- Skill level: Easy cross stitch design for beginners and up.
- Stitch dimensions: 74w x 88h – perfect for a glamorous and personal journal cover.
- Easy, on-the-go stitching.
- Looks great on any neutral-dyed fabric!
“Clitarita” is definitely art nouveau inspired. It’s a celebration of the human clitoris in five soothing pastel colors, plus optional pink blending filament for the “magic button.” Its warm, rounded curves are flowing and humanistic. Wing-like, even. It’s as if Clitarita is reminding you how much fun it is to saddle up and fly, baby.
I had other inspirations too, of course. Just generally being a clitoris owner and all-around fan is right up there! But also, I keenly enjoyed remembering the raucous laughter we all shared in 1998 when medical science finally discovered the whole clitoris. And of course, it was a woman who found it. Memes didn’t really exist back then, let alone the notion of anything like that “going viral.” But, can you imagine what the 1998 internet would have been like if they did?
Beauty, wonder, and shared laughter. Three good sources for any design.
Art Nouveau inspired, real world reflections
As I was working on the design, I began to notice something. Reduced down to its essence, the basic shape of the full clitoris looked terribly familiar. In fact, it’s the same basic shape as that of the star-ship that was burned into my psyche from a very young age. I hope with all my heart that Majel Barrett had something to do with the design. Not because I think she consciously knew what the rest of human science didn’t—though she might have. But mostly because this is distinctly female, and an archetypal symbol. It’s one that took on the overwhelmingly phallic imagery of space travel and brought it right back home and made it personal for human women.
The very warm, human-body curves began to emerge in the design almost from the beginning. At first they were depicted embracing a much more anatomically correct version of the clitoris. But as I worked on them, I realized that echoing their lines in the clitoris itself made the whole thing more visually appealing. Then I anthropomorphized the external clitoral button and hood just a bit and had my very first “Wow, this is it!” moments in cross stitch design.
And then I couldn’t wait to stitch it.
Easy on-the-go stitching
As someone who enjoys taking her stitching with her when she goes out, I knew early on that I needed my designs to travel well. It was important to me to feel confident that I could work on a project while enjoying coffee with friends in a local shop. Or waiting for jury duty. Or even picnicking in the grass at a park. After almost 40 years of traveling with my stitching, I’ve definitely come up with a few opinions about what “easy on-the-go” means.
The four essentials reduce down to this:
- The pattern should require basic tools only. Snips, needles, a small frame, flosses on a ring, bag, or in a small project box.
- The pattern doesn’t have to be “small,” but it does need to be compact. Smaller projects are easier to manage than larger ones.
- The pattern should feature bigger blocks of color, for fewer needle reloads.
- The pattern requires a minimal number of floss colors. The fewer bobbins, spools, or baggies to deal with, the better.
This standard is embodied only in Clitarita’s design. It’s also one I’ve striven for in most of the charts I’ve designed since. So you could say truly that everything that went into Clitarita was foundational to what Grimalkin Crossing is. Sue and I hope you’ll find that the best things womankind embodies are foundational to what’s here, too.
Here’s another of our unapologetically feminist designs: History Lesson!
| The full price for Clitarita in PDF is $7.95 USD. Thanks for stitching with me! |
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