stitch - especially reversible (two sided) double running stitch. I contributed to the discussion with these thoughts, but the answer below is a bit of an elaboration on my original discussion group post.

Double Sided Double Running Stitch - Is it possible for your chosen pattern?

The first thing to do is to determine whether or not your contemplated design can be done 100% reversible. Those that can have every design element connected. There are no floating little diamonds or sub-motifs off on the side un-connected to the main design. This simple design is easy to do two sided:

This one, although vastly more complex, only presents a couple of challenges. The center diamond in the nodule at the base of the plume flower is one. Every other element is connected, but that one diamond stands alone. If I were to work this design double sided, I'd add a stitch to the top and bottom points of the diamond to connect it to the rest of the design. The visual impact of that modification would be minuscule. The other challenge is the presence of some detached stitches in the "bark" area of the branches - the little floating verticals unattached to the main body of the work. If I were to do this one double sided, I'd either omit them, or lengthen them to intersect with a segment of the branch's outline. A pain, but not totally fatal, and both changes wouldn't be very evident.

By contrast the column and wreath design below, though simpler, presents a greater challenge for two-sided stitching. Each of the small circlets in the centers of the wreath units stands alone. Attaching them to the rest of the work would diminish the impact of the design. Although the rest of the design can be worked entirely two sided, the circlets are problematic because they're free floating and rather small. If they were worked independently, with their own lengths of thread, there isn't enough real estate in each one to cleanly hide the thread ends.

Much of this mermaid panel can be worked double sided, but by now you can spot the facial features, fruit dimples, flower centers (and prominent nipples) as presenting problems that can't be solved by modifying the design. BUT the small dolphins, although separate from the main pattern aren't a problem. They're big enough to stitch with their own threads

O.k. Now we've determined which designs can be done double sided without modification - the ones that have no isolated design elements. On to stitching logic.

Stitching Logic - Baseline

I use two methods for completing a double running stitch pattern - baseline and accreted section. I'll tackle baseline first

Baseline Identification

In the baseline method, the stitcher identifies a line that travels the entire length of the pattern. That's the baseline. It can be obvious, like a stem from which all of the pattern's flowers grow, or part of an outline; or it can be less obvious. In this oak leaves and acorns border, one baseline is blindingly obvious:

It's the ground line from which the little motifs sprout.

In this pattern it's slightly less clear. Any one of several options can be used as an effective baseline:

Here's one possible baseline:

Every other element of the design can be worked as a detour off this main highway. You'll note that the baseline needn't march around the perimeter of the acorn. In fact the entire acorn is one nested set of detours. And this isn't the only possible baseline. Here's a more efficient though less intuitive one:

Both are perfectly logical. I might use the one at the top if I wanted to quickly establish the height of my piece. It's just one unit shy of total pattern height. But the only reason to chose one or the other is personal preference. Please note that the logic of these to baselines applies equally well to the horribly complex plume flower:

I'd suggest folk new to double sided work start with patterns with easily identified baselines, and work up to some of the more daunting patterns.

Next post - stitching logic. Traveling along the baseline and its detours.

Technorati : Holbein stitch, Spanish stitch, double running stitch, embroidery

Well, my day job continues to eat my life, leaving precious little time left over to do much else. I do keep plugging away on the Clarke's Law sampler. I finished out the small panel of narrow bands on the right, and am working on the border defining the bottom edge of the similar space on the left. I have to admit that I'm very bored with this narrow strip. It's LOTS of repetitions of the SAME unit, with LOTS of long armed cross stitch background to fill in. I am sincerely looking forward to when this band is over and done with, so I can move on to the next bit of fun.

For Eleanor, who wanted to see the source material for the current band, it's here. Fourth strip up from the bottom. I wish I could read the V&A accession number on the label in the photo.

The set of narrow bands in the blank space immediately above the bit I'm working now will be different from the ones on the right of the center motif. There will be four and they'll alternate between black and red, but they will be of different widths than their counterparts, with the narrowest on the bottom rather than on the top.

Apologies to the few remaining readers here. This project has bored everyone but me to tears. Thank you for putting up with it.

Technorati : blackwork, counted-thread, double running stitch, holbein stitch, spanish stitch, voided

Amazingly, in the middle of the constant stream of work-related chaos, I did manage a half day over the weekend to unwind. Here's the result:

I've finished the panel of narrower bands to the right of the central motif. Now, with my right hand edge better established, I can finish out the voided, red band immediately below. Then it's on to th set of four narrow bands on the other side of the center. They'll be different (and different widths) but they will also alternate red and black. For the record, all four of these narrow bands can be found in TNCM, the pomegranate and foliate bands being two of my special favorites.

Here's a partial shot showing more of the piece. I still have to fill in "-A.C. Clarke" immediately to the right of the word "magic," but I haven't identified the smaller but complementing alphabet to use. I'll fill any left-over space above and/or below the author's name with another narrow black double running stitch band.

And on the bottom? Yes - there's one more wide band to go after all of this is done. I'm not sure. Something spectacular, with liberal use of both red and black. I'm not sure what that will be either, although I do know that whatever it is it will need to be between 50 and 60 units tall. (point of reference - the grapes at the very top of the photo above are 65 units tall.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, double running stitch, embroidery, holbein stitch, spanish stitch, strapwork

Finally! Time to finish off the last band on my Clarke's Law sampler. I really like the way it turned out. Yes, it's dark. But it's the narrowest strip on the work so far, and it separates the text bearing area above from what will be a more chaotic bit below. (The jury is still out if I'm going to continue full width strips down here, or do a more random placement of motifs:

But on to the the next a bit, unusual in the original sampler:

It features prominent outlines, plus some speckled, scattered straight stitch fillings and what looks like some patterned fillings too (the base of the pillars). While the source has several voided patterns and ones with lots of internal detail, this is one of the few that could be classified as falling into the "inhabited" style. I'm going to play with this a bit - working the outlines in two strands of red, and then doing some fillings in a single strand of black. Possibly patterned darning, possibly standard blackwork geometric fillings.

"Ah," but you say. "These patterns were done in monochrome, with the same color used for both outlines and fillings." I answer by pointing out some sources, including the ultra-famous Jane Bostocke sampler, and several others illustrated in The Victoria & Albert Museum's Textile Collection: Embroidery in Britain from 1200 to 1750, V&A accession numbers 516-1877, T.32-1936(particularly nice contrast color specking on this one). and an Italian strip (late 16th/early 17th century) appearing in Johnstone's Three Hundred Years of Embroidery, 1600-1900. You can even see polychrome work in the sampler that's been the inspiration for most of the bands in this piece, and from which the above snippet was taken.

Plus since I've got no historical precedent for the way I am using these patterns (even though each can be sourced), who's going to stop me? The Stitching Police? I raise my needle in defiance!

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery, voided

Another descent into deadline hell for me so posts here have been/will be sparse again.

I did manage to squeeze in a strawberry tart. Made entirely from our own home-grown strawberries.

Three years ago I got one plant from a neighbor, and put it along with some lirope in the sunny side garden near our giant grass. I know that strawberries spread by runners, and between the two low, green, spreading plants, I hoping for a nice ground cover in between the roses, heather and blueberry bushes, sort of a green mulch.

The first year the strawberry plant established itself. The second year it conducted a savage land war with the lirope, which is now pushed to the edges of the area. There were a couple of berries, but the squirrels got them long before we did.

This year there are strawberries everywhere. My ground cover hopes have come true. The plants are thick enough to suppress all but the most insistent weeds. In addition we've got berries! LOTS of berries! So far we've picked about four pints. Not much by commercial standards, but enough for a nice fat tart and several breakfasts. And they're GOOD. My girl-next-door berries are a far cry from the centerfold-bimbo ones trucked into the local market. True, mine are no where near as huge nor as pretty, but they're intense and firm with a flavor the watery supermarket berries can't match.

