“What is it—I don’t know. I can see that it could be a pattern for embroidery, but—Oh, yes, I do know what it is! It is a doily pattern! Isn’t it?”
“Hurrah!” sang Joyce. “You guessed! It is! All one has to do is to cut out the pattern and then take a sheet of carbon paper and transfer it to a piece of square linen. If you cut the design out larger, it can be used for a linen sofa-pillow with the four little clover things worked in each corner like the pattern in the wall paper. It would be easy embroidery—I could do it! I can’t do difficult needle-work. And, of course, if one didn’t have carbon paper or know how to use it, one could copy the design with tissue paper and trace it that way—sometimes carbon paper that one uses makes a blue spot on the cloth, if one leans on it with any pressure.”
Jimsi was looking hard at the doily pattern. “Do you know about stencils?” she asked.
“No,” replied the little lame girl. “What are they?”
“They’re designs that are cut out of stiff paper or tin or wood. You take a paint brush and paint over the openings and it makes a reproduction of the design. I think we could cut that pattern out and make a stencil pattern of it. Maybe the paper’s thick enough. Let’s try!”
“All right,” returned Joyce. “But, first, let’s see the embroidery. We can try stencils afterwards.”
Jimsi agreed. “Let’s see the rest.”
“Well, here’s number three,” indicated Joyce. “That is a cross-stitch pattern. Do you do cross-stitch? It’s easy to do. That’s the stitch they use to make pictures on samplers. You’ve seen samplers?”
“Aunt Phoebe has one in her study. It’s framed. The little girls used to work them long ago. That was the way they learned to sew—by making samplers.”
“I can show you cross-stitch,” Joyce volunteered. “You won’t even have to transfer this cross-stitch pattern. It’s quite plain even though it isn’t all little crosses in the wall paper. It would be pretty embroidered on the end of a guest-room towel. Miss Phoebe showed me one she was doing once. It had flowers on it something like these.”