Happy Fourth!

Made only one thing, not the full outfit for the kidlet I had planned - just a hostess gift for a cookout, with the June design from the Martha Pullen Internet Embroidery Club. But I've finally gotten embroidery on knits down!

A question about embroidery patterns

I'm confused about cross stitch and embroidery patterns people sell online.  As far as I can tell, someone puts up a lovely, high-res image (well, line drawing) on Etsy, looking perhaps like this cheerful clock from Shutterstock, and you're on your honor to pay them to send you a digital copy of the image rather than just printing out the image from their shop yourself for free.  Is it really all on the honor system?  (Kits I understand. I buy kits. But digital image files?)

Cross stitch is similar - it's a bit harder to back-form a chart and pick out your own thread colors, but (especially with one-color designs) it's still basically "here's a grid with the squares in the picture filled in with red thread - you can see it easily in the photo, but please pay me to send it to you rather than just doing it yourself."  Indeed, for out-of-print kits, it's fairly common to find an old photo online and work it out yourself, since you can't get the kit anymore (the old small pictures of English Heritage sites are good examples here).  So is buying the digital pattern just done because it's the right thing to do and you want to support the artist?  (Not that there's anything wrong with that.). Or is there something I'm missing?

(Embroidery patterns count as art for copyright purposes, I believe; so would a cross-stitch image, most likely.  Knitting does not - I mean, the words of the pattern are copyright as written material, but the technique is not copyrightable and the finished object would likely be a useful good rather than art, legally speaking.  That's why you're not going to have much luck suing someone who looked at a photo of your baby sweater and worked out the pattern on their own.  It's also a lot more work to do that than to right-click and download a photo instead of paying someone to email it to you.  Just like with quilt patterns, generally a combination of public domain patterns (if they're even copyrightable in the first place), but you pay for them to keep from having to work out all the math yourself.)

Aristocats!

I can do many things, but they all fit in one general idea, in keeping with my engineer-brain: they're all structured.  Knitting, crochet, sewing from a pattern, cross-stitch, needlepoint? You know exactly where to put your needle or hook.  (I can make up the pattern myself, but then I work from it.)  Cooking from a recipe or especially baking?  You know exactly what to do, and there's sometimes spectacular failure (in baking) if you try to make it up.  Linguistically, I go towards Sanskrit, Latin, German - nice extremely-structured languages, not like French or Hindi.

That's not the case for everyone in my family.  My grandfather was a well-regarded watercolor painter; my mother and aunt can draw; and my sister's taken up a new craft, which benefits the baby greatly:

 

embroidery!  This is one of her onesies (a Gerber trademark, did you know?).  She also has a Houston Texans jersey onesie and a sweet one with a little dove on it.

 

Isn't her work impressive?

The baby also has a nice assortment of socks, with flowers, butterflies, and even elephants on them.

If I can't do embroidery (I can't keep it even, because I'm not told exactly where to put the needle), at least there's someone in the family who can!