Slow going too on the Clarke's Law sampler. I'm still working on the current voided strip. Again, filling in the background with long armed cross stitch takes longer than just working double running outlines. That and time compression are slowing me down:

And for Karen in California, who wanted to see the whole thing so far:

This is roughly 7 months of stitching, for between 30 and 90 minutes per day (my first post in this series was back on 7 December of last year).

Next will be a very wide strip, probably worked two tone using both the red and the black together. Slightly less dark than the narrow strip I'm working now, but denser than the motto bearing areas above it, to help anchor the bottom. I've got a couple of candidates but haven't decided exactly which one to do. After that it's probably between one and three strips to finish out the cloth, depending on width of the patterns chosen, filling in the area east of "Magic" with an author attribution in a smaller font (probably balanced with a narrow strip to take up any remaining space); and doing some end of line doodles to square out the ragged right in the other text strips. Then finishing and framing. Taa daah!

PS: Thanks to adnohr. Both the Ursa and XStitch Studio programs are on my list to review, once I return from the shadow of deadline doom.

Technorati : baking, blackwork, counted thread, double running stitch, embroidery, strawberries

My sampler continues to grow. Here's the progress on my latest strip. Filling in the background with long armed cross stitch does take quite a bit more time than does just working the outlines in double running:

In other news, I celebrated yet another anniversary of my 21st birthday over the long weekend. The Resident Male helped me snag a copy of Lotz on eBay as my present (special thanks to Long Time Needlework Pal Kathryn, who pointed me to it).

What's Lotz, you ask? One of the leading sources on historical pattern books. In 1933 he began the systematic categorization of all extant historical pattern books printed prior to around 1700 or so. His Bibliographie der Modelbucher is a compendium of his research and is considered to be the seminal work in the field. It's in German, with over 100 plates of page reproductions at the back. I had used some of the Lotz pages when I graphed up patterns for TNCM, but now I have my own copy of the 1963 edition. Although I don't read German, I'm looking forward to puzzling out the text with the help of OCR software and translation utilities, and learning more.

In the mean time, those of you who wish to see some 16th and 17th century modelbooks, I recommend Pal of Pal Mathilde's on line linked bibliography as an excellent place to start. To be able to find some of the sources readily available on the 'net is a wonderful thing, although doing in-person research in libraries does have the collateral benefit of seeing the book two over on the shelf from the one you were seeking. Mathilde has gathered together a selection of reproductions that are readily available (one may require retrieval of a dead link via Internet Archive).

I'm still investigating possible platforms for charting double running stitch. So far none of the commercial needlework specific packages have presented an overwhelming advantage. I'll detail more of those trials at a later date (you can read reviews of several candidates in my posts from February 2010). I'm now looking at commercial general purpose graphics programs, including Visio, Open Office Draw, GIMP, ArtRage, ArtWeaver, Real-Draw, and others. Criteria for selection include:

1. Ability to graph VERY LARGE projects legibly on 8.5" x 11" paper

2. Visual breaks between consecutive individual stitches (as opposed to showing a series of many stitches as a solid unbroken line)

3. Ability to represent the background as dots rather than graph squares (to complement the visual break stitch illustration method)

4. Standard freeform capture/copy, rotate, mirror and flip tools

5. Ability to represent both line and solid unit patterns

6. Ability to vary the width of straight stitch units (to represent various thread thicknesses)

Most needlework packages handle #4 and #5. Several also do #6. The do however fall down on #1 because tend to present patterns at large scale for legibility and in deference to most modern stitchers gauge preference. It would be difficult to use those packages to graph out high stitch count repeats without the patterns overflowing onto multiple pages.

I've only found one package that does #2, but to achieve it I run afoul of #1, because the real estate required to represent the stitches as units is prohibitive. #3 is alien to everyone. I appear to have invented that method of presenting counted thread stitching when I doodled up TNCM. It worked, and I'd like to use it again (with edge notation on count), but it appears that the only way I'll find it is to figure out how to do it again on my own.

Technorati : BLACKWORK, COUNTED-THREAD, double running stitch, embroidery, voided

The latest strip:

I've been alternating red patterned panels and lines of black lettering. I've run out of lettering, but I'm keeping the red-black-red alternation. This one is also from the V&A 14.931 sampler. I'm working the foreground double running stitch using a single thread of DMC 310 black, and the background in long armed cross stitch using two strands.

I'm having way too much fun with these patterns to stop. I've been talking about a sequel to TNCM for years, but now I'm engaged in doing it. I'll be resuming my search for a decent charting program (or general purpose graphics program) specific to the needs of legible presentation for double running stitch. And given my horrible experience with the publisher of The New Carolingian Modelbook, I'm looking into other options, in specific - the feasibility of self-publishing, but I know very little about the various web-based micropublishing alternatives, but I'm open to all concepts. I do know that for this type of book paper copies are still valued by most. I don't believe that there's a critical mass of stitchers out there yet who would make use of an ebook stitch reference when hard copy sits so quietly in one's workbasket without consuming batteries.

I'm also considering different formats. The last book was a 200+ page compendium of patterns, with lots of appendices of various sorts. I don't think that's necessary this time out. Other options exist. Shorter booklets or broadside sheets for example lend themselves more easily to web-based publishing both for the issuer and the downloader. Pricing is also problematic. The income stream this would represent is quite small, and the burden of record keeping as a small business for taxes is immense by comparison to any possible profit (discounting entirely the major effort involved in creating the work itself).

So I put these question to the few folk who visit this place and who I presume might be interested in such a thing:

1. Would you be interested in a sequel to TNCM?

2. Would you find ebook format (meaning to be read on a book reader or iPad) useful?

3. Would you be open to receiving a print-your-own PDF rather than bound paper?

4. What length book would you consider worthwhile - a leaflet of 20 pages or fewer? A booklet of 21-50 pages? A small book of 50-100 pages? 100+? (Bearing in mind that content for a 100+ page book would take a while to compile).

5. Any suggestions for publishing options aside from self-created PDF download via wiseNeedle, or commercial services like Lulu, iUniverse, or Etsy? Any cautions on the commercial service route?

6. Would you object to a higher proportion of original and adapted patterns mixed in with exact stitch recreations, so long as all patterns were documented as to origin and modifications (if any)?

7. Anything else you want to see in a book of patterns of this type?

Technorati : Embroidery, blackwork, counted thread, double running stitch, voided

The latest strip. As you can see, a relatively un-normal quiet week allowed me to finish up the last lettered strip and begin the next. This one is done in standard double running stitch (aka Spanish stitch, Holbein stitch) using one strand of plain old DMC cotton embroidery floss. I was thinking of working the background, but I think I'll leave it plain. I don't want to overwhelm the delicate scrollings.

I graphed this from the same photo of a Victoria and Albert Museum sampler that many of the other strips here and in TNCM came from. If the link above doesn't work, search for item #T.14-1931 (it's also pictured in Drysdale's Art of Blackwork Embroidery). It's listed as Italian, 16th Century in the museum records, but Drysdale lists it as later. Another source lists it as Spanish, which is where the attribution in TNCM came from, but that's wrong and if I were to re-issue the book, would be corrected. If you squint at the photo you'll see the sources for my tilting columns, grapes, and the hops flowers and plume flower strips.

But this pattern doesn't appear only on this one source (right edge, lower four up from the bottom, and just below a red pattern, also see the snippet below). The unknown keeper of the www.drakt.org website took some photos of other samplers at the V&A among them is a page of showing shots of two cases of voided work. Thank you Unknown Keeper! If you look at the centermost of those three photos, you'll see a pattern very much like the one on 14.931, but instead of outline only like that sampler's (and my) rendition, this one has a filled in background. Here are the three versions of my current pattern side by side:

The 14.931's version is on the left. The unnumbered V&A bit from the Drakt site is in the center, and mine is at the right. I charted mine from 14.931, as best I could. Thankfully I have a better photo from which to work, provided by long time stitchpal Kathryn. For the record, I have not seen this exact base pattern with its distinctive frilled/curvy leaves in my amateur's wanderings through historical modelbooks, although there are quite a few designs in them that are vaguely similar to it.

