Saturday, March 28, 2009

I've been thinking about trying cross stitching and bought all the materials during spring break, but hadn't found a pattern yet. I want to make a sampler, and I think I'm going to use the lyric from the Joanna Newsom song "Sadie" when she says "Stretched on a hoop where I stitch this adage / Bless this house and its heart so savage." But, you know, only the bless this house part.

So I'd been struggling to find cross stitch patterns I liked online, until I found this AMAZING blog with scans of early 20th century French pattern packets. The charts are a little hard to read, but they're so fantastic it's definitely worth the effort. [via Floresita.]

Check out these lovelies:




Those bees!

Somehow I'll have to pick favorites and then arrange them into some kind of design, which will probably take me forever, but at least now I have some amazing things to start working with!