Seriously, I don’t know why I hadn’t figured this particular bit of insanity out before. Someone had mentioned it, but it was too insane to be believable. Color me educated.
Background – prior to the advent of good design software, all patterns, whether cross-stitch or knitting, were drawn by hand. In some cases, the grids were hand drawn as well. Once there was software, two things happened. The first was that essentially all designers for cross stitch switched to the computer programs. The second was a serious increase in patterns which were designed, but not test stitched. That second issue is as serious an issue as the first. I have Dover publications from the 1980s which have hand drawn patterns. There also was a tendency, if the pattern included a lot of colors, to reuse symbols, but change of the color of the symbol. Think about it for a second – here we have a pattern with 20 symbols in green and 20 in brown. I asked a friend – he said that both looked the same to him. So obviously the idea of male stitchers (red/green color blindness) wasn’t a consideration.
The guilty party who STILL hand draws symbols is Nora Corbett. Her lines – Nora Corbett & Mirabilia – are extremely popular and are never, ever available in PDF. Well – when everything is hand inked – that makes sense – there isn’t anything other than a hand drawn graph with symbols which can be easily printed into hard copy. And she hand draws it all. As it turns out – with scanners, skinning, and software generally available, it hasn’t made a serious dent in piracy of patterns. But what it has done is make life a bit more challenging for those of us who are older, visually challenged or both. Hand drawing is closer to art skills and it allows for less precision…
I have no qualms about skinning patterns that I own; it is little different than making a copy for my personal use. I can revert to the original at any time (which I do for backstitching) and it certainly increases my enjoyment of the process, truth be told.
Off Soap Box.