Let's look at the two historical pieces. The V&A calls out 14.931 as possibly being a professional's work sheet - a sampler in the truest sense of the word, collected by a stitcher of high proficiency as a record, as a reference. The stitcher did just enough of each pattern to set the repeat. The Drakt photo is of a finished band, tricked out with accompanying side flourishes. I'm not sure what the finished band would have adorned. Possibly a pillow or bedcovering, or some table linen. It's not impossible that it came from clothing, but linens are more likely.

Discounting the worked background, the similarities between the two outweigh the differences. Those are minor - the treatment of the center binding band and stems/bodies of the central flowers, and the treatment of the diagonal arm that links each up-down motif. 14.931 uses a more architectural binding in the center, with more delicate center stems. Its diagonal arm is adorned with an S-shaped squiggle rather than chained solid fill diamonds. But even with the differences between the two historical renditions, it's clear to me that the two stitchers involved were cribbing from the same source, with minor changes creeping in much like the modern game of telephone, in which a comment whispered to one end of a line and then passed up along the chain often turns out different than the original message. I happen to prefer 14.931's lines and proportions, so that's the pattern version I started with.

My amendations are mostly in the treatment of the two terminal flowers in the pattern's center, a minor elaboration of the binding bars in the center, and the filling in the diagonal arms that connect each central motif. I didn't like the sponge like "down flower" at the center of 14.931, and I had trouble seeing exactly what was going on with the "up flower." Plus I didn't like the smashed tulip look of the comparable center bloom in the Drakt photo. I tried several variations on the S-squiggle in the diagonal arm, but didn't like any of them. I ended up with th ladder shape in order to make the airy and open terminal acanthus-like leaves look lighter by comparison. And then I added the second narrow binding bar to correct proportions in the motif's center. I could have raised the original bar two stitches, but I liked the way that it lined up with the separation between the leaves, so instead of moving it I increased its depth and intensified 14.931's horizontal lines.

I consider my own changes very much in the spirit of the original, and well within the range of variation presented by the two historical samples. I've preserved the look and feel of the pattern without debasing the delicacy or detail of the original, and left it a totally identifiable scion of its parents while tweaking it just a bit to my own taste. Your mileage may vary.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, double running stitch, embroidery, holbein stitch, spanish stitch

Thanks to a relatively quiet week with only two late nights and one day of weekend work, I managed to make significant progress on my sampler.

I finally finished the band of tilting columns and started on the final line of lettering.

After the lettering I have room for several more patterned strips, the exact number depending on how wide each one is. I'd like to include a row of strawberries, but I haven't found a historical pattern for them that I really like, so I'll probably doodle up one myself. I'm also considering several inhabited bands, with dragons, lions or mythological creatures, not unlike the mermaid strip I included in TNCM.

Another possibility would be a series of two-tone patterns, using both black and red in the same strip; or another long armed cross stitch band of a pattern similar in style to the one at the top, but worked voided. That would be very heavy though, and if done at all, should probably be relatively narrow. Maybe I'll save that for the last one, to give weight to the bottom of the composition.

Technorati : BLACKWORK, CROSS-STITCH, Embroidery, counted-thread, double running stitch

The latest strip. Unusual because of the columns:

Angelique asks when this type of needlework was popular. I respond that double running stitch came into vogue in the early 1500s, and continued to be worn for the next 130 years or so, although the actual designs worked in the stitch changed over that period. The strips I'm doing now are late, mostly adapted from a photo of a sampler, and that sampler is dated to the late 1500s, early 1600s. Which would put it at Shakespeare's time and just after.

So. Does my favorite style of needlework appear in Shakespeare? Possibly. People have looked to his texts and found all manner of things that might or might not be there, but I have a feeling that double-sided counted work of this type did make an important cameo.

My case? Othello.

As those of you who know the play remember, Othello is swayed to believe in his wife's supposed infidelity by scheming Iago, who points to a particular handkerchief as proof. Othello had given the piece to Desdemona. It was filched by her lady in waiting (Iago's wife) and planted as manufactured evidence that Desdemona was having an affair with Cassio, Othello's trusted favorite whom Iago envies and despises. The play's central tragedy results.

The handkerchief is mentioned in a couple of places. It's in Act 3, Scene 3:

IAGO

Nay, but be wise: yet we see nothing done;
She may be honest yet. Tell me but this,
Have you not sometimes seen a handkerchief
Spotted with strawberries in your wife's hand?

OTHELLO

I gave her such a one; 'twas my first gift.

IAGO

I know not that; but such a handkerchief -
I am sure it was your wife's--did I to-day
See Cassio wipe his beard with.

And is described further in Act 3, Scene 4:

OTHELLO

That is a fault.
That handkerchief
Did an Egyptian to my mother give;
She was a charmer, and could almost read
The thoughts of people: she told her, while
she kept it,
'Twould make her amiable and subdue my father
Entirely to her love, but if she lost it
Or made gift of it, my father's eye
Should hold her loathed and his spirits should hunt
After new fancies: she, dying, gave it me;
And bid me, when my fate would have me wive,
To give it her. I did so: and take heed on't;
Make it a darling like your precious eye;
To lose't or give't away were such perdition
As nothing else could match.

DESDEMONA

Is't possible?

OTHELLO

'Tis true: there's magic in the web of it:
A sibyl, that had number'd in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew'd the work;
The worms were hallow'd that did breed the silk;
And it was dyed in mummy which the skilful
Conserved of maidens' hearts.

Later in the same Act: Cassio comes upon the handkerchief and gives it to his doxy Bianca:

CASSIO

Pardon me, Bianca:
I have this while with leaden thoughts been press'd:
But I shall, in a more continuate time,
Strike off this score of absence. Sweet Bianca,

Giving her DESDEMONA's handkerchief
Take me this work out.

BIANCA

O Cassio, whence came this?
This is some token from a newer friend:
To the felt absence now I feel a cause:
Is't come to this? Well, well.

CASSIO

Go to, woman!
Throw your vile guesses in the devil's teeth,
From whence you have them. You are jealous now
That this is from some mistress, some remembrance:
No, in good troth, Bianca.

BIANCA

Why, whose is it?

CASSIO

I know not, sweet: I found it in my chamber.
I like the work well: ere it be demanded--
As like enough it will--I'd have it copied:
Take it, and do't; and leave me for this time.

So allowing me the license used by many Shakespeare pretenders, what we've got here is a handkerchief - essentially a two-sided piece work, embroidered with strawberries. There's an allusion to the embroidery being a deep crimson silk ("the dyed with mummy…conserved of maidens' hearts"), although Lord alone knows whether or not mummy was actually used as a dyestuff, and if it was, what color it might have produced or abetted. We've got a link between the work and a mysterious Egyptian/Moorish origin. It's worth noting that the name for double running stitch at the time of the plays debut was "Spanish Stitch," and it was wildly fashionable and popular. Plus it's clear that whatever type of embroidery it was, it was easily copied.

Taken together - reversible, red (along with black, one of the most fashionable colors for Spanish Stitch), stitched in silk, easily copied, link with Moorish origins - that's my style!

If the local amateur troop ever decides to stage Othello, I think I'll volunteer to stitch the handkerchief. And I plan on doing a strawberry panel on the current sampler, for good measure.

Technorati : blackwork, counted-thread, double running stitch, embroidery

Work continues to gnaw on my life and spit out the bones, but I do have something to share. Caroline, a regular reader of the blackwork discussion group on Yahoo, used a line unit pattern from TNCM to make a sweet biscornu:

The pattern she chose is the Brier Rose Twining Border (Plate 51:1). It's one of my own as opposed to a pattern with a specific period source, and it's one of my faves. I really like the way she's taken the corner and adapted it to fill the top of her pincushion with a chaplet of roses. I've used the rose pattern several times, but always as a longer border run either with or without the corner; and I've never played with working the flowers and stems in different colors.

