THREE HAND STITCHES

backstitch · running stitch · whipstitch — what shows on the face and what the thread does underneath

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Formats: A4 · A3 · A2
What you get: Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject: body and care · beginners · memo · study

A solid line is the thread on the face; the dashed line is its path under the fabric or behind the edge; the dots are needle holes. The sheet deliberately prescribes no stitch length: it depends on the fabric and the thread. Diagrams are drawn from the stitch sequence itself.

AN UNBROKEN LINE MEANS THE NEEDLE WENT BACKWARDS

Of the three stitches only the backstitch leaves an unbroken line on the face — and that is mechanics, not decoration: every stitch is sunk into the end of the previous one, so no gap can appear, while under the fabric the thread travels twice the stitch length each time. That double spend of thread is the price of strength.

Until the sewing machine became a household thing, everything that had to hold — garment seams, sails, harness — was sewn exactly this way, backwards. The machine stitch imitates its face, though inside it works differently.

On the sheet

A solid line is the thread on the face; the dashed line is its path under the fabric or behind the edge; the dots are needle holes. The sheet deliberately prescribes no stitch length: it depends on the fabric and the thread. Diagrams are drawn from the stitch sequence itself.
Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 10 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

THREE HAND STITCHES

AN UNBROKEN LINE MEANS THE NEEDLE WENT BACKWARDS

On the sheet

Printing

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