Even in warm California October there is a feeling of fall in the air. This week’s vintage charts all gave a feeling of fall- autumn leaves, celebrating achievements, back to school.
First we3 have this upper case alphabet. It’s the first part of Anne’s child’s alphabet. It also includes lower case, numbers, and even Roman Numerals. (You’ll see the rest of it next week.) It’s a great small alphabet for sayings or for monograms.
Laurel Wreath
The Ancient Greeks crowned their athletic heros with a laurel wreath crown, charted below. Later it became associated with Napoleonic monograms. This laurel wreath is colored and taken from one of Anne’s filet crochet charts. It can be used as a monogram with one of the letters from this weeks alphabet inside.
By changing the color of the ribbon, you could make this be a small celebration for anyone.
Fall Leaves Border
Although the original border was in greens, I though this simple chart, below, would be perfect as a fall border. To make it “fall” gather up all your scraps and threads in fall colors. Randomly pick them to stitch each leaf.
You can make the leaves more symmetrical by stitching the ones on the left in Reverse Tent.
About Janet M Perry
Janet Perry is the Internet's leading authority on needlepoint. She designs, teaches and writes, getting raves from her fans for her innovative techniques, extensive knowledge and generous teaching style. A leading writer of stitch guides, she blogs here and lives on an island in the northeast corner of the SF Bay with her family
I believe I have asked you this question before and I have misplaced your answer. Do you have any recommendations on software to use to make stitch diagrams and design charts? I will be doing this for both needlepoint and cross stitch. Thanks for any guidance you can give me.
It really depends on whether you’re using a PC or a Mac. I’m completely a Mac uses, so I can’t really recommend anything for PCs, but I think there is information about this somewhere on the ANG site.
For Macs, there are only a few programs out there. For cross stitch charting, I recommend Mac Stitch Pro but it doesn’t look as if it can create needlepoint stitch diagrams.
For my stitch diagrams I use Cochenille’s Stitch Painter. I like it but the symbols don’t fill the squares and oblique stitches don’t work well, so I take most of my diagrams and make them pretty with Photoshop Elements.
Folks I know who are handy with graphics programs use Adobe Illustrator or Canvas, but along with being a klutz with drawing I’m also using an older Mac so these programs won’t work on it.
One note about Stitch Painter: to run the latest version you need a hasp key which is a little device that plugs into a USB port.
I hope this helps you.
Keep Stitching,
Janet