What's a biscornu? It's a little eight sided pillow-type pincushion, made up from two squares of fabric of the same size. They often have a bead, button or stitch dimpling the center to accentuate the shape. Some are stitched on both side, some on one. Biscornus have become more popular recently, with the enthusiasm for them starting in Europe a couple of years ago. Their popularity has blossomed because they're a charming little project, ideal for showing off counted or freehand embroidery. They've been featured in recent issues of both print and on-line stitching magazines and blogs, with lots of free patterns on line. There's a nice article about making biscornus here.

To get the odd shape (which is the origin of the name, from the French for "quirky," or "odd shape"), the two squares are sewn so that the points of one square align with the center of the sides of the other (think about taking the two and matching them exactly, then give one of the squares an eighth of a turn clockwise or counterclockwise). Caroline has finished hers especially nicely, with neatly done stitching along the seam. You can see the point of her bottom square matching up with the center of the stitching on her top, ornamented one.

In any case, great job Caroline! A lovely (and useful) little project. I'm delighted that she thought to share the joy of her needle with me, and that she consented to give permission for me to share it with you.

If you've stitched, knit or otherwise worked something from one of my patterns and would like to see it posted in String's gallery, please let me know.

Technorati : biscornu, blackwork, counted-thread, embroidery

Suzie asks to see the back of my Clarke's Law sampler. Here it is in the dawn light:

I've not been very assiduous about making it 100% two sided, but double running stitch does lend itself to highest efficiency if one follows that logic. I'm also using knots, for which I am wildly unapologetic. Also, I'm not one of the back-is-perfection nazis. Neat, yes. Long jumps and stringy bits can be shadow-visible from the front of the work. Plus work should have a logical progression that uses thread efficiently. Rabid about it though - no. Historical works weren't perfect.

If you notice, both the plume and hops flower patterns contain elements that cannot be worked 100% double sided - isolated lines or units not attached to the main work area. For example, in the hops flowers those are the little detached diamonds that inhabit the central motif. If I were to work this pattern double sided I'd modify it slightly, adding a vertical connecting each of those diamonds to the lozenge that surrounds it. That way front and back could be completely alike. But since the back on this won't be visible once it's mounted, I'm not making an extreme effort. Still, you can see that with the exception of the voided backgrounds, I'm pretty close:

Plus as you can see from the back of the piece at the top, I'm on the letters that follow the hops band. What to do next? I haven't decided yet.

Technorati : blackwork, counted thread, embroidery, voided

Hobbled as I am by lack of time (work has invaded every corner of my life), I haven't had much time to do much stitching. Ten days since the last progress point and I've only managed to finish out a postage stamp sized area on the last strip and to begin the next row of letters:

For WindyRidge who asked for a close-up, here's the hops flower panel:

After a couple of cursory searches for these embroidery styles on line, I'm beginning to get the feeling that not too many 'net-enabled stitchers are playing with them. There are folks doing double running stitch and voided embroidery to be sure, but not from patterns of this complexity or vintage. If there are any of you out there I'd love to hear from you; especially if you're composing new works incorporating patterns from historical sources, as opposed to working up samplers designed by others. While working up pre-designed samplers is a pursuit of high order, it doesn't face the same sort of problems as original collation/composition. Those are the problems I'm most interested in right now.

Technorati : blackwork, counted-thread, double running stitch, embroidery

Through it all progress is being made. I do try to grab 10 minutes at lunch and another half hour in the evenings to decompress. Plus two weekends ago I had an actual half-day off on Saturday. My most recent strip is growing. I've got one more hops flower to go on the right hand edge, then it's back to more lettering:

This is a strange strip to be sure. You can see the similarity between this and the plume flowers strip:

Both feature the same type of up/down symmetry, with a center vaguely vegetal motif separated by mirrored stem-like surrounds. Both use small parallel stitches on the inside edges of the motif as shading. Both combine flat decoration (the sprig at the center of this strip's flower's base, and a similar sprig in the same spot on the plumes), with more rounded, natural forms. And both sport a sort of baroque exuberance and total unconcern with true plant shapes. Not unsurprising since both of these were cribbed from the same source sampler.

It is interesting though to see how variants in working method change the look. The plumes were done in one strand of floss, the hops flowers outlines in two, with the background of the latter in one strand. Although detail in the two strips is roughly comparable, and if anything the plumes have MORE detail than the current strip, the plumes are lighter and airier. The current strip is by contrast, meaty looking. Those ocarina like turnip things on the stem divides are particularly fleshy, in a somewhat unsettling way.

I'm not sure what the strip after the next bit of lettering will be. I am considering a bastard mutation of two blackwork styles - perhaps working an outline for a very open and unadorned long repeat strip similar to this one:

But instead of working the background, working the foreground as if it were one of the freehand inhabited blackwork styles, similar to this:

Not sure yet, but with no historical accuracy constraints on this piece, why not?

Technorati : blackwork, counted-thread, embroidery, sampler

Spring floods here. A minor one in the basement, brought on by the inordinate amount of rain we've had in this area this month, and at work, with more deadlines rushing one upon the other. Which must be good for business, but is exhausting none the less.

Last post I promised two things. The first one is a dream project. Something I will probably never have the time or resources to accomplish (especially the time): my own embroidered casket. Not the kind you're thinking of.

Back in the 1600s the crowning achievement of what passed for female education was the completion of a small box covered with embroidery. These were called cabinets or caskets, and often featured dimensional embroidery. They were about the size of a large tabletop jewelry box and were truly spectacular. The Peabody Essex museum in Salem has one one dated to 1655.. Here's a particularly nice one in the Minneapolis Institute of Art's collection. They're highly sought after by collectors.

Via Needleprint, I stumbled across this:

It's a modern chest base, made by a woodworker specifically for creating cabinets. If you click on the link you'll see that the individual panels are made to be removed. All that needs to be done is stitch up a piece of the correct dimension and lace it onto the panel, then refit the panel into the cabinet. Now all I need do is set aside two years, a pile of silks and metal threads, some excellent linen, and $800 for the box base (including shipping). Another item on my ever growing never-never list...

The second thing I promised was word of a snail invasion in the Antipodes. Again, not the kind you're thinking of. Garden plantings are safe. But Friend-of-Friend Fred Curtis, resident in Australia happened upon my book and is doing all manner of happy things with my snails. Here's a trial for a man's necktie to be covered with snails. He also stitched a camera straps using TNCM patterns (shown in process), and has used another of its patterns on a baby bib. But back to the snails. Here's another of his pieces, offering up early spring inspiration to those of us in the Northern Hemisphere.

(Photo reproduced with permission). I'm always tickled to see stuff worked up from patterns I've posted, both for knitting and embroidery. If you'd like to see them posted here in the Gallery, please feel free to send me an image or a link. Fred - thanks for the smile!

Technorati : Embroidery, counted-thread

Poking my head up from yet another marathon sprint at work here. With promise of another one hard on the heels of the last, I'm probably surfacing just long enough to note limited progress on my sampler and report other news.

