UPDATE:  AN EASY TO PRINT FULL PAGE VERSION OF THIS DESIGN IS NOW AVAILABLE AT THE EMBROIDERY PATTERNS LINK, ABOVE.

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