Stitcher:

Designer:

Stitcher's comments:

The inspiration for "Beth's Vest" was my desire to stitch a piece of needlework for my daughter, to celebrate her love of horses.

As far as attribution is concerned, there are three types. Some of the motifs are from a set of articles in Just CrossStitch magazine, from 1984 through 1980. For these, I used the charts from the articles, doing tent stitch as opposed to cross. Another group of motifs are my realization of ideas that were contained in those same articles. A third group are ideas that came to me as I stitched the vest and that are my own design entirely. I will break them down in detail:

Motifs charted in Just CrossStitch, various issues from the 1980s:
   Horses, people, dogs, cows
   Brick house and the woods behind it.

Other content from Just CrossStitch articles, from which I used the ideas, but stitched them according to my own needs for this piece:
   The woods behind the white house
   The evergreens
   The road and fields
   The fallen leaves
   Some of the deciduous trees

Original ideas:
   Remainder of the deciduous trees
   Stone wall
   Fence
   Fox
   Pond
   White house (my parents' house)

The "design" -- the plan of the work -- is my own. Since the pieces in Just CrossStitch were for framed pictures, I used the individual motifs that I wanted and placed them on the vest canvas to tell a story. I started with the brick house on one shoulder, then got the idea to do my parents' house in Virginia on the other shoulder. I drew a road that would crisscross the front of the vest, and placed horses, riders and dogs wherever they helped to tell a story of a hunt meet. As I went along, I added the fence, the stone wall and the pond, and trees wherever they seemed to belong. The hunt is getting ready to go, with more riders coming toward the meeting point. The fox, in the meantime, is ready to leave the area.