Although you'd never want to read a novel typeset in Fraktur, the alphabet is so beautiful and elegant that it continues to be used in an ornamental fashion. You'll recognize it on everything from Gothic-looking t-shirt designs to marriage certificates. Mathematicians may remember working with Fraktur letters alongside all those Greek characters. Here is a pangram (in German, of course,) a sentence using all of the letters in the alphabet, for you to see how lovely the text looks. German pangrams are more challenging because they must include the letters with umlauts too. I'm including only the capital letters in the stitched piece.
The art style goes hand-in-hand with this typeface is the Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, also called Fraktur. You can see online and in museums examples of documents lettered in Fraktur calligraphy adorned with elaborate ink and watercolor drawings. The most common motifs are birds, hearts, and plants with crazy wild flowers. I do like crazy flowers. For something different, and I think appropriate to the style and its time period, I am stitching this one with Gentle Arts Simply Wool threads. It is such a different feel working with the wool. You use a single strand, but it still has sooooo much body over 2 on 32, which I am attempting to show in the close-up below. I'm finding they work up better than I had expected; my hands are a rough and dry mess. Frogging is not nice (but is it ever?) and the needle is a bitch to thread, but once I get going the thread hasn't frayed or gotten thin or lost its twist on me. There is a limited palette available, but I've been able to find colors that work. All in all, I'm really glad I've tried it.
Cool! I'm anxious for it to be ready. Always interested in design derived from fraktur since my ancestors made some of the first ones in this country as residents of what is now called the Ephrata Cloisters. They were part of the original group and all died there many years later but 3 of the young women worked in the Scriptorium making fraktur from 1734 on. Their parents were there also, the father worked in the then-famous print shop there; a brother died there and another was lost on the seas on a mission trip back to Europe. So fraktur's big in my history! I bet the wool looks really full and rich. Can't wait! Susan McKay
ReplyDeleteOoooh I was hoping Fraktur was coming up soon :) Can't wait! I've used the GAST wools and love them :)
ReplyDeleteLooks like fun. Can't wait to see the finished pattern.
ReplyDeleteThere may be a small palette, but such deliciously rich colours! If you stitch in German, will you translate? ;-)
ReplyDeleteWhat a cool story, Susan! I had to look up the Ephrata Cloisters, as we have a town here in Western Washington named Ephrata but it didn't make sense for the context in history. So, Ephrata,PA. Do you have any Fraktur heirloom documents that your family was able to keep? I've never been that big into tracing relatives, but this is the kind of cool stories I love to hear.
ReplyDeleteThat looks really cool, Tracy, can't wait to see the finished design
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