Curve stitching templates

Curve stitching was created by Mary Boole as a method to teach children visually how angles and spaces worked in geometry. She considered herself a mathematical psychologist and was very interested in how children learned math. She made cards with holes punched in them that students could stitch.

Skip forward all the way to the 70s and curve stitching using thread around nails in boards was super popular. String art was trendy, with the lines of stitching making up lovely intricate geometric designs and abstract representations of birds, boats and other popular decorating themes.

There are so many shapes that can be made using this nifty technique and these templates are fairly limited. But they can be used for simple designs. They are 100 dpi with evenly spaced dots. Click on the images for the full sized versions.

Using these is fairly easy. When you're working a round design, the spacing of your first line will determine how wide the mesh of the curve stitched circle will be. These two designs have a line marked in red so you can see how long each of the lines is and how it shapes the design. The first one, the spacing is a lot closer, which makes for a nice frame effect.

 

Using the square grids, you can do corners, diamonds and other shapes on a right angle. Making the spacing of one axis farther apart than the others creates extended curves for lovely tall thin diamond shapes.

As you can see, with this one the inner star is spaced so it's every 4th dot marked and the lines are made so they intersect fairly close to the middle to make a star shape. The crescent moon is done by only doing part of the circle. The spacing is wide and open.

I hope you enjoy the templates and come up with lots of your own designs!

Curve stitching forget-me-not printables

Curve stitching is interesting, and I always forget how fun until I run across something about it. It's creating curves using straight lines, or for people my age, it's the nail and string art that our parents did or had in the 70s. The coloring page and pattern are meant to be printed at 100 dpi and will be 8 inches across printed at 100 dpi. If you download the pattern and print it at a higher dpi it will print smaller. The pattern can either be used with a ruler and colored pencils or you could pierce a card and use thread to stitch the design. Follow the lines in the coloring page to make it look like mine. Click on the images for the full sized versions. The box is 300 dpi. I resized one layer and not the other from my 300 dpi original and really liked how it looked which is why the coloring is all outside the lines.

This time, what made me think of curve stitching was finding a vintage nail and string art book at a local book store. If you ever come to Anchorage, you might want to go to Title Wave Books. They have a huge collection of new and used books with pretty impressive cookbook and craft book section. I found 3 more vintage craft books for my collection, a liqueur recipes vintage book, and 2 Japanese beading books. I need to do a vintage craft book post again soon!