For those who have asked, the dragon panel pattern from the Siebmacher modelbook I regraphed for The New Carolingian Modelbook has been posted over at Bibliodyssey.



Apologies to anyone who wondered why this was posted three times.  I've had problems wrestling with the "post away from home" feature.

Enjoy!

Long-Time Needlework Pal Kathryn (she of "too many centuries, too little time") is mid-sock, knitting up a pair loosely following Paton's own recipe for Kroy Socks. She's using Kroy in Retro Red, plus navy and Blazing Blue. The nifty cloverleaf motif she's using is the reason for this post. She's adapted it from my New Carolingian Modelbook, Plate 1!

As ever, I'm tickled to see one of my pattern children make it out into the real world. Great socks, Kathryn! You made my day. (Photo is Kathryn's, reproduced with her permission.

Technorati : knitting

I met my major deadline today, and am beginning to decompress. The best way to do that is to think of something completely different, so I've begun to contemplate patterns in general, with some idle thought to my Spanish hat. So I began playing with motifs I have lying around. Like this one

I don't think this particular one is great for the hat, but I have an odd fondness for it, plain as it is. As the source annotation states, it's one of the patterns I included in The New Carolingian Modelbook. While it looks like it would be at home as a border on the wall of a 1950s era tiled bathroom, it does in fact date back to 1546 by specific annotation. It may well have appeared elsewhere, although most of the da Sera patterns are pretty unique to his books. (If you think pattern piracy is rife these days, you'll not be surprised by 16th century publishing ethics).

This particular pattern would work as nicely for stranding or for knit/purl textures as it does in cross stitch or other forms of counted thread embroidery. In fact it would have a number of advantages if done in knit/purl:

• Complete reversibility
• Low curl factor - roughly equivalent amounts of knit and purl
• Deep texturing - the knit/purl sections would pull in a bit like ribbing unless strongly blocked
• Ease of memorization - purl rows mimic the lay of the knit rows below them, and there are only two different row patternings, alternating blocks of k2, p2, and alternating blocks of k6, p6

So I put it here in part to make up for the consternation I caused with yesterday's subject line.

Technorati : embroidery, knit

Another entry from long ago. The link provided is no longer good, but the advice still holds. Copies do surface every now and again on eBay and on AbeBooks. Nothing has changed about my royalty situation or the low esteem in which I hold the owners of the publishing firm and their total lack of responsibility. This first appeared on 24 June 2004.

Some people have asked me where to buy my book of charted embroidery patterns. I have to say that there aren't many places that sell it. It's a long, sad story involving publishers who were sloppy and unprofessional at best, and downright unscrupulous at worst. Copies do surface every now and again. I wish I could say that I was selling them, or that I had a prayer of getting royalties from those transactions, but I don't.

However a friend just notified me that some copies have surfaced on eBay. The seller isn't the original publisher, they appear to be an independent bookseller. I also apologize that the books appear to be going for well over the original cover price. I have absolutely no affiliation with this seller, nor will I benefit from these sales. But if you're desperate for a copy, it's the only source I know.

Hmmm. As I was writing today's entry, I wanted to refer back to a post I remembered writing back in June of 2004. Apparently not all of the posts for that month imported correctly when we transferred our archives over. So the posts you'll see today are hand-carried ports of the AWOL material. Apologies for the deja vu. True new content tomorrow. I promise.

Material originally appearing on June 14, 2004. For the record, the pattern for the Spring Lightning Lacy scarf is now in the main wiseNeedle pattern collection.

WORKING REPORT - SPRING LIGHTNING LACY SCARF

My lacy scarf is done!

As planned, the ribbed center section pulls in a little bit, making the two diamond panel ends flare out. Stretched and blocked, across the widest point of the edgings it measures 14 inches at the end and 12 inches at the center. It's about 80 inches long. That's big for a scarf and narrow for a stole, but I like the size. I really enjoyed this project. It was just the right combo of super-easy and super-exacting. The Greenwood Hill Farm 2-ply laceweight yarn was wonderful. I Can t say enough about it. It's the softest, most buttery Merino I've ever worked with. It's hand-spun look is unique. You can see the slightly whiter areas in the photo - those are spots where one of the plies of the two-ply yarn gets a bit fluffy. There's a lot of variation skien to skein in the amount of the fluffy bits, so if you order it or buy it at a sheep and wool show, you may want to try to pick skeins that are similar (or not, as your taste and project needs dictate).

