last modified June 24, 2007

Roots

In March 1999, I designed and stitched a piece I'm calling "Roots". It has four trees with their roots tangled together in hardanger. The original was done on 25ct Gold-Cream Lugana (cream with gold woven into it). But I wanted it on blue and completed another model on 28ct forget-me-not blue Jobelan. I strongly suggest the blue version. The trees now use two colors of Caron Impressions (opposing trees match colors). Three yards of each color is enough. Several years ago, that thread was $3.75 a skein (36 yards). This makes for an expensive "free" chart. So you would need 6 yards of each of the two colors of Impressions (1110 and 1112). The hardanger area uses #12 perle cotton. Use Emerald Wildflowers for the tree leaves (5 yards would allow for variegation) and Twilight Wildflowers for the border (about 3 yards). If you have another bluish Wildflowers (Blue Lagoon or Peacock), you can use that.

A few people won't want to do the hardanger although I strongly encourage you to try it. It's fun and gives impressive results with remarkably little work. If you don't want to do the hardanger, do some flower swirls from my flower lattice chart in one strand of Teak or Bark Wildflowers.

Download the PDF version of the roots chart. It's about 123 KB, but it should print beautifully on a page. It says draft, but I didn't change anything as I stitched it.

I realize some people on RCTN would like to have geometric charts have the middle on one of the solid grid lines. I agree that would be nice, and I could write the code that way. BUT this is drawn as a counted canvas, and the lines show threads rather than holes. If you look at the middle, there are nine squares made by four grid lines intersecting with four grid lines. The middle of the design is in the middle of a square and can't be a solid line. So I've left it the way it is.

By the way, the programmers out there might like to know that I'm a big fan of using functions. Each tree is drawn by a function. I have a function where I rotate 90 degrees and draw the tree with a given symbol. I used handy symmetric symbols (filled and unfilled circles) so that you can't tell the symbols are rotated. And I've written functions to draw dove's eyes and Kloster blocks and each of the symbols. However, this is really PostScript programming. It is not user friendly. Here's a short snippet; it's the function to draw the four trees.

/trees {
    % draws four trees with rotations around middle of hardanger  
  gsave
    39.5 39.5 translate  % middle of hardanger
    2 2 scale % to go over two
    5 5 /dotFill oneTree
    90 rotate
    5 5 /dotOpen oneTree
    90 rotate
    5 5 /dotFill oneTree
    90 rotate
    5 5 /dotOpen oneTree
    90 rotate
  grestore
} bind def

[ My Comcast Page ] [ My MU Page ] [ My MU Needlework Page ]