Title, compass rose, and attribution. Since I did the vast majority of the work last year I used that date. And since I am me, I designed the alphabet myself, all the letters in upper- and lowercase, and digits although I ultimately liked the look of the Roman numerals better.

Since blackwork was popular over a long stretch of time I had a lot of options for an era-appropriate script. I found a website called Medieval Writing with lots of examples of scripts and was able to observe my lowercase options pretty thoroughly. I decided to create a blend of 15th-16th century English chancery hand and 15th-16th century French and Italian humanistic minuscule, with an eye to legibility for modern readers. Well, it turned out more to be based on those scripts in the way that TV movies are based on true stories, but I think it has the right flavor. I made the uppercase and numbers by looking at assorted typefaces and online calligraphy lessons, and the ampersand right out of my head. My favorites are the old-looking a, dramatic d, and potbellied U.

I have for you a blackwork alphabet PDF that includes the laid-out text for the map (aside from my name, which I didn’t think would be of much use). I thought it would be useful as an example of kerning the letters even if you wanted to use this for a different project.

After stitching, I washed the map and hung it from a deck chair out back, before I remembered I needed to block it on the ironing board with six or seven hundred pins. Next stop: the frame shop. I’ve never had any of my embroidery framed, so this will be an adventure.

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After many moons, the blackwork map is stitched. I have improved and repaired the pattern, as well, which you’ll find linked from my Upper Valley Fiber Crafts post on the topic.

This time around I couldn’t hang it outside after washing like I’d been doing, so I pressed the water out in a bath towel and pinned it to my ironing board to dry. That allowed me to put more tension on it than the hanging did, which made a really visible difference in the wrinkles. I also pulled on it a bit, like pizza dough, while it was soaking in warm water, and folded it differently than before in the big tupperware-type-thing it was in – this time I made sure the map itself was as flat as possible, with the excess fabric folded in around the edges.

Here’s a shot where you can see the last portion stitched a little closer.

Now I have to decide what kind of title or legend or signature I want to apply to it, how, and where. But that’s for another day!

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This segment had the fun Piermont-Haverhill puzzle piece border.

Just the bottom 10 (and a half) towns left!

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This time I sewed a little casing into the bottom of the fabric before washing it. I used warm water and dish soap instead of laundry soap to be sure to cut through any oils from my fingers. When I hung it to dry (via large binder clips around the top of a metal deck chair) I slid a dowel into the casing for weight and even stretch. I think that helped get more of the embroidery hoop marks out, compared to the previous update. The dowel came in handy later as well – rain was threatening, so after the fabric was mostly dry I brought it in and hung it between two chairs inside via the protruding ends of the dowel.

Onward and upward! Well, some upward, but more rightward and then downward. You’ll see this again at the 3/4 mark, in a month or so.

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That sounded like a good place to start. Actually, changing the color sounded like a better place to start – I figured if I ever planned to dye it, it would be better to do so at the beginning. I don’t have a before-before picture, but you can imagine the standard t-shirt heather gray.

To obtain material for the new collar, I shortened the shirt, which helped with fit as well. The plan was to change the collar and then reassess fit before re-hemming the bottom, and as I expected the v-neck helped the fit substantially – so much so that all I did afterward was re-hem. I took 4.25″ off the bottom, in addition to the 1.5″ or so that came off when I removed the hem to make the collar.

For the collar attachment I used a narrow, short zigzag, but I topstitched with a straight stitch. For the hem I dug out my trusty double needle. The end product looks a little boxy on the hanger, but loose and comfortable on me.

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The post on UVFC has several links for each of four possible approaches: altering, decorating, making into a new garment, or making into a non-garment. You’ll see my project (or projects?) here as the month goes on but please feel welcome to play along – even if you’re not local.

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I had to rip and re-stitch part of Pomfret, where I accidentally stitched over 3 strands at some point and couldn’t disguise the problem. I actually hemmed and hawed so much about whether to redo it that I finished stitching the whole town, but concluded that it would be silly to spend so much time on this project (it’s at least an hour per town for me) only to leave in an error that really was plenty obvious. Fortunately I was able to take out the bad part without disturbing too much of the rest, and still have enough loose thread to re-secure the ends.

Before taking the photo above I washed the fabric. I’ve had problems in the past with long-term projects becoming irrecoverably grungy, so I plan to wash this every time I’ve finished enough to give another update.

Remember that you can make your own map or hijack the filling patterns for other purposes by visiting Upper Valley Fiber Crafts.

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Originally I wanted to partition the map into what we really think of as towns, which are smaller, more numerous, and more irregular than what the state governments regard as towns. The large boxy shapes date back to at least 1860, though, and I determined it would take me months to draw other boundaries. Drawing my own borders would also result in many arbitrary decisions about what was in or out of town.