I'm not sure whether I'll keep this scarf or give it as a gift. On one hand I really like it. On the other hand, while it would be an interesting contrast with my guy-style brown leather aviator jacket, I know several people who might appreciate it as much as I do. Plus I'm not tired of my Kombu Scarf yet. Good thing I have the summer to think about it before scarf season resumes.

FILET KNITTING

Here's an obscure style. Mary Thomas in her Knitting Pattern Book mentions Filet Lace Knitting. It's a style of knitting more or less equivalent to filet crochet, which is itself an adaptation of earlier lacis and other filled net or withdrawn thread style darned embroidery. In this set of styles, the needleworker follows a graphed pattern, working solid or "empty" squares. The pattern is built line by line by these blocks of squares. This butterfly insertion is a good example of filet crochet:

(Pix from http://www.knitting-crochet.com - attributed there to Star Needlework Journal, 1917)

On page 263 of her book, Thomas describes a way to do something like this using knitting. Solid blocks are formed by units of three stitches x four rows. Spaces look to be formed by a combo of yarn overs and bind-offs. I haven't quite figured them out yet, but Thomas gives several illustrations and a couple of easy practice pieces.

I'm asking if anyone has ever actually tried this because I have never seen any lacy knitting that was done this way - not as a piece of actual knitting, nor in a photo either on the web or in any other book. I have never seen a lace pattern for a project done in this style either. So I'm asking. Have you done this? Do you know of any pix or other sources for the style?

The reason why I'm asking? I'm in the middle of one of those panting-and-eyes-wide moments of gotta-do-it-but-how? inspiration. Yesterday we closed on the new house. I am now the proud owner of a massive Arts and Crafts style front door, with a glass window that's 30 inches wide by 18 inches tall. There's mounting hardware there for a lace curtain panel, currently holding a dingy scrap of Woolworth's best. The door cries out for a better curtain.

But not just any lace panel will do. I've **got** to make one, and not only do I want to make one, I want to make one from THIS panel from my book of embroidery patterns:

The ultimate source is a book published in Nuremberg Germany around 1597 by one of the more prolific and well-known makers of embroidery pattern books. Not only did Johan Siebmacher put out several (this pattern was in his Schon Neues Modelbuch vol allerly listigen Modeln naczunehen Zugurcken un Zusticke"), his books traveled all over Europe so they're very well represented in museum collections. Many plates from them were copied and re-issued during the counted pattern "Renaissance" of the mid 1800s. This particular panel has cropped up several times over the years - often simplified or truncated. The most recent adaptation from it of which I know is a pattern for an cross stitched kitchen tablecloth and curtains set in an Anna magazine from the mid 1960s.

I haven't a clue as to how I'd go about making my George and Dragon panel, but I've got the will, the how-to book, the cotton yarn (Crystal Palace Baby Georgia), and the blissful confidence born of total ignorance.

Technorati : knitting

I know there are folks who are looking for my book on embroidery.  Every now and again a copy or two surfaces in Albuquerque, where the fly-by-night publisher was.  Always at the same bookseller.  It looks like that same bookseller has "found" a couple more copies.   I get nothing from these sales, but I do know that people are rabid to lay hands on the thing.   Even if this sale is closed by the time you get there, keep an eye on these people because if more copies resurface anywhere, it will probably be with them.

Please note that I have no affiliation with the seller.  In fact on my previous attempts to contact them, they told me that I was dead (which was news to me); and rebuffed my request for the publisher's last known address. 

My thanks to embroidery pal Mistress Karen Larsdatter for spotting the sale notice!

The Kureopatora snake scarf continues. It's longer, but otherwise looks the same. I will probably finish it up tonight and post my how-to thereafter.

In the mean time, here's another of the embroideries that litter my house. This one is another doodle - a sampler in the true sense, done to try out patterns that ended up in my book. It's done in a single strand red linen on a linen ground, at about 15 stitches per inch on linen that's about 30 threads per inch. The long dark band at the bottom was done in long-armed cross stitch. The lion, the knot at upper left, the narrow diagonal band next to it, and the dark band at the left edge were in more standard regular cross stitch. THINK was stitched on the count using chain. The rest of the patterns were worked in double running (aka Spanish Stitch, Holbein Stitch).




