Day 74.

Day 74.

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.

This is the start of the piece for the winner of the giveaway. The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost. I spent a lot of time figuring out the exact lay out of this one. I ended up writing the pattern out four or five times, but I think I've finally figured out how I want to do it, so here we go. I also think I'm going to make quite a lot of mistakes in this one.  I've made it pretty complicated, but hopefully it will be worth it.)

Incidentally, the winner was allibys. 

Bristol-based art-academia-community group MakingLearning are producing a series of patchwork poems - each patch contains a word, and is made by a different person. I just did the piecing and the quilting. MakingLearning may be Bristol (uk) based, but for the patchwork poem project we've received patches from lots of different places - not just other places in the UK, but also from other countries in Europe, and other continents. So if you think this is something you'd like to participate in, please don't think distance is a barrier! Get in touch, and we'll post a patch out to you. MakingLearning has a Facebook page, which you should totally check out: https://m.facebook.com/makinglearning

More geometric play. The symmetry isn't perfect, but given the amount of tension points, I'm happy with it. The stitches used here are all really basic - twisted satin, buttonhole, vandyke, lazy daisy, whipped wheel. The complexity comes from how they interact with and tension each other (e.g the vandyke stitch will loop around the cross junction of two button hole stitches, and pull them into a new positions (and then you have to try and get exactly the same tension another 9 times). I don't know if there's an official name for this type of embroidery. I have a lot of stitch dictionaries and collections, and I've never seen anything like this in any of my books. If no one else knows of a pre-existing name for it, I'mma have to invent one. Maybe... Arachne work.

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.