Current issue | Letters Online | What's on | Webwatch | About us | Previous issues | Contact us | Subscribe/renew | Index | Terms & conditions | Your basket
Patent StitchesAs always, The World of Embroidery is just wonderful. The May issue included a letter by Anne Dyer about trying to patent stitches.
First of all, Chottie's surname is Alderson, not Anderson. Be that as it may, when these people attempted to patent stitches, it was a real joke and a small scandal. The reason was simple. The US Patent Office knew nothing about embroidery or stitches and what was being attempted to patent was already in the public domain, having been done by our predecessors several centuries earlier. We were living at a time when everyone who took an embroidery lesson wrote a book and some successful entrepreneurs kept renaming stitches as though they had invented them.
Everything that anyone wants to know about stitches is still in that wonderful old slim volume produced by the Victoria & Albert Museum and entitled Basic Stitches of Embroidery; everything else is redundant. Having played with stitches for these fifty years plus, there is nothing new under the sun, only the pleasure of solving the problem at hand.
Ita Aber, New York, USA