The dense rose corner surrounding the lion is original, the rest (except for THINK) all have historical precedent, and are all graphed out in The New Carolingian Modelbook. In general I'm not that fond of this one. Done as a true sampler as it was, placement of the motifs was very haphazard. I stitched whatever I felt like trying out, and if the pattern didn't fit - I didn't care (the leggy grapes are truncated at the bottom edge). I didn't plan anything, and the imbalance of the whole thing reflects that.

THINK ended up hanging in my husband's office for a time. That company he was working for in '89 used the heraldic lion as a logo element, which is why THINK and the lion both ended up on the thing. He's no longer there and has another, better embroidery at work now. THINK along with its obsolete logo has been exiled to the upstairs hallway.

In the absence of any knitting progress, I offer up another embroidered tidbit.



This is the last pattern in my New Carolingian Modelbook. It's the same one that the SCA Lady Lakshmi used to make a hat for her friend Mistress Morwenna.

As you can see (in spite of my lousy camera work), my panel isn't centered on the middle of the repeat. Instead I've skewed it a bit to focus on one mermaid, and to show the second bounce center - the twist at the panel's extreme right. This is in part because I wanted to work one full cycle, but was limited by the size of the piece of linen I had available. For the record, this is done on 30 count linen (about 15 spi) using one strand of standard DMC embroidery floss.

This is one of the pieces I entered in the Woodlawn Plantation embroidery exhibition over the years. It won an honorable mention prize (feedback was that the judges didn't like the skewing of the repeat). Amusingly enough, my brazen, bare-breasted mermaids must have offended some sensibilities. The piece was displayed at the very top of the wall in a room with 15-foot ceilings. The prize ribbon was clipped athwart the bosom of one mermaid, and a yellow sticky note was affixed to her sister's.

A few knitting and non-knitting related questions from the inbox:

How did Killer Bunnies go?

Tons of fun. We played as a mixed-age group, with the youngest being 7. We had hoped to get the Red Expansion Pack at Puzzle Me This in Provincetown, but they were out. We settled for Violet, the next one in sequence. The game plays more smoothly if you add them in order because each pack builds on the last, but we were able to use most of the Violet cards anyway.

What size needles did you use for the two versions of your counterpane?

The old version in the heavier cotton was knit on one of my odd size needles, it's a set of old long steel DPNs, they're probably antique 9s - and just a bit larger than standard US #4s (3.5mm), but closer to #4s than #5s (3.75mm). The new piece is knit on 3mm needles, which in some makers' lines is a US #2, and in some is somewhere between a US#2 and a US #3.

Did you finish that embroidery doodle while you were away?



Are you planning on assembling the counterpane in the same way as the last try?

No. These units can be joined in many ways. Last time I butted the triangles together. This time I plan to join squares. My goal is to do the layout shown at the upper right. Last time I used the one at the lower right. Both use some plain solid triangles in addition to the pattern bearing units.



Where did you buy the counterpane pattern?

I didn't. I made it up, starting with a standard spiraled star. I added the outline-like bars to emphasize the motif, and played with several treatments for the ground behind the star. This one like my Mountain Laurel counterpane plays with a textured ground and smooth star, but unlike that piece, plays a bit more with the ground. I also wanted to do a counterpane that was an tessellation of more interest than a flat tiled hex or a plain octagon and hex. That's why there are four units - the center hex, a patterned square, a patterned triangle, and a plain triangle. The layout above is actually an early draft showing how I played with the concept, looking at ways in which I could use the patterned units to extend the lines of the center hexes.

Can you send me the pattern?

Be patient. I plan on posting it to wiseNeedle this year - probably after I've gotten considerably more done on the thing and have a decent representation of the piece's final look. I'd also like to noodle up a complementing half hex and border.

From the inbox:

How did you draw the pattern on the cloth?

I didn't. I have the design drawn out on a piece of graph paper. I'm copying that design onto the fabric, using the weave of the linen as the equivalent of graph paper. Each unit on my ground cloth is a two thread by two thread square. I worked from the graph to establish the outlines in the center motif, then "colored in" the long armed cross stitch background. I worked the first repeat of the lettuce around the edges from the graph, but subsequent iterations of it from the piece I embroidered (much less cumbersome than toting around a book).

