ACORNS, TOO
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.
SCALE
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 2×2 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 3×3, 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.
GRAPES – REPEATING ON AND ON ON REPEATS
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.
A BIT DIFFERENT
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 2×2 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.
THIRD SMALL INSERT, ON TO THE MYSTERY STITCH
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!
NO, I’M NOT NUTS
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.
REVERSING ENTROPY
All in all a hectic week, even for one with a snow day smack in the middle. Work deadlines aside (constant drumbeat that they are), our domestic plant experienced a bit more chaos than usual, with major appliances deciding in concert to abandon their prime functions. But we’ve now beaten back the forces of entropy and now can wash clothes on the premises again.
That being said, work does progress on the book collection. I now have about 27 plates (roughly 60 individual patterns) substantially drafted or in progress, along with a good start on the documentation that accompanies them. Also a start on the bibliography. My notes are far from exhausted, and there are lots more pages to go.
I also continue to playtest some of them. Here’s one I couldn’t resist. It’s from Plate 25 of my blackwork fillings collection. Work continues on that final PDF, too.
Even though this design is original and not sourced to a specific historical artifact, I think it would make a smashing all-over design for a coif or sweet bag. Especially if the little diamonds that surround the quatrefoil pomegranates were replaced by spangles. You can see the full effect in this larger rendition. The pattern collection’s thumbnail made it hard to see the whole design’s geometry.
Finally, in a new development, I’ve decided to give the blackwork fillings collection a name. I named my first book after the SCA group here in Boston, a group especially blessed with artists, artisans, researchers and folk who just plain enjoy hands-on exploration of the arts and sciences. The Barony of Carolingia is and ever will be my SCA “home.” But I did spend some time down in the Washington D.C. region, and promised my House Oldcastle friends down there that someday I’d write “Ensamplio Atlantaea” – a pattern collection named after Atlantia. the kingdom that includes the D.C. area. So the blackwork filling collection will come out under that name (provided it passes muster with my language maven pals).
And in the interests of continuity, the new book will be entitled “A Second Carolingian Modelbook.” That should make it easier to find for folk who found the first one to be useful.
HOW BIG IS BIG?
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.
BLACK AND WHITE
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.
CLARKE’S LAW SAMPLER – FINAL SOURCES ROUND-UP (LONG)
UPDATE ON 24 APRIL 2022 – For some unknown reason, the majority of this page disappeared. I’ve gone back to find and restore the missing info. Apologies if the links are still broken. This is a work in progress.
———–ORIGINAL POST – RESTORED MATERIAL FIRST PUBLISHED ON 24 OCTOBER 2010 ———–
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 2×2 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. [2022 Edit note – I have since tracked down the particular strip that was included in the massed display artifact shown on the defunct drakt.org website – it’s Victoria & Albert Museum’s Border, dated 1600s, accession 503-1877. The massed display in which it is mounted is also pictured on the V&A’s page.]
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.
String-Or-Nothing 
