Okay, I'm Very Curious: What Makes You Determine How You Are Doing A Translation Into Stitching?

Okay, I'm very curious: what makes you determine how you are doing a translation into stitching?

Essentially: just reading the poem. I read to see if there's an obvious colour palette suggested by the poem. Reds and oranges, for instance, seem a fairly obvious choice for Blake's poem 'The Tiger' - the tiger  'burning bright' and the imagery of the forge, etc. 

Then I do a pretty basic frequency analysis of the text and sort the letters according to frequency, which helps me refine the colour palette - if I want more reds than oranges, then I need to assign reds to the more frequently occurring letters, etc. 

I also might assign colours based on a specific detail I want to pick out - to carry on with the Blake example, I might want to draw attention to how many questions there are in the poem, so I'd assign a really stand-out colour to the question marks. 

I'm currently working on a translation of Wordsworth's 'I wandered Lonely as a Cloud' I picked a blue colour palette because so much of the imagery refers to the cloudy sky, the night sky, the reflection of the daffodils in the lake, etc. but I'm picking all the punctuation out in yellows to represent the daffodils and to try and catch on some level the images evoked in the poem. 

K, L Q, R K is Dutch knot, L is French knot, Q is sorbello stitch, R is French cross stitch. I really like puzzling out how I'm going to group the different types of stitches within the whole sampler. Sorbello stitch is very similar to Dutch knot (the difference is 45 degrees), and French knot and French cross stitch are also similar. All four are types of knot stitch.

A--R. Half way now. An detail of M and N. M might look pretty much like G above it, but I promise you they're different stitches. G is just a plain vertical cross, M is knot stitch/ four-legged knot stitch, where you wrap the thread around the cross before completing the final leg. The big stitch is captive rice stitch, to complement the triple rice stitch of the G above. N is Turkman stitch, and a spiral of my own design in the middle. Let's call it four-legged spiral stitch!

I'm reblogging this here so I don't have to type it out again.

I would like to take this opportunity to assure anyone I owe art to (give away winner - I am an awful person, I am very sorry) that I have not forgotten them nor given up on completing their pieces.

I'm going to make a concerted effort to update more regularly, and be more productive.

Day 76.

This post is dedicated to grrlcookery And darkness-be-my-friend- for asking where I was/if I was okay. I probably wouldn’t be posting this without those precious messages of support, so: with all sincerity, thank you.

It’s been a while, I know. The last however many months have been busy (PhD upgrade - I passed), hard (landlady illegally tried to kick us out of our house, but of course we then had to move anyway - who wants to stay where they’re so obviously not welcome?), and rough (health, money, stress).

I’m really trying to get back on top of things and have some semblance of routine and productivity in my life, but I don’t want to make any promises about being back in full flow for now, because I’ve tried to get back into things before and just crashed myself again.

Here’s hoping I update again tomorrow.

Just to let everyone know, the giveaway is now over, and the winner has been contacted. As promised, I wrote everyone's names on bits of paper, stuck them in a hat and got a curious cat to stick his paw in an pull one out. Your hat for this giveaway was Pink Floyd and the cat was Zeno. I wish I'd filmed it, but I needed both hands to hold the hat open for him.

Wonderful photo of the work, but please ignore my blurry face in the background.  I didn't realise I was going to be in some of the photos, and it was a very hot day and I'd been running around like crazy helping with the graduand leaving party. Hot and sweaty is not a flattering look.