More chicken scratch embroidery

I told in a previous blog about my Grandma Freeman's love of needlecraft of various type. A few days ago I came across some of her patterns. I don't ever recall seeing her with any sort of commercial patterns for anything but maybe some of her fancy crocheted edgings.

These patterns were for some of her chicken scratch embroidery work. She would work a design on a piece of fabric and then use that to recreate the design on a larger scale. Sometimes she made some homemade graph paper to plot the design on or sometimes just a random scrap of paper.





Those designs were put on scraps of fabric that she could refer to when making the actual finished product, some of which were shown on a previous blog.

On the next picture you can see how careful placement of the stitches makes it look like a circles are formed by the crosses.




















With large designs she would carefully calculate the number of squares each pattern took, then make sure the finished item would have the correct number of squares to have the pattern come out even.

I even found one pattern that didn't use gingham. If you look closely, you can see that one pattern is meant to be used for a pocket and another for a belt.



Whatever she made, you can be sure it was carefully crafted and made as beautiful as she could make it.