Que Seurat, Seurat

This is just a short entry on french knots and pointillism.

The next step in the embroidery project was filling in the center of the daisy. Daisies are compound flowers, and so little dotty french knots made the most sense as a stitch. Here is a photo depicting how one is made. The result is a little ball of embroidery thread a couple of millimeters across.

Now, I’m just using french knots for their textural property, but that’s not the only thing you can do with them. You could, in theory, do an entire picture with them. Lots of images are made using dots - your television screen, the computer screen you are using to read this blog, most printed material. In those cases you can’t see individual dots - they blur together. But of course there are some famous examples of images generated with dots where the dots are readily apparent:

Seurat used this technique to great (and quite famous) effect.

Some embroiderers follow in Seurat’s footsteps and make entire compositions out of french knots. There is an entire book on the subject, actually. So there you have it, proof that there are people in the world even more anal retentive than I.