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Embroidered Norse Triquetra on Indigo Sweatshirt

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This is a fabulous celtic / norse / tribal design for ladies and gents. Tattoo styling for cold days. The triquetra is a design deep from within celtic and norse roots. It is the simplest of knotworks, yet able to be depicted in so many forms, and carrying many hidden meanings.

Sadly we can never catch the true lustre and fluidity of embroidery with a photograph, the twisting and turning of the stitch as light dances across it is too dynamic to portray in a single 2-dimensional frame. The slightest hint of the effect is visible with the round dots appearing as varying shades of orange, each stitched with the same shade of thread but at different stitch angles. In real life the celtic orange triquetra leaps out from the garment with its own inner glow, a vibrant counterpart to the subtle muted tones of the green norse triquetra.

There's a nifty visual trick in this design that makes it really pop out from the shirt. We've taken one of the concepts from photographic processing and applied it to embroidery. There's a process called sharpening, or more correctly "unsharp mask", often abbreviated to USM, which is a means of tricking the eyes into seeing a sharper image. Originating in the chemical processing darkroom, the principle is alive and well, almost essential, in the digital image age, and often incorporated aggressively in in-camera processing of jpegs and on tv display screens. On a photograph it is done by subtely emphasising the contrast gradient across an edge by darkening inside the darker side, and lightening slightly on the lighter side. Done properly it is barely detectable, but is most often visible on oversharpened pictures as a bright band in a light background around darker objects, or bright spots within plain coloured areas. So here what we have done is to put a black running stitch line around the orange elements of the celtic knot. The effect is to visually reinforce the contrast gradient, resulting in the orange knotwork "popping" out from it's background.

As a machine embroidery this design is currently on the edge of feasibility for this fabric. The deep soft sweatshirt fabric stretches and rolls over the backing fabric as it is stitched, much more so than on thinner t-shirt fabrics. Using hidden pinning stitches we've controlled most of the movement, but the accuracy necessary for this design is barely achieved. Detailed forensic examination of the stitches on this image shows the problems we're fighting, with the green norse triquetra stitch overlapping over the ends of the orange celtic segments, and the black running stitches unnevenly spaced to the other elements. There would have to be another few days work of design tweaking and testing to produce any visible improvement. As perfectionists the errors are irritating, but being pragmatic the design is still visually effective and the realistically small errors do not detract from the design aesthetics. If there is a sudden rush and people start buying them we'll probably revise the design, to ensure we don't lose any garments to excessive errors, but as we have only sold one from our first batch it's not at the top of the priority list!

Feel free to download the image for personal use (eg desktop, screensaver, pinterest, facebook, tumblr, etc) as is, but no derivative works or commercial use please.

Dark Chocolate T-shirt version here:

Norse Triquetra on Dark Chocolate T-shirt by FancyTogs



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Fancy Togs is a small dressmaking and embroidery business run by Clare & Lawrence in Shepshed, Leicestershire, UK. Together we make our range of original art wear, made to measure clothing, custom embroidery and Irish Dance Costumes.
Website: fancytogs.co.uk
Shop: fancytogs.etsy.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/FancyTogs

Image size
1500x1000px 1.21 MB
Comments11
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blanket86's avatar
This is so amazing! Beautiful composition! I love it!