Was this stuff actually done on the count in the 1600s?

A vast amount was. There are a couple of caveats though. Some people assert that a minority of counted thread pieces worked on very fine linens used some other method to establish the evenly spaced graph-like appearance. In particular, they suggest that some sort of evenly woven but easily unraveled fabric was placed over the ground cloth, and used as a stitching guide. The stitching was done over the placement aid, and its threads were later removed from the work. Other people suggest that pouncing, either over paper or another fabric was used to produce evenly spaced dots, which were then employed as the spacing mechanism for the ground. I'm kind of skeptical on the pounced dots thing. That's a ton of very smearable dots in a very small space.

Another exception is theorized for other forms of voided foreground stitching. (Yesterday's piece is voided foreground). Some of the panels look more like someone drew the foreground motifs freehand, then filled in the background with the covering stitch. Again I can't confirm or deny this. Some panels (especially those with repeats) look quite precise to me - too stitch-precise and weave-aligned to have been freehand sketches. To my eye, the few pieces that might have been done this way are pictorial panels that have almost a folk-art type naivety of line and motif placement. One of these panels is pictured in Bath's Embroidery Masterworks. While it's not a probability that all voided foreground works were done this way, it's not a impossibility that some were.

I'm sure the total state of research into the origins of voided foreground styles and Assisi embroidery has gnawed into this problem. I haven't kept up my reading in it of late. My long time pal and needlework buddy Kathryn Goodwyn has an excellent article on voided foreground stitching on line (this group of styles is her specialty). She mentions the hand drawn outline variant as a curious offshoot.

Are the colors accurate?

Green wasn't the most popular but it was used. However the natural color, brownish unbleached linen I had on hand wouldn't have been used. A historical stitcher would have preferred a much lighter ground. The accompanying black outlines in this piece are also open for debate. Few pre-1700 pieces employ contrasting color outlining, although most later examples of the style do. The original of this design clearly employs two different colors in the work. Even in the black and white photo of the original (dated 1560-1625), the background is clearly a different color from the outlines. The original also shoed background area behind the lettuce north and south of the main panel as being worked in long-armed cross stitch - something I don't intend to do. (Lettuce isn't a technical term for the extra borders framing the main panel, it's just my own term of reference).

Linen thread?

It is out there. DMC has some. There are linen threads made by other makers, too. But sometimes expedience wins. I'm not doing this piece as a totally accurate historical study. It really is a doodle. I'm playing. I happened to have the Flower Thread on hand, and it worked nicely with the weave size of my ground cloth.

I'm offended. My 11-spi stitching isn't "coarse!"

For me, 11 stitches per inch on 22 count linen is much less fine than the gauges I usually pursue. I prefer the look of stitching on a really buttery thick 50-count linen (that's 25 stitches per inch). Compared to that work, 11 stitches per inch is as large as logs. My doodle is a quick study, again not intended for any purpose other than to let me do some stitching at events, and for the fun of it.

What does the back look like?/Do you use knots?

My backs are relatively neat, not because I'm a fanatic about making them so and not because I believe that that's the way they should be. My backs are neat because that's the way I stitch (historical pieces often have absolutely chaotic backs that would make most modern needlework judges recoil in horror). And yes - heresy of heresy - unless I'm working something that's intended to be totally two-sided, I do use knots. No - if done carefully they don't pull out or show through to the front. Savage me if you must, but I reserve the right to ignore you.



What stitches did you use?

Double running (aka Spanish Stitch, Holbein Stitch, Vorstitch) for the outlines. Here's a double running stitch mini-lesson from the Skinner Sisters website. I could also have used back stitch, a less represented but also historically accurate way to do them on voided foreground works. Long armed cross stitch is less well known than it's X-like cousin with equal length arms, but it's a very useful thing. There's a research article about it here by Christian de Holcombe (another needlework pen pal), but a short example of how to (along with quite a few related stitches) at this site.

Doodle?/What's it going to be?

I haven't thought that far ahead. I'll probably end up mounting this piece for wall display. I called it a doodle because it's an offhand and trivial effort, a time-filler, and bit of life's marginalia. It's not a Big Project, nor a planned project. It's just... a doodle.