First the progress:

You can see that I've completed another row of text, and I'm on to another double running stitch panel. I'm working this one voided too. It's a mishmash, with the bulk of the elements taken verbatim from the sampler that provided the previous strip. The hops flower(?) and the strange ocarina-like turnip things on the side are direct quotes. The finials on either side of the hops flower were very difficult to copy though, so I took the liberty of substituting bird heads for them. Lots of patterns of this style/era include animals, humans or birds (all or in part) sprouting from vegetation. My treatment of the voided area is however a total flight of fancy. I chose to use half-cross stitch, massed into a field of diagonal lines. I used a diagonal fill on the Do-Right sampler, too:

Unlike the graph paper like squared fill I on the grapes strip, I haven't seen historical precedent for the diagonal line treatment. But it's not totally illogical. If you've seen an artifact worked this way, please let me know. Other unusual treatments of the voiding include working the background narrower than the foreground and the direction of my diagonals. I've only seen one historical piece worked this way - a late 16th early 17th century panel photographed in Cavallo's Needlework. I graphed that one out, it's in TNCM on Plate 74:1 - I worked a bit of it a while back, and am considering doing it again on this piece:

Mirroring the diagonals on either side of the central motif is new. I haven't done this before, and I've never seen it done on any other piece. Again - I can't claim originality, there's only so many ways to do things in needlework, and it's a sure bet that the most obvious have been tried before. One last thing I'm planning on doing is NOT filling in the voiding in the background behind the little triangular areas above and below the strange, mutant turnip things. That will make the central hops flower motifs on their lozenges of darker background look a bit like a series of very large beads.

Given my impossible work schedule, the stitching density of both the foreground motif (again worked with two threads of my DMC floss), and the background (worked with one thread), this panel should take me quite a while. After this one comes the rest of my quote. So far I've stitched "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indi-" Next comes "-stinguishable from magic. In all probability, the "magic" won't fit on the next line of text. I'll deal with that problem when I get there.

Next post - snails in the Antipodes! My dream casket! (Not the kind you're thinking of...) Stay tuned.

Technorati : BLACKWORK, COUNTED-THREAD, EMBROIDERY

While my current work languishes, here's a picture of another past sampler. This one I stitched in 1996. It hangs in my husband's office:

Again most of the patterns are from The New Carolingian Modelbook, and the piece is a mix of plain old cross stitch, long armed cross stitch, and double running stitch, worked in DMC embroidery floss on 36 threads per inch linen (18 stitches per inch). The center twist is the same one I used on the knitted Knot a Hat earwarmer band. (It's also pictured on Ravelry.) You can see the difference in proportion between square unit based long-armed cross stitch, and the not quite square knitting stitch units. More rows to the inch than stitches across to the inch gives the knit version the slightly squashed appearance.

The quotation on this sampler is "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for the are subtle and quick to anger." From JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and totally appropriate for a software developer.

Technorati : blackwork, cross-stitch, embroidery, knitting, sampler

Work has a nasty way of eliminating any discretionary time whatsoever, but five minutes here and 20 minutes there, I have finally managed to finish the plume flower double running strip:

On to the next band of lettering, and on to thinking about what to do after that one is done. The current rate of production coupled with a workload that promises to double again in the coming month will give me ample time for that bit of consideration.

I hope to resume my explorations into charting software possibilities. I've got an itch to publish more patterns (including the just-completed strip), but without tools and time it's just not happening.

Technorati : blackwork, counted-thread, embroidery

Charlotte asks about the colors of the bands on the Clarke's Law sampler. She says that each successive band looks lighter than the one before. I answer:

So far I've used only two colors of embroidery floss - DMC Red #498 and DMC Black #310. The top band was done in long-armed cross stitch, using two strands of red. Long armed cross stitch produces a particularly dense and raised texture.

Outlines on the grapes band were worked in double running stitch using two strands of the red, but the background grid filling was done in one strand - also in double running.

The current plume flower band is worked in double running using just one strand.

Between the relative densities of the various source patterns and the density of the working methods I've ended up with the progressively lighter look for each band even though all are worked using the same thread.

My plan for the rest of the bands is to do more of the double running work, choosing bands of different visual densities and working some but not all of them voided (with a background fill, but not necessarily solid). The next one will probably be somewhat closer in look to the grapes panel, but in between that and the current band in darkness. I will alternate bands of various densities with the black lettering. I've used plain old cross stitch for both the letters and the red embellishing squiggles that loop around the letters. If you compare it to the long armed cross stitch snippet above you can see the difference in coverage between the two.

When all of the lettering is done I'll consider working more long armed cross stitch. Depending on how much room is left on the cloth, I might just go for broke with one massively large pattern, working it voided, so that the piece has a nice dense anchoring segment at the bottom. Or there might be a couple of bands of progressively darker stitching leading up to it. I haven't chosen the patterns yet and I'm not sure exactly how much room I've got, so you'll have to stay tuned to see how it all works out.

To answer Ellis - the reason you can't see any lines drawn on on the linen for stitching over is because there aren't any. This piece is done on the count. I'm using the weave of the linen as my guide, copying patterns drawn out on graph paper, with each grid of the graph paper corresponding to square of 2x2 threads.

To answer Marya - if my pattern contains a straight line that spans two or more graph units I do not make one big stitch over all of them. I make an individual stitch for each grid unit, even if they are all in one straight line. This keeps the work neater and more true to the graphed original. Long stitches are also more likely to catch on things.

To answer [anonymous] who noted that all of these patterns seem to rely on just 90 and 45 degree angles - yes, you're right. I can't rule out totally that diagonals over a 1x2 grid unit weren't used (30/60 degrees), but so far I haven't found a historical piece that used them in this type of pattern. It's possible that some in-filled blackwork diaper patterns (the dark outline, different geometric filling variant seen below) used stitches at those angles, but I haven't had the luxury of examining enough historical works close-up to make that determination. Lots of modern blackwork does use those angles. But for me, I'll stick to the orthodox and limit my design to 45s and 90s.

Technorati : blackwork, cross stitch, embroidery

Apologies to the person out there anxiously awaiting the rest of my charting review series. I've had a serious attack of work obligations that has eaten into all time not spent sleeping. Even family maintenance has been scaled back. Blogging and research for blogging is right out. But for all of that, I do reserve to myself a half hour in the evenings for de-stressing. So I do have some progress to show on my Clarke's Law sampler:

When this band of plume flowers and branches is done I do the next line of text. At the current rate of life-obfuscation, I won't have to worry about picking the next band pattern for weeks yet to come.

Sigh.

Technorati : blackwork, counted-thread, embroidery

I'm still working on my round-up of charting software reviews. I've got three or so more dedicated programs to try, and then I'll attempt to bend standard graphics programs to my use. In the mean time, work eats at my life. I did get a little bit of time to stitch while we were watching the Olympics yesterday. Here's the result of that hour plus the prior week's worth of dinking around on my Clarke's Law sampler:

Complex, but in a blocky, heavy-torso, post Renaissance way, kind of delicate. It makes the grape border above the line of text seem meaty by comparison. This strip is mostly reversible. Some small bits like the diamond in the center of the plume/flower's base and the bark texture lines are discontinuous, and I didn't bother to either start or finish off my threads invisibly. But with a bit of tinkering to norm the non-attached bits of detail, there's no reason why this pattern couldn't be worked totally two-sided.

For those of you who are thumbing through TNCM looking for this one, it's not in there. It's part of the set I'm grooming for the next book. If the investigations into a feasible charting method ever pay off...

Technorati : Embroidery, blackwork, counted-thread

Continuing my exploration of dedicated and general purpose software for use with my two great needlework passions - charted patterns suitable for counted thread embroidery (in specific - double running stitch) and knitting. Again I'm not testing one main feature of these programs - the ability to turn images including photos into needle-painted ready-to-stitch images. I don't care about that feature, although it's clearly the hook on which most of these programs hang their hat.

PC Stitch Pro v 9.01 by M&R Technologies

PROS: Standard features that one would expect - cross stitch, floss palette tied to major manufacturers offerings (in this case, in a companion program that allows color editing, but does not appear to allow one to mix across makers lines without direct finagling, or to blend colors - two features that Pattern Maker had). Includes back stitch, but not a separate straight stitch). Includes standard flipping/rotating/mirroring manipulations. Allows back stitch to be displayed in color. Allows printing pages with a selectable number of overlap columns so that navigation among multiple pages is easer. Allows auto-outlining of blocks of contiguous cross stitch with back stitch.

