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St. Lawrence EMC
Wednesday, November 10, 1998

A Stitch in Time! Cross stitch designer Joanne Gatenby of Lyn sew up her craft

By CHRIS VAN WINGERDEN
Staff Writer

Joanne Gatenby keeps herself in stitches. Its not that she has an over active funny bone. Its just she has a passion that seems to just needle her on, a love - and a talent - that has thread its way into her life.

Gatenby's passion is cross-stitch, and her talent is in design.

Discovering that talent, though, was something of an accident for the Lyn resident. Gatenby explains she has enjoyed different types of needlework - from sewing to embroidery - for a long time before discovering cross-stitching.

But those other interests quickly fell aside when she discovered cross-stitching.

"Its just like the cross-stitching took me over." she says. "You kind of get hooked on it."

Getting hooked, though, was just the starting point. She soon found out she wasn't entirely satisfied doing patterns designed by others.

"I was always adapting other patterns to suit my own needs," Gatenby says.

Her husband, Bill, joked one day about her dissatisfaction and dared her to design something herself. She told him she just couldn't do it, and then set out to prove that to him by trying out some designs. She soon proved herself wrong.

"When I had 50 or so completed, I said, 'OK, that's not going to work," Gatenby says of disproving her husband.

That was about five years ago, and Gatenby has never looked back. "Now I'm happy. I just design it the way I want it done," she says.

Gatenby's designs range from traditional sampler styles - featuring alphabet patterns or wedding symbols, for instance - to vivid, life-like nature studies.

"I usually design on the computer," she says.

Design software allows her to graph her stitches and make changes easily, working with the mouse to give her images shape and form.

When she first started designing, though, she worked on graph paper, buying the largest sheets she could find, often taping several together before shrinking them down to life-size on a photocopier. Working in larger-than-life scale first allowed small details like lettering to be clear at the smaller size after reduction, she explains.

Of course, it wasn't a perfect system, and if she made a mistake, or simply want to make a change, she had to start almost all over with clean graph paper.

"It took months to do a design," she says.

The computer, though, has changed all that. Making alterations is as simple as pressing a few keys, and if a change still isn't right, another change is just as easy.

Still, Gatenby admits that it isn't a perfect design system, either. A computer mouse isn't the smoothest of tools to draw with, she says, so she has learned to adapt her old design method to the new technology.

"I'll take my marking pen and draw on the screen and then fill in the lines," she says with a laugh. It usually works best with a wipeable marker, she admits.

And every design she puts in the computer still has to pass the final test of being applied to cloth. One of her favourite designs, Gatenby says, is a lioness with a cub, which took eight hours to design and four to graph. It then took 54 hours to complete the design on cloth.

"It's so much more fun to start a project than it is to finish one," she says.

All that time and effort, though, is something Gatenby doesn't mind a bit. Her hard work was recently rewarded, in fact, when a design of a leopard she had done was accepted as the front cover design for an American cross stitch magazine called Stoney Creek Cross-Stitch Collection.

"It's quite hard to get into them. I was really excited," she says of seeing her work on the cover. She says she has submitted pieces to other magazines as well, but this was her first acceptance.

"Other replies have all been encouraging, but it's really hard for Canadians to get Americans to take them seriously," she says.

There is even an expectation that Canadians ought to stick with designs that reflect the national identity, choosing beavers and maple leafs and the like over other natural phenomena. It's a hard stereotype to crack, but Gatenby she says she's happy to keep trying.

Acclaim like that is a real bonus, but the real reason she does her design is to see them completed by others, Gatenby says.

Cross stitching is a very accessible hobby, and Gatenby says she is even seeing a lot of men taking up the pursuit.

"It's actually one of the easiest types of needlework you can do," she says.

Unlike needlepoint, a cross stitch piece requires completion of only the design itself, not the cloth background as well, making the task of starting a project less daunting for a beginner, she notes.

Cross sitching is done on aida cloth, perforated with evenly spaced holes which are threaded together to make patterns.

"The holes form squares, and that's the size of your stitch," Gatenby says. "You basically make X's."

Cross stitching is benefiting from a general resurgence of interest in textile arts, Gatenby says.

"A lot of old needleworks are coming back now. People say, 'Oh my grandmother used to do that' and now they're coming back," she says. Contemporary takes on the old traditions help give these arts a new life as well.

"When it first started being done, cross stitching was very boxy, with squared off edges and corners," Gatenby says. "Modern cross stitching is softer and more elegant looking than the original concept," because designers have learned to smooth out curves and rounded edges.

"It's interesting to see the new twists," she says.

After five years of putting her own designs together, Gatenby says she is still improving.

"My designs are getting more sophisticated. My shadings are getting better," she says. She has also learned to look at the world around her in a manner that helps her to create her designs.

"My kids laugh at me, because I talk in colour numbers," she says, referring to the incredible variety of colours the thread she works with comes in.

She says she has also taken to watching scenery as she drives, or looking at people's faces, picturing what she might do to render something in cross stitch.

"I love shadows, the play of light and dark on people's faces. Sometimes I'll see a photograph that will spark my imagination," she says. "A lot of times it's just something like that that sparks an idea."

"It's something I do because I love it."