Your book is out of print, it's o.k. for me to copy it, right?

No. Absolutely not. Copyright doesn't last until the publisher decides to skip town, or drop the item from current inventory. US copyright lasts 75 years. Even if I get hit by a truck, that copyright is part of my estate and would be owned by my heirs until 2070. Anyone who respects authors, living or dead, should respect copyright.

I'm not an ogre, hoarding rights and royalties (lord knows I've seen almost none of the latter). I AM trying to get the thing back into print. One publisher has turned me down flat in part because his research indicated that illegal copies were being made.

So don't do it, as tempting as it might be. There's more about copyright - in specific your rights as a purchaser, as well as the author's intellectual property rights at Girl From Auntie and Yarnaholic Confessions.

This weekend past we went to a local SCA event. We're not very active in the organization any more, but every now and again it's fun to show up and partake of the day. This particular day was quite warm, and we arrived late - missing the most strenuous part of the planned activities. We mostly sat in the shade and enjoyed various song and story performances. In the evening a very ambitious dinner was served, consisting of dozens of dishes from a recently translated 16th century Italian cookbook.

I keep a small sampler I work on when I go to events like this. Now that I'm up to the easily replicated borders, I rarely stitch on it in between events.



My doodle is worked on even weave unbleached linen, using DMC's Danish Flower Thread. The Flower Thread is a matte finish cotton. In construction this thread is a single strand, as opposed to the more commonly seen multstrand embroidery floss. Having used both, I find that for small pieces, this thread mimics the look (but not the stiffness) of linen thread. I'm working at at the extremely coarse gauge of 11 stitches per inch, on 22 thread count ground. It's quick and easy to see.



All of the black lines in the piece are done in double running stitch (aka Holbein Stitch, Spanish Stitch). You can see the bit in process, where I've established a baseline. All of the "growths" from that baseline are traced out and filled in again as I go along. The background is done in long-armed cross stitch, worked back and forth across the piece to heighten the illusion of a plaited ground. Since I've already done a full repeat of the border, I no longer need to refer to my original printed pattern. Also, because the whole goal of this piece is "quick and portable," I'm not working it in a large rectangular frame. Instead I'm using a plain old 7-inch diameter round tambour-style embroidery frame. My matte finish single construction thread stands up to the hoop's abuse much better than does silk or even cotton floss.

The design is another one from my New Carolingian Modelbook. It's on Plate 74:1. I graphed it from a photo of a late 16th or early 17th century artifact, appearing in Adolph Cavallo's Needlework. (New York: Cooper Hewitt Museum, 1974). What I like about this design in particular is the way the edges of the work pop past the internal border. The meaty branches have an almost palpable vitality, as if they can't be contained by the formal constraints of the stitching. Working a solid background (as was done in the original) heightens the effect.

I've only tried out one repeat of the central design. The historical piece repeated the S-shaped flourish, mirroring it at either end. Since this is a self-contained unit, it can be either mirrored or it can be repeated in the same orientation to make a longer length of patterning. Period embroiders used both methods of composition to construct longer decorative bands.

I am so flattered!?

My friend Nancy has done an amazing thing with some graphs from The New Carolingian Modelbook. She took the tulip repeat from Plate 5:1, and the dragonflies from Plate 12:2, some snappy color choices, a good eye for placement, a comfy garment shape, and a true talent for stranded knitting and came up with this:



I'm tickled pink (and blue, and green, and yellow...)

Details on the graphed patterns

Tulip - This pattern was published at least?three times?prior to 1600 (early pattern book publishers freely copied off each other.)? The first appearance of it I've found is a book entitled Furm Oder Model Buchlein, put out in Augsburg, Germany, 1524.That makes it from?one of the earliest extant books of graphed patterns. (It's theorized that broadside sheets were sold prior to entire books of collected patterns, but none of those leaflets survive.) The?other appearances of the tulip pattern?I've stumbled on were in Matteo Pagano's Trionfo Di Virtu, Venice, 1559; and Sessa's I Frutti, also Venice, 1564.

Dragonflies - This one is my own, inspired by insects appearing in a series of Italian pattern books from the 1530s.



