12-Days of Christmas - Day 2

 

Today's giveaway is a package of sampler postcards.  If you are interested in this set, send an email to tricia@alum.mit.edu with Sampler Postcards in the subject line.  Add your name and mailing address to the body of the message.  Send it by midnight EST on December 17th to be entered in the drawing.  

Are you interested in samplers? Have you wanted to design or modify your own historic-looking samplers?  Perhaps you want to make a family genealogy sampler in a particular style?  Have an over the top 17th century band sampler in your head?  Maybe you love the monochromatic Quaker, Vierlande or French samplers and want to design your own.  Have a needle book idea you wanted to design?  My Historic Sampler Design Course is the thing to help you do this.  This 4-month online course will teach the fundamentals of how to design using source material. 

The course includes:

• Lectures in both pdf and video formats covering the theory of design, how to choose motifs, layout samplers, identify common design mistakes, balance motifs by color and weight.  
• How to choose a theme for your sampler and use constraints when designing to help you make decisions
  and avoid decision paralysis
• A method to use cut and pasting of motifs on base graph paper to design if using a computer isn't your forte. 
• Over 100 pdf pages of motifs from historic samplers of the following genres and organized into themes: American, English (1600-1900), Quaker, French, Scottish, German, Dutch, and a smattering of Spanish/Mexican and Scandinavian motifs.  The majority of motifs are from samplers in private collection and were selected to be representative and of enough variety to allow for design creativity.
• The electronic files in both .chart and .oxs format for all the motifs with video based directions on how to import them into MacStitch (Mac), WinStitch (Windows) or MobiStitch (iPad) software by Ursa Software so you can build new samplers using them.  These software platforms can be purchased separately directly from Ursa Software if desired (<$50)

If you want to learn to use the basics of graphing software, there are videos in the course showing how to do basic functions using the included motif files from the course

• Examples from my own design work will be used to show how the designs were arrived at from themes, constraints, color work, mistakes, etc.  
• Use of several Pinterest boards which give extensive examples showing (1) layouts types using historic samplers (2) samplers from the same teacher with ones that weren't designed well and those that improved upon them fixing problems (3) examples of good and bad use of whitespace, weighting and color balance
• A series of design challenges, starting small with monochromatic small samplers and building to a non-rectangular shape/3-dimensional shapes to practice each of the principals separately.  These can be uploaded to the NING student site for discussion with the teacher/students to help get over problem areas if desired.
• How to layout the sampler to fit into spaces and produce the graph to fit after being stitched.  One of the design challenges will be to produce a mini-sampler for an unusual shape.
• How to choose and balance color for your sampler
• Choosing stitches.  The motifs are primarily cross stitch to simplify computer charting but we will go over how to recognize which alphabets/motifs can be changed to satin stitch, eyelet, four sided stitch, etc and how to balance the visual weight change as well as fill 17th century bands with unusual stitches.  Stitches will not be taught but appropriate reference material will be cited.
  

The course is starting again on February 1st, 2025 and registrations are taken now.  

We use cut and paste to first organize and work out designs.  Here are three examples of taking an idea and making it more complicated on the way to the final sampler design