The same yesterday...

When I joined the church I currently attend, it was pretty small. There were maybe about thirty of us. Since then, the town has grown apace and the church with it, and now we can easily get 150 people in on a Sunday morning. That rather makes me feel we ought to do a church plant, because that's too many people for everyone to know one another. (My mother once asked me what a church plant was, and I said it's exactly like a ginger beer plant. You take a bit off the church and put it in a separate container, encourage it, and it grows.)

But, anyway, five years ago or so, there were thirty-odd folks; and I can't remember exactly why, but we put together a rapid emergency care package for our pastor and his family. I think someone might have had to go into hospital or something like that. And everyone in the church put something into the package; even at that size of church, small items were encouraged rather than large ones, as they did need to be able to put it somewhere. People baked things or made small items that were more permanent, the children drew pictures, that kind of thing. And I decided that what I was going to do was make a cross-stitched bookmark. Naturally there are certain themes that lend themselves in particular to bookmarks for one's pastor; I did briefly think of doing a nice Celtic cross with shedloads of knotwork (you may have noticed I like knotwork, and at some point I may do a post on how you draw it, because it's not intuitive). But then I thought... nope. For one thing I need something a lot quicker to do than that, and for another thing he's a down-to-earth non-denominational pastor, not an Irish bishop.

So, keep it simple, and stitch the name "JESUS". Except the problem with that is that bookmarks point the wrong way, as it were, so you've got the name sideways; which means you might be looking at it from either direction.

This is where I'm indebted to Douglas Hofstadter. Well, I am in fact indebted to Douglas Hofstadter in very many ways; it is to his book Le Ton Beau de Marot that I owe my long-standing love affair with poetry translation. (Having seen some terrible verse translations when I was younger, including sitting through an excruciating English translation of Lehar's Die lustige Witwe, I had become convinced that it wasn't possible; this book not only put me right, but inspired me to go and learn Italian so that I could do it myself.) The book covers a great deal of ground, but I can't remember if it was that or another of his works, Metamagical Themas, which first introduced me to ambigrams. And an ambigram is exactly what the JESUS chart is. The Wikipedia article linked here is fascinating and well worth reading in full, since it covers a number of different types of ambigrams, many of them very beautiful. Some of them, like my JESUS chart, are words that look the same either way up; some are words (or sets of words) which are symmetrical about an axis, usually the vertical one; some look like one word if you look at them one way and another word if you look at them another; and some of the most intriguing ones look like two things at once, depending on how you view them. There's one by Hofstadter himself (who, in fact, coined the term "ambigram") which contains a set of glyphs that can be read either as his signature ("Doug") or the date (2006).

Anyway, I'm not at all sure Professor Hofstadter would approve, given that he's something of a militant atheist; but this was what I designed and embroidered for my pastor, and it went down very well. I used soluble canvas on a piece of quilting cotton from a fat quarter. (Fat quarters are great; I don't quilt with them, but they are perfect when you just want to make a small project with no fuss. You can get a handy little bag out of one with no waste.) There are some really lovely calligraphic ambigrams around and I'd be quite happy to have a go at designing something like that, but if I'm going to design any kind of ambigram I'm going to be starting with squared paper. Once you have a basic gridded design, you can always tweak half of it on the computer, copy the new layer, rotate or reflect to get it on top of the non-tweaked half, merge everything down, and then repeat till it's just the way you like it; but to get all the bones of your design accurately placed to begin with, squared paper is your friend. You work in pencil and then just keep physically rotating it, rubbing out and editing as necessary, until you end up with something that looks good enough to be able to ink it. And then, if you want to convert it from a chart to something more flowing, you put it on the computer - but only then. (Quite a handy way of doing this is to abuse a spreadsheet program; I do this to compile crosswords, as well. You adjust the grid till it's square, select the cells you want to use, then flood-fill them. You can always get rid of the gridlines later in your image processing software.)

A chart, though, is extremely handy for a lot of crafts. You can knit it, though that will squash the design down a bit, because knitting stitches are usually wider than they are high; that, however, doesn't affect the symmetry. (I have actually knitted a version of this, just as a test, even though I'm normally not much of a fan of doing colourwork. I thought if I did it in 4-ply it would work for another bookmark, but I decided that even at that gauge it was a bit too thick.) You can work it in filet, although for this particular chart it's going to be a little fiddly as you can't carry the thread between the letters; however, there's nothing to stop you designing a cursive-style ambigram (there are many in the Wikipedia article). You can weave it on a bead loom. And, indeed, please feel free to do any of those things; I'm making this chart officially available in the public domain. (I'm sorry about the squared paper. I wanted a nice big grid so I'd get a clear photo, but all I had in this sort of size was this weird American quilting paper that's marked up in quarters of an inch, so everything is in fours instead of fives and tens. If it's any consolation, it bugs me too.)

As for our church... I don't know what we'd look like now if we all tried to get into the room where we used to meet; but I don't think I'd get my scooter in there!