The excellent photo was taken by Nancy's friend Terri (credit where credit is due). Nancy didn't tell me the yarn she used, but she's a frequent visitor - perhaps she'll see her masterpiece and leave a comment.

For those looking for a copy of TNCM, it's hard to come by. The publisher did a disappearing act shortly after the book came on the market. Copies continue to trickle out for sale, and it sometimes shows up used or on eBay. Both Amazon.com and abebooks.com list used copies as being available, although some of them are at grasp-the-chest-and-stagger high demand/collector prices.

Elissa wrote to me to ask how I could tell what graphed patterns might go together well as I was looking for more borders to eke out the edges of the dragon panel. I am not quite sure I can answer, in part because I'm not quite sure I've made successful picks yet. I do a fair bit of this type of composing in the course of stitching up monochrome embroideries. The best way I can discuss this is to show a blackwork sampler I did a while ago:

I stitched this up while I was working on my book of embroidery patterns.  Some of the patterns on this piece made it into the book, others didn't.  The ones I left out were ones that turned out to be too late in origin for inclusion in the book, or whose documentation and provenance weren't complete or accurate as the rest.

You can see several things on this mostly-blackwork piece.  First, even though I was working exclusively in double running stitch (aka Spanish Stitch, Holbein Stitch) and cross stitch, there is a tremendous variation in density and the depth of tonal values among the various patterns.  There is also variation in the delicacy of line, even comparing the airy double running stitch patterns.  The highly geometric bit in a similar style to Jane Seymour's cuffs (center top) presents a very different look than the curled plume-like leaves in the bottommost left.

Now this piece is far from entirely successful for several reasons, design by accretion being the leading one.  Like my dragon curtain it was done "bungee jump" style.  I took my ground cloth and just began stitching, picking my patterns one by one as I finished the last.  The first bit I did was the sorrel leaf strip in the upper left (looks like clovers).  I worked more or less across and then down from there, leaving the center blank until I hit upon something to put there.  That happened to be my father's favorite saying, and a large yale, but I certainly didn't plan on them being there when I started.  (A yale is a heraldic goat with skewed horns, although some heraldic specialists will debate whether this is a goat or a yale.) The last bit to be filled in was the small rectangular area just below the yale, which I patched in with several smaller scale fillings commonly used in inhabited blackwork, finishing up with my sig strip at the center bottom (KBS '83).  I used a couple of these in my blackwork underskirt and Forever Coif, too.  

Had I actually sat down and planned the piece, I would have better balanced the placement of light and dark areas, and the apportionment of delicate curved lines with harsher block geometrics would have been more pleasing.  Those sorrel leaves for example are way out of place.  They're too light and too leggy sitting as they are on top of the darker knot strip.  The large double star motif beneath the yale's back hoof is also out of place.   While it balances nicely with the English acorns on top of "Worth Doing" and the star and fleur de lyse at the center right edge, in combo with the Chinese peonies just above it the heavy visual density weighs down the composition along the left edge. 

All this is a long way to go to answer Elissa's question.  In a piece as small as the dragon curtain, with a limited number of patterns, I wanted to call attention first to the center panel.  To that end, I framed it with a strip repeat lighter in value than the average tone of the dragon and knight unit.  I tried not to "fight" with the center panel, picking a repeat that was rather delicate in line rather than a heavier one to avoid the the overpowering effect demonstrated on my Anything sampler.  However, once that frame was completed and I wanted to add more width, I decided to use strips of a heavier, more geometric border around the whole piece.  With luck, now that the lighter inner area has been established (sort of like matting a painting), the denser second border will serve the same purpose as a dark carved wood frame on a painting - defining the inner space inside the frame and accenting the center, by contrasting with both the mat and the piece's focus.

A short post today on a time-stressed weekend day. 

Buzzing in on the hopping heels of last week's bunny, here's another small graph from my embroidery book.  This super-simple one is original. One dragonfly can be spot-placed, or they can be done in series using stranding.  A strip of dragonflies can be aligned either katywumpus as I show here, or all facing the in same direction.  In knitting, I think that these would be particularly fun to accent with shiny beads or duplicate stitching on the body or wings.  They'd also be a killer trim if done in bead knitting. 

Other uses for simple graphs include filet crochet (Mary Thomas' Knitting Book describes filet knitting, too); all types of cross stitching; needlepoint; and lacis or pattern darning.  I've even heard from people using TNCM patterns for wood marquetry and tile mosaics!