CONS: Selection is limited to rectangular areas (no free-form lasso), oddly called "select all" on the edit menu. The selection area can be resized as needed, and does select back stitches along with block units. Back stitch cannot be displayed with voids between individual stitches or by symbols that otherwise indicate beginning and ending of individual units. Back stitches can't be right-click erased like cross stitches or erased using the eraser tool, they need to be individually clicked on and removed using a pop-up window.

KNITTING AND CROCHET SPECIFIC USE: Can be used for standard colorwork mappings, and true type fonts (including the same knitting font mentioned yesterday) can be substituted for the symbol set. Symbols can be displayed on a color background and more than one symbol can be assigned to the same color. You can also override the program to assign more than one color to the same symbol. Like all graphing solutions not specific to knitting, there is no artificial intelligenge programmed in that would prevent building impossible to knit stitch configurations (this is rare even in the knitting world). Could handle block unit diagrams for linear filet or multi-color tapestry crochet, but even if one had a pre-made font for crochet symbols, this isn't well suited for stitch graphing.

VERDICT: Handy for cross stitch but unremarkable for my intended uses. I don't like the interface with the separate floss management program, or the way selection is handled.

Previous posts in this series are here, here and here.

Technorati : counted-thread, crochet, cross-stitch, embroidery, knitting

In the middle of this charting program exploration I have had time to do a bit on my Clarke's Law sampler. But first to answer a question. Aileen read my last couple of posts and wondered what I would consider a complex double running stitch pattern. I answer with pix of my current piece, plus a snippet of this pattern done up using Pattern Maker Pro, from yesterday's review.

The nickel shows scale (click for better size shots of each). This strip is stitched using one strand of DMC floss, color #498 on 32 count linen (16 spi). Not particularly fine, but fine enough to show the patterns. The entire stitched area is about 15.75 inches across. From the top of the dark red twining strip to the bottom of the the D of ADVANCED is about 8.6 inches.

The top strip and the cross stitch words were all done using two floss strands. The outlining of the motif in the wide grape strip was done using two strands, and the squared background was done using one. (I've since found historical precedent for the squared background treatment).

All of the strips between the words will be relatively light in value, done in some combo of plain or voided double running stitch, but they won't be as wide as the grapes (well, maybe the last one will be just to balance). I won't do another dark band in long armed cross stitch (either foreground or voided) until after the entire quotation is done. I think it will take another three bands of text before the whole quotation is complete. Then I'll fill out the cloth with a mix of styles, perhaps doing some in two-tone. It's all fly by night here. I'll also figure out something to eke out the line ends where the lettering comes up short. I think that NOT centering each line of text works better for my purposes, especially because I'm breaking text between lines in an unorthodox manner.

Now back to writing up the results of my stitch charting program explorations. Which for my knitting and crocheting readers, will have value. Either of the programs I described yesterday can be used to graph out colorwork repeats, or linear crochet (filet and tapestry styles). Pattern Maker Professional also allows you to assign a True Type knitting font (like the one from Aire River) to the symbol palette, and then using the program in symbols-on-graph mode, to compose knitting charts. Here's a sample from PM showing a simple double 1x1 twist cable:

Where this falls apart though for knitting is if you try to display both colors and textures at the same time. The purl symbol will always be associated with one chosen color, the knit symbol with another. Although you can override the program and display more than one symbol per color, this program links symbol and color in a way that you can't have multiple colors per symbol. Numbering rows is also problematic.

As I write up the rest of the sampled programs I'll include their potential for use by knitters.

Technorati : counted-thread, crochet, embroidery, knitting

O.k. Let's start looking at the various available charting packages, two at a time. Again, I'm not doing a full-on evaluation and comparison of every available capability. In particular I'm ignoring the import/translate capability that people use to turn standard graphics and photos into cross stitch designs. I'm looking at just one aspect of these tools - charting complex double running stitch patterns.

KG Chart LE for Cross Stitch by iktsoft v 1.09.06

PROS: First off, you can't beat the price for this one. It's freeware, no registration required. It presents output in both graphed and stitch simulated formats, and includes a DMC-based thread palette. The program is optimized for cross stitch, but it does contain a back stitch option that allows drawing straight stitches. Standard ouput in in-program composition mode appears to max out at 73x73 per printed page but mesh size can be manipulated to present more units per page (reducing down as far as legibility will permit and then some. Prints to paper (and PDF if a PDF writer is installed) and exports to JPG, PNG, TIFF, TGA, PCX, JPG-2000 and as pixel only to make icons.

CONS: Backstitch doesn't present on screen in either mode as a series of countable, identifiable units. Yes, you can count the boxes over which the stitches travel, but that can be difficult, especially in low light or in dense patterns. While back stitch clusters can be selected and moved, inverting or mirroring them introduces errors - the replicated units don't look like the original (plus transformation). Multiple page works are presented without repeats/overlaps for cross page orientation. Zoom is constrained to 8 set levels.

VERDICT: An excellent value for the casual cross-stitch user who wants to create multicolor block unit patterns and who may want to use the occasional outline or straight stitch unit. Not very useful to anyone composing entirely in double running.

Pattern Maker for Cross Stitch (Professional) by HobbyWare, Version 4

PROS: Back stitch and straight stitch have symbol sets that can be manipulated to display individual stitches (see settings in screen shot below). Units can be selected as part of a rectangular block or "lassoed" as a non-standard shape (Pro version only) and the selected or pasted bit can be mirrored/flipped/rotated with no loss of relationship among constituent units. Stitches can be represented on screen in floss-strand equivalent thickness units, and different stitches can use different thicknesses of thread. The thickness backstitch and straight stitch symbol representations can exist independent of floss thickness Output can be printed to hard copy, and mesh size can be manipulated to present as many per page as are legible. A dizzying array of available colors from most major floss and thread makers is included.

CONS: To show stitches as individual units, back and straight stitches need to be drawn one at a time. You can't paint a line of them across multiple chart blocks and have each one neatly display as a separate unit. I can't figure out how to display both cross stitch and line stitch symbols on the same view (I'd like to be able to show the line stitch units from the left hand picture and the color x units from the center pix on the same final image. Freehand "lasso" selection and export to JPG, TFF and other standard graphics formats are only available on the Pro version (JPG export shown in right image). The Pro version costs $120. US. The four day trial is a pain (those of us with careers may not have four linear days in which to make an adequate assessment of both versions).

VERDICT: A possibility, but pricey. Need to test it on a really complex bit of charting.

I'd appreciate hearing from others who are using any of these (or other) dedicated charting programs or who may be bending general purpose graphics programs to this need. Love a program? Have problems with one? Have hints/clues/insight into features/limitations? I'm sure that others would love to know, too.

Technorati : counted-thread, embroidery

I've got enough patterns now on tap that I should start thinking of how the follow on to The New Carolingian Modelbook should be composed. It's been notional for a long time, with the tentative name of Ensamplio Atlantaea in honor of the other SCA region that took me in during my self-imposed absence from Carolingia.

Aside from having no publisher for this one, the biggest impediment is that I haven't figured out how best to graph the patterns for publication. At this moment, I'm still bound to paper and pencil. The graphs in TNCM were made using my late, lamented Macintosh computers (a II and a IIcx); and Aldus Superpaint drawing/drafting software. We shifted over to the PC world long ago in response to the strain of keeping two parallel suites of hardware and software functional, and in response to the PC-centric nature of employment in this house.

To date, I've not found Windows based general graphics software that does as good a job for charting as the vintage-1990 stuff I used for my first book.

I'm still looking. I have an interim solution using MS Visio. It's cumbersome, and time-consuming compared to my Superpaint method. In Superpaint I was able to establish a bitmap based graph as a separate field, then paint on lines set up with voids to correspond (in negative) with the dots of my background. So instead of painstakingly noting each individual stitch, I could run a length of stitches in one stroke and have those stitches neatly separated by voids to mark the length of each. For example, instead of a solid line four units long, I was able to paint a line that looked like it was broken up into four exact stitch length units, and do it on vertical, horizontal and diagonal planes. But in Visio I can't do that. The best I can do is create several blocks, each with a line segment corresponding to a stitch (one side, two parallel side, two sides meeting at one corner, one diagonal, two diagonals, one diagonal and one side, etc.); then stack and rotate my blocks into my finished pattern. Although this method works well enough for block unit patterns it is excruciatingly slow for line unit designs, and compared to my old method is too tedious to use for a whole book.

