Unity and Uniformity in Needlepoint

Updated December 19, 2023.
You may wonder why it is that, given half an excuse, you see patterns everywhere. That’s because our brains are hard-wired to find both pattern and relationships between objects. Even if it’s just two random lines, we’ll try to figure out how they relate to each other. If you look at the picture of the vessels above, take a minute to look at the area under the pots. Our brains interpret the darker areas as shadows.

Our tendency to find relationships is why the simple process of changing color while keeping the stitch the same works. We interpret the color change as a shadow.

This shows us how our brains look for and interpret what we see as related items. That’s the principle of unity. Unified designs have relationships between the parts. These can be anything: related colors, shapes, a background that reflects the focal point, stitches that show perspective — all kinds of things. Our desire for this is so strong that in the absence of one kind of clue, we’ll discard that to find relationships in other ways.

This piece I stitched has a very complex background. But the canvas was devoid of the color clues that show increasing distance. According to the perspective rules, items get lighter and bluer as they get further from us. these don’t. Nor are they smaller (another clue to perspective). Looking at the canvas, I could have interpreted them as just pretty bands of color, but I wanted more. I decided they were hills with white sky at the top. To make sense of the different colors, I decided they were different crops. To make them look in perspective, I used increasingly smaller darning patterns.

By doing this, the background, which could easily have lacked unity, became one thing — a distant landscape of fields and hills. Not only did it increase the unity of the background it also added to the unity of the piece because it made the whole background (now seen as one thing) distant from the flowers (the close-by focal point).

So the design is unified, but what if I treated the background as I did the stripes in the canvas above? Would there still be unity, or would the design look chaotic? It would look chaotic because I had not unified the parts of the design, nor had I created through my stitching a way to view the story of the canvas as a whole. That idea of unity is important to our designs; sometimes we need to work harder to achieve it.

You can see how having too many unrelated things in a design creates a feeling of randomness and chaos, but can we err by having too much unity?

Yes, when things are too much the same, we get uniformity. As things get more uniform, they get more and more the same until the same element is repeated repeatedly. In the picture above, you can see something uniform on the left and less uniform on the right.

Both have some uniformity, the pattern is colored squares the same distance apart. Making them all the same color makes them more uniform.

In needlepoint, we have a ready source of uniformity called Tent Stitch. Because the stitch is always the same size and direction, stitching a piece in all Tent imposes uniformity.

People differ on how much uniformity they like. Some people like the uniformity of a single stitch; others call this ‘boring.’ Some people like lots of threads, stitches, and embellishments; others call this ‘too much.’ It’s a matter of taste.

Each piece of needlepoint you do falls somewhere on the scale from random variety to uniformity. You are probably more comfortable with some areas on this scale than others. To learn where your tastes are, take several stitched pieces from your stash. Make sure at least one is a piece you don’t like much and one is a piece you love.

Decide where each falls on the scale. Are the pieces you love in one area and the pieces you hate in another? Then you should strive for that level of uniformity in your pieces. Is there something you can do to increase or decrease the uniformity in the pieces you hate to bring them closer to the ones you like?

However, your taste is not the only consideration here. If you are making a piece for someone else, consider where they are on this scale. Take this into account as you plan your piece, just as you would consider subject matter, color and end-use.

Recognizing this will give you a goal to strive for whenever you start a new project, so you will be happy with the results.