Another Double Casket Finish to Celebrate!

Deborah Zibrik has just sent me fabulous photos of her finished Five Senses Double Casket to post.  Over the moon with the results!  

I had to zoom into the photos to look at the silver trim closer and realized immediately it wasn't a purchased trim but had been handmade by Deborah and so asked her the story behind it:

The needle lace trim was made with a crochet hook – was single crochet on either 3 or 7 stitches to get the needed width and then made as  long as required. The sterling thread is a really high quality vintage metallic thread  ( almost like a passing thread) purchased several years ago in Amsterdam. - DZ

Deborah sent me some of this luscious vintage thread to play with and it is just lovely and has a wonderful patina.  I just love it when people add their own panashe to their caskets with layers of stories.  I really recommend them being written down on the bottom of the casket or as a note in a secret drawer to preserve it for the future.  Can you imagine a descendent or museum in the future finding that note to realize the personal story behind just the trim!  

Inside the handmade vintage silver trim changes its design

For my caskets I was in Venice this summer and visited the last hand gold beater.  You can bet I purchased the gold I was watching and filming being made into leaf.  I will use it to gild the feet of my casket and will have to put that story somewhere on the box.  I have many stories of how the parts were made and the wonderful people involved.  Gotta start writing more of them and sticking them in drawers.  

If you are on the private class site (NING) there are several caskets being shown that are getting closer to competition and it is getting exciting to see them come together.  Hopefully in the next year I can post a few of them.

Tricia

Historic Sampler Design Course - Starting Dec 1, 2023

Some of the pages of motifs in the course showing the different historic sampler styles treated

Yea!!  I have been able to launch a new online course that I have been working on it for many months and am very happy with it.  It's another 'Tricia course' where it has so many layers that you might go back to it for years. 

I taught this back about twenty years ago in person using only Dutch motifs and it was very well liked.  But now I have expanded it greatly and found a way to put a modern spin on it to make it so much more useful.  Not only is it a system of layouts with historic reference material in the pdf (also on pintrest) to see how all samplers conform to these easy layouts, but also a step-by-step design methodology.  And then there is the source material.  Loads of source material.  There are 100+ pages of motifs and alphabets culled from samplers, mostly my collection, which span many major classes of samplers from Europe, UK, and the US.  Think 10 crammed pages of quaker motifs for example.  

The original course taught how to cut and paste motifs on graph paper to get your result.  But this is a major upgrade.  I have been working with Ursa software for months to provide the pages of motifs in formats that students can download and use in either the mac, windows or iPad version of their popular charting software.  So there will be videos on how to use the software (you buy separate if you want - if not - cut and paste).  But it is really reasonable - less than $20 on an iPad, which I really prefer as using the pencil is great.  

Mobistitch interface on the iPad allows you to upload my graphs and pick and
choose motifs for a new design

Videos on the design process and how to fix common issues, how to balance whitespace, dense motifs, etc.  Then selecting and balancing color and thoughts on how to select counted stitches for things like band samplers (12 pages of bands included).  Lessons have mini-design projects to try out concepts and you can upload a picuture to NING to get some feedback if wanted in the course group.  And I will go over non-rectangular samplers and other 3-D projects as an advanced topic.

See the full course description here

Examples of design work from the inspiration, methods and mistakes are provided

Sampler designs in process are shown to highlight design problems that came up and
how they were solved