So it's back to exploring the world of commercially available charting software. There are several programs created expressly for needleworkers. However they're not aimed at my needs, they're all targeted at multicolor tapestry style cross stitchers, who are interested in styles that look more like needlepainting (creating multi-color pictures with stitch units corresponding roughly to the pixels in a raster display image) than in the linear and mostly monochrome styles I prefer.

To date I've looked at several programs including:

• Cross Stitch Professional, DPSoftware
• PC Stitch 9, M&R Technologies
• PatternMaker for Cross Stitch, HobbyWare
• Easy Cross, Fulford Software Solutions
• KG Chart LE for Cross Stitch, iktsoft

Mind you - remember I'm not looking at the features that most of the world wants in these cross stitch packages, notably the ability to turn JPGs or photos into cross stitch graphs, fidelity to a dizzying array of potential thread/color choices, or final output targeted at publishing complete patterns (with thread consumption and stitch symbol charts). I want something that will graph out double running stitch in a manner that enables stitchers to clearly discern the number of units in a long run, that allows easy selection/inversion/mirroring of pattern subunits or areas, and that otherwise eases production and use of of high complexity charts for double running or other similar linear stitching styles.

In mainstream graphics programs, I've been playing with Visio (described here) and Open Office Draw. I'm thinking of exploring the world of contemporary raster based Windows graphics programs next, but there has to be a better solution.

I'll post detailed observations of these programs this week. Stay tuned. And if you have any suggestions for other Windows-based software that might suit my purpose, please let me know.

Technorati : charting, embroidery

Wandering around looking for designs to add to my growing Clarke's Law sampler I stumbled across the needlework photo collection oft the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

They have all sorts of fabulous things there including several items that may provide fodder for more bands on my current work.

But as I leafed through the collection one item in particular struck me. It's no secret that I've had a long association with the Society for Creative Anachronism. Among my long time and dear friends I count many members of Clan Oldcastle. Their device (shamelessly borrowed from their website) is:

I was amazed to find a historical embroidery oh-so similar to that device. The original is a fragment of a larger piece, done in drawn thread embroidery. The museum's accession info dates it to the late 16th/early 17th century, and gives it an Italian provenance. There's a companion piece, too, with a boat, some rather blocky lions.

But it was the castle that excited me. Here's a graph adapted from the museum artifact. Click on the thumbnail below to print a useful size.

I've made some minor changes but kept most of the imperfections of the original. My count is the same. The original looks a bit taller because its constituent units are not square. I've kept the not-quite symmetrical center tower, with the ornaments below the tower's embattled top offered up skew to the rest of the count. I've substituted stars for the crosses on the original flags, and added two more of them for good measure. (Estoiles being of special heraldic importance in conjunction with the Oldcastle edifice). I've left the one at the top of the left hand tower closer to the original in shape for those who prefer them accurate, but added a bit of twinkle to the others. I also took the liberty of mentally fixing a bit of wear on the original on the open portcullis. But the rest is spot on.

I'd love to see anything made up from this pattern. It would be especially nifty in any of a dozen styles of counted thread embroidery, in Lacis, Burrato, or Filet Crochet; or in knit or tapestry crochet. Other non-textile applications include mosaic work and marquetry. And if you do use this pattern, please consider visiting the Clan Oldcastle link above, and using the address there to make a donation to the American Diabetes Association.

This one is going into Ensamplio Atlantaea (my growing sequel to The New Carolingian Modelbook) for sure, but I share it here first.

Technorati : crochet, embroidery, knitting

More babbling on here today.

Faithful Reader TexAnne noted my mention yesterday of the "print to transparency" cheat for flipping charted patterns and added another that I had forgotten. Some printer drivers and photocopiers allow you to mirror-image their output. This option is most accessible in the Mac world. I remember my late, lamented Macs having a prominent command in the print dialog that allowed mirror-image printing, something that came in handy for printing out driving directions. I'd print them out in a large font in mirror image and lay them on the dashboard of my car. They were just visible as a right-side reflection on the windshield in front of me, and acted as a "heads-up" display.

Since TexAnne's note I've tinkered with the print dialogs of several PC world printers from HP and others, plus some large office photocopiers, and in most of them I've found a buried "Print Mirror Image" command. It's usually on an "Advanced Commands" tab that summarizes the state of all available printer options, but it's not often displayed as an easy to get to setting. But it's usually there somewhere. Scan to print or printing mirror image is a matter of finding and setting this hidden command. It's another useful way to use technology do do a mirror image chart flip.

Long Time Needlework Pal Kathryn reminded me of a story connected with the pattern I'm stitching now.

Back when I was working it voided on the Think sampler (lower band, shown flipped to the same orientation as the current work for comparison) I did lots of stitching (and knitting) in public. I worked in the Washington, D.C. area, and would take my projects outside at lunch and do them on park benches. I wrote to Kathryn that one day an elderly lady and her granddaughter approached me. They were of Hmong ancestry, a Southeast Asian people with a rich heritage of traditional counted cross stitch embroidery. With the granddaughter translating, the lady admired the work and asked if the pattern was traditional to my home village or family. I thanked them for their compliments and said that sadly, Brooklyn, NY did not have its own embroidery tradition, and that I'd found the pattern in a book. Kathryn says she's thought of this particular design as "the Brooklyn Pattern" ever since.

Technorati : counted-thread, embroidery

Not much progress for this week, but my time has not been my own.

This strip will continue marching on to the right, ending approximately at the green stripe. The horizontal blue stripe shows the approximate length of the graph for the repeat as it appears in my book. More on that below...

First, thank you to those who have left comments or sent notes of support. I know that lots of knitting readers are disappointed that I've been stitching lately. The huge drop off in visitors is a clue, but some of that is due to other factors. Ravelry for instance has just about killed all but the most popular independent knitting sites. So it goes.

Back to stitching. I've got three comments I'd like to address here. The first one is of interest to knitters. Faithful Reader TexAnne points out that long block unit repeats like the one I'm working now would adapt very nicely for double sided double knit scarves. An excellent observation, thank you! I add that anything worked in strips, like a large lap throw, an edging around a circularly knit skirt hem would also show this pattern (and its kin) quite well. I've done double knitting from these before. My oven head hat is knit up from an outtake that didn't make it into TNCM. You can see the negative/positive effect in the flipped up brim:

The chart for this hat appears in a follow-on post to the hat description. And, although not double sided, my Knot A Hat earwarmer band (which appears to have lost its picture link, although the chart link works) uses another historical knotwork strip for knitting:

Charts for both these repeats can be found by following the links above.

The second comment contains questions from Ellen R. She asks if I've ever worked these patterns before, and if they can be done in voided (Assisi) style. Here's an answer to both:

I did "Think" in 1989 and gave it to my husband to hang in his office. At the time he was working for a company that used the Scots lion as its logo. All of these patterns are in TNCM, and you can see the one I'm working on now across the bottom of the piece. It's upside down compared to the strip I'm working now, and is worked voided - with the background instead of the foreground stitched. The effect is a bit different. To my eye, it's more formal done this way. You can also see more of the repeat, although even this strip doesn't capture one full cycle. I've worked quite a few of these many times, although even I haven't done every pattern in TNCM (darn near close, though).

The last comment comes from Anne in Atenveldt, (an SCA region that includes parts of California and Utah). She's got a copy of my book and notes that the chart for the current strip shows the two interlaces and the segment between, but is much shorter than the length of the strip I'm working now (or for that matter, what's in the Think sampler). She wants to know how I do the additional segments.

