Credits

The Designer

She is the editor of Legends, an online journal of heroic tales in history, literature, folklore, fiction and the arts, and designer-in-residence for Renaissance: The Elizabethan World and Life in Elizabethan England: A Compendium of Common Knowledge 1558-1603.

By avocation she is a graphic designer and essayist with a passion for historic costume, swashbucklers, and fantasy fiction. She designed the Fantasy Association newsletter Fantasiae for many years.

She lives in a 1930s cottage in a woodsy pocket of the San Fernando Valley, and earns her book money managing web development for a major motion picture studio.

The Drawing Tools

The blackwork patterns are drawn in Visio, a terrific drag-and-drop technical drawing package now owned by Microsoft, using a custom Visio template of blackwork elements. It sure beats pencils and graph paper.

The Visio drawings are captured, bordered, and turned into .gif files using Paint Shop Pro.

References

For more information about blackwork embroidery (in books and on the Web), see the bibliography.