I was re-graphing this rabbit from my book of embroidery patterns, and I thought angora-fanciers might like to work it into a headband or sweater front. 

The original plate from 1597 showed a large group of animal motifs clustered together to save space.  It included this one, two coursing dogs (possibly greyhounds) a squirrel, an owl, a stag, a unicorn, a parrot, a yale, and the lion I previously shared for Gryffindor pullovers.

Again apologies to those on the updates mailing list. I did a bit more maintenance, adding categories to all the existing posts so it's easier to page through this ever-growing mound.

A couple of people have asked for the graph I used to knit the interlace shown on my overly warm teal and black alpaca hat.   Here it is. 

This one didn't make the cut for my book because it's one of the designs for which I lost my notes.  A long time ago I had a miserable move between apartments.  Several boxes were stolen off the back of my truck.  Among the things that went missing was a notebook full of source notations for counted embroidery patterns.  I had been researching them casually for more than ten years, and had hundreds compiled.  The sketches for most of them had already been redone on my ancient Macintosh, but all associated notes remained solely on paper. 

When I was composing The New Carolingian Modelbook I had to go back and confirm the exact origins for all the counted patterns I wanted to include.  I managed to find the sources for about 200 of them, but a third as many more have eluded me.  This particular interlace is from my collection of the lost.  It is similar to designs by Matteo Pagano as published in his 1546 book Il Specio di Penfieri Dell Berlle et Virtudoise Donne, but I can't swear that it came from that or one of his other works.  Given the relatively clumsy, heavy spacing and short repeat it might even have been something I doodled up myself after a day of research.

Many of these early Modelbook designs got there by way of Islamic influences (especially patterns cribbed from woven carpets and embroidered texiles).  Over the years the patterns drifted away from work worn by the elite to work worn by middle and then lower social classes, eventually ending up in folk embroidery where they never quite died out.  Counted thread needlework styles were revived big-time among the fashionable in the mid 1800s. Researchers found and reproduced surviving older pattern books, and began collecting motifs from traditional regional costumes and house linen.  Some of the later and folk uses of counted patterns include standard cross-stitch, Hedebo, Assisi-style voided ground stitching, and various types of pattern darning or straight stitch embroidery done on the count. 

This pattern can be interpreted in many crafts.  Historically accurate uses contemporary with first publication include cross stitch panels (the long-armed style of cross stitch is overwhelmingly represented in historical samples compared to the more familiar x-style cross stitch); weaving, or lacis and burato (types of darned needle lace). 

Counted patterns are a natural for knitting.  The first book of general purpose graphed designs that listed knitting as a specific use came out in 1676 in Nurnberg, Germany and was published by a woman:  Rosina Helena Furst's Model-Buchs Dritter Theil.  (the title is actually much longer).   There may be others that predate this book, but I haven't seen mention of them, and I haven't seen the Furst book in person.  It's in the Danske Kuntsindustrimuseum in Copenhagen, a tad far for a day trip from Boston, Massachusetts.  The entire group of graphed designs displayed in the early Modelbooks shows a straight continuity with the geometric strip patterns found in modern northern European stranded knitting. 

The short 14-stitch/17 row repeat of this graph does work well at knitting gauges.   I've always meant to use this one again on socks - either as-is or stretching it a bit by repeating the centermost column so that it better fits my sock repeat, or doing eight full repeats at an absurdly tiny gauge.  As is, you'd need a multiple of 14 stitches around.  A standard 56-stitch sock could accommodate 4 full iterations of the design without adding any columns.

Some people have asked how to get a hold of my book.  The answer is, aside from the used market where it is going for quite a premium, I haven't a clue.  Sadly all I can report is that the publishers absconded shortly after publication.  I have no idea where they went, and have had no replies from them to any queries since 1996.  I received only about a year of royalties on the first 100 or so copies, in spite of the fact that the book went through two printings with an estimated total run of 3,000.  New copies continue to trickle onto the market even today (they're sold as used but mint).  The new-copy seller has rebuffed my attempts to find the ultimate source.  

Moral of the story - don't enter into publication contracts without a literary agent, and if the company has a name like "Outlaw Press" there's probably a reason.