I attempt to answer. The extra length is a mirror image of the section presented in the book. I work along as shown for the center point interlace and then the area between it and the next interlace as shown. On the far side of the second interlace, enough of the established pattern is shown to keep the stitcher on target, but after that point a bit of mental gymnastics is required. The stitcher has to continue on by inverting the graphed segment, mirror image style until the next mirror reflection point is reached. Again, I do show some of the area on both sides of that second bounce point to assist in navigation (and because in this case the interlaces are eccentric), but space prohibits showing a full cycle of the repeat.

Now this doesn't present a problem for me, but as you can see, I've been flogging myself with this sort of thing for a long time. And it's no shame to say that doing this in-mind reflection is difficult for you. It's a matter of wiring, and not everyone can do this with ease, no more than can everyone use a map or read music.

If chart flipping presents problems, I do know of one easy shortcut. Office supply stores still carry transparency sheets for overhead projectors. They're far less common in these days of Powerpoint and projectors, but many schools still use them so they're kept in stock. They come in several flavors for various types of photocopier or printer, so be sure you've got the right kind for your machine. (Hot process laser printers and photocopiers for example use a melt resistant plastic, and can be fouled by using something not designed for them). Copy your chart onto the transparent sheet. Put it in a page protector sleeve with a piece of plain white paper. Work off it as usual. When time comes to do the flip, turn it over inside the page protector. Instant mirror image. The only caveat is that on pattens with eccentric interlaces as the flip point (like the one I'm working now), you'll need to finish the interlace as charted before flipping to work the "in-between" portion.

In all, thanks to all who continue to read here. I do hope that my prattling on is useful to someone.

Technorati : counted-thread, embroidery, knitting

My own progress on the Clarke's Law sampler? A bit:

I've got the full segment from one bounce point (the column down the center of the trefoil interlace) to the other bounce point (the column down the center of the heavy stem interlace at the left). To be fair, this pattern's bounce points aren't exact. The interlaces themselves don't mirror perfectly left and right, but they're close if one makes allowances for the minor perturbations caused by the stem elements twisting and weaving over and under each other.

The rest of this strip is a (more or less) mirror image of what I've already stitched. As you can see, a full cycle of this repeat is very long, making it difficult to use for clothing, but ideal for household linens, curtains and the like.

I happen to like long repeats though. They're far more interesting to stitch than shorter ones. But I'm ready for the next panel. Got to finish out this one first, then it's back to the area below the lower band of the motto. I'm not sure what I'll put there, but it won't be long-armed cross stitch. Back to double running for the next panel. And it will probably be something from my design notebooks, rather than from TNCM. If so, I may consider posting it here. Stay tuned.

Technorati : counted-thread, embroidery

I really like double running stitch. The more complex the pattern, the better. Best of all are the amazingly detailed ones from the late 1500s/early to mid 1600s that are an explosion of vegetal forms. Some are inhabited by natural or mythical creatures. Here's an example:

StitchPuppy, a stitcher new to double running stitch (aka Spanish Stitch, Holbein Stitch) asked me about the logic and method of working double running. She's familiar with the working method - that the final effect of a solid line is achieved by two passes of the needle. On the first trip every other stitch unit is made, and on the return trip, the "in betweeners" are filled in:

(Pix above are from TNCM). She understands that with careful stitching, pieces in double running stitch can be made to look exactly the same on the back and the front - a plus for cuffs, collars, napkins and other applications where both sides of the work are likely to be seen. Where StitchPuppy has problems is on understanding how the method can be applied to complex patterns. She wants to know where I start when I tackle a complicated double running pattern, and whether or not I use a logic that helps keep me from running into dead ends, or that helps ensure that I do end up with a front/back reversible end product.

I'll try to answer.

First - not everything that's graphed out for double running can be done easily totally two-sided. Any design with an isolated bit of stitching that's not connected to the main pattern presents a problem. The small dolphin just below the mermaid in the stitched panel above is not connected to the rest of the design. It's a stand-alone element. To work this particular piece double sided, one would need to both begin and end off a separate strand of thread, just for that dolphin, or connect it on one or both sides to the main motif by one or more bridging stitches. Either way, the dolphin presents only a small problem. A larger one is posed by the mermaids' facial features. The eyes, nose and mouth are isolated from the main stitching areas, and are too small to be worked double sided and have enough area to finish off the ends.

The rest of the mermaid pattern can be worked double sided. There are no other logical impediments to completion. But how to work a complex design? Not hard. Any design without a discontinuity (like the orphan dolphin) can be envisioned as a single baseline, with detours to fill out the details or as a series of areas. Let's look at the phoenix I posted here a couple months ago:

(By the way - see that border? The octagonal interlaces are not connected to the little "Vs" filling out the border north and south. Lots of discontinuities there, and if you saw the back of that work you'd notice the bridging stitches I used to connect the design elements).

Back to the phoenix. It's pretty easy to identify a baseline around the phoenix's perimeter:

Sometimes I stitch this way - working a long every-other-stitch outline around the entire motif, then going back and doing the "detours" from that line. The advantage of working this way is that it's quick to block in the major design elements and to make sure they're properly aligned to each other before investing time and thread in filling in the rest of the design. The primary disadvantage is that it's hard to keep count during long straight runs. This is the working logic described in most blackwork books. This piece shows another example of the conventional baseline-first attack method:

You can see that I've outlined the blossom's main elements, and am now following along to work the individual petals.

However, I'm far more likely though to work my pattern in a more compartmentalized manner, either identifying the baseline but instead of following it and filling in detail later, starting on the baseline and taking every detour that presents itself. I'm using the baseline identified above, but instead of following around the bird, I immediately zip down to do that first little feather slice, returning to the baseline when that's done.

Worked this way, the design gets filled in early on, moving down the baseline and accomplishing the detours, and returning to the baseline after each one. All that's filled in on the second pass is the every-other-stitch segment of the baseline. .I find this method much easier to use for complex charts. It's quite easy to count little completed feather units in the bird's wingtips as I finish them. The flower strip above also shows the second method. I used it for the acorn sprigs. I stitched along the baseline, but every time I got to a branch, I finished the branch before returning to the baseline. The second pass is a straight run along the baseline itself.

Where to start? It depends on your work, the style of frame you are using, and your own preferences. In general it's better to minimize handling of the stitched area. Working from the center out is an accepted practice because it tends to keep sweaty hands away from finished stitching. But there are times when working that way isn't logical. I began the phoenix with its head, having matched the center of the pattern with the center of my to-be-embroidered area. The phoenix was also at the rough center of my finished project and was one of the early elements I completed on it. The strip below though was done bottom up. And the patterns I'm working on my current piece were begun at the cloth's center. It's all situational.

Where is the baseline in an all-over pattern? Wherever it's convenient. Here you can see that I'm using two baselines for the twisted frame element, and not worrying about completing the entire interlace in one gulp:

Is there any way to determine which method was used on historical pieces? Scholars may have made figured it out but I haven't run across word of it in popular stitching literature. The most reliable way to figure out historical stitching logic would be to pick apart an artifact. NOT something anyone sane would do.

One word of caution to those who want to work something two-sided. Resist the temptation to use veeerrryyyy loooonnnnnggggg strands of thread to minimize the number of ends. They WILL tangle and abrade as they are stitched. You will curse the day you started the project. (Trust me on this.) I do have a trick to share, though. If I use a very long strand I start from the middle of it. I pull the thread half-way through my work, then in an inconspicuous spot, I wind the excess thread around a straight pin. I stitch away with the free end until it's ready to be terminated. Then I go back and free the other end of the thread from the pin, and use that. Since I am stitching with a sane length each time I avoid tangles and thread wear, but I minimize total ends. Of course this presents its own logic problem - how do you know where to start the next mega-thread, but that's a conundrum for another day.

I hope that this is helpful to StitchPuppy and with luck others, too. If anyone has questions about identifying baselines or stitching logic in double running, please feel free to post them here.

Technorati : counted-thread, embroidery