I also didn’t intend to include 46 towns in the final map, but again, restricting would have required arbitrary decisions. The towns I included comprise the beat of the local newspaper, so any arbitrariness to the boundary is well in the past now.

To make the town outlines I imported an area map into MacStitch (of which I still owe you a full review) and traced the edges with backstitch. Deleting the cross-stitches was easy since none of them were black, so I was able to simply remove each color and its stitches from the palette. I then adjusted a number of the edge lines so all town corners would be at grid corners, in case anyone wants to make their own arbitrary exclusions.

I asked for and was granted permission to use fillings from Kim Brody Salazar’s wonderful blackwork fillings collection, but between asking and receiving I had the idea to make fill patterns out of the initial(s) of each town, and couldn’t let go of it. That meant 46 different fill patterns, 7 of which had to be built from the letter C. That is not a letter that has much difference between upper- and lowercase, or print and cursive. Also difficult were 3 Ws plus WF and WW. Oddly enough, the solitary F and E gave me more trouble than, say, the 4 Ss. Many evenings of sketching while watching the hubs play Skyrim passed as I designed letter fills and then slotted them into their locations.

A few more evenings passed while I stitched the beginning of my sample, shown above. I don’t have time to continue to be so dogged about this, so it will be some months before I’m done, but you’ll see it again then. I’m working on 32-count linen (over 2, for an effective count of 16) with a single strand of black embroidery floss (DMC 310). The stitching I’ve done is all six strands of a 2–2.5 foot length of floss.

There are a few useful links in the pattern post that are also now on the ideas and inspiration embroidery page, halfway down, where I’ve added a blackwork entry to the slowly growing directory of embroidery techniques.

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I left the edges of the fiddleheads unsewn in the hopes that they would fray in the wash, and then realized that saturated with paint, even dilute paint, they might not. Fortunately they did. Before ironing and trimming the longer threads I realized a strange thing: the green is lighter underneath the fiddleheads, which doesn’t make sense to me if the paint was soaking up through the fabric.

Then I had to figure out what to do with it. We already have more wall hangings than wall space, and there was no little cubby in need of a curtain, so after hemming and hawing I sewed it into a bag. Well, actually, there was a bit more hemming and hawing on fabric choices, but I went with a somewhat contrasting batik. I used a fabric I like but is not applicable to many situations (somewhat heavy, with a handwriting pattern) to back each piece separately, and then sewed them together. My original plan was to chop off the bottom corners to make it a shorter, boxier bag (as in the reversible drawstring bags), but I realized that would pull the fiddleheads too far down and they would look odd. So instead, I made a fold-over-top laptop or portfolio bag. I do wish the handle were longer (this was already cut corner to corner in my fabric), but I can perhaps graft in a center section later.

It is a poor day for photos, but April’s end is nigh, so without further ado: the finished bag.

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I thought I’d show you the steps so far. I started with a large piece of yellow fabric and some pieces of green that I cut out into fiddlehead shapes. I sewed the spirals on with a straight stitch down the middle of the strip of fabric and zigzagged the outer edge of the background.

Then it was time for paint. I wanted a darker green than the fiddleheads at the bottom, and for whatever reason was completely attached to a rosy pink at the top. I also wanted an irregular gradient, so I diluted fabric paint (green with a little black) in a fairly tall, narrow jar, rolled up the fabric, and dunked it in. I happened to have a rolled-up piece of light cardboard — originally the center of a roll of wrapping paper — that could hold the fabric tube upright during the dunking. My hope was that the fluid would wick up the fabric, but gravity would keep it most concentrated at the bottom. I also expected the white design on the yellow fabric to resist the paint.

And it did! There is the green, still wet, not as dark as I imagined but just fine as is. I left the fabric in the jar overnight, and it crawled much further up than I expected (especially given the amount of fluid left in the jar the next morning). I love how much further up it extends on the right, which was on the inside of the roll, than the left.

For the rosy pink I mixed pink with a little red and gold, and decided not to repeat the capillary action method, lest I get a muddy mess where the colors met. Instead, I mixed up less-dilute paint, scattered it across the top of the fabric, and used my hand (and water in a spray bottle) to distribute it to be unbroken across the top, with an irregular bottom margin. There was some drippage, which was perfect, although I did have to rescue one fiddlehead from a pink splotch with a judicious spray of the water bottle. Here’s a very sunny picture of the wet pink paint.

The next step will involve heat-setting and washing the fabric, but the paint has to set for 72 hours first. This project will see you again next week.

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