The Shoe Stool Too

So, here's The Shoe Stool finished before delivery to its new home. The previous post discusses the text's origin in The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.



Sally translated the drawing wonderfully into stitch, with some extension to her technique. Through a first sighting on AAPC and a recommendation by Luke, I landed a copy of Elsie Svennas' A Handbook of Lettering for Stitchers (1966). These spreads indicate the food on offer; for this project, the trammed-thread filling stitch shown above was adapted for the leg tone.





Here's a detail. Our collaboration is working best when we think together about the physical equivalent to linework, acknowledging the behaviour of a needle through quite coarse linen-cotton texture and allowing for this to lead a little more.



Always a mesh of visual cues that sort of rhythmically feed the language. I'm looking a lot at the exchange between Susan Kare's original pixel-textures for MacPaint and Memphis' inventory of Po-Mo-pattern, as seen and discussed on Rob Giampietro's incredibly info-rich and inspiring Lined & Unlined.



Chipping too at a kind of needly eeriness, something that detained me greatly as a child, around a padded, skipping step of malign characters in fairy tales. This image (via) from Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter (1845), holds it in the arch small foot and meaty calf. The non-perspective of the wall had its say too.



So somehow this part of the original drawing became a little obsession; and a leader for other forms to follow.



Robert Helpmann's cobbler in (the unmatched) Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburgers' The Red Shoes (1948) has always rattled around in a corner of one's picture-memory for similar reasons.