My grandmother's Cross Stitch Embroidery of Old Glory
This year, as America marks its 250th birthday, I find myself thinking about what patriotism looks like when it is made by hand. Slowly and carefully, stitch by stitch, into something that endures.
Ninety-nine years ago, my grandmother immigrated to the United States. She arrived with the hope that so many immigrants carried: that this country would be her home, her future, and her freedom. And she meant it. To celebrate becoming an American citizen, she cross stitched an American flag in red, white, and blue with the words, "Old Glory Long May It Wave." She hung it proudly in her living room for all to see. It left an enduring impression on me.
I often think about what it meant for her to create that piece. Every stitch was a small act of devotion to the country she loved. When she sailed into New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty came into view, it represented the hope of freedom and the promise of a new life.
Bringing It Into the 21st Century with TurtleStitch
When I decided to recreate my grandmother's embroidered flag as a TurtleStitch design, I wanted to honor both what she had made and the medium I work in. TurtleStitch is wonderfully suited for geometric designs, and an American flag, with its precise grid of stars and stripes, is exactly the kind of challenge it was made for.
My First TurtleStitch Flag
My first TurtleStitch flag was actually a Vera Molnar inspired design I created years ago. The stars were repeated with random placement, and the stripes were set at random angles to give the flag an artistic, abstract feel. I returned to that earlier work as a starting point and built a more traditional design from it, adding the text "America 250" and "1776–2026" to mark the occasion. Coding the Stripes
The thirteen stripes are straightforward to generate programmatically. A simple loop handles the structure beautifully. I stitched each stripe with three parallel rows of red cross stitches to create a textured, hand stitched appearance reminiscent of traditional embroidery.
Coding the Stars
The fifty stars presented a more interesting puzzle. Each star occupies a precise position within the canton, arranged in alternating rows of six and five. I defined the star as its own procedure, a five pointed star drawn with a single continuous path, and then used nested loops to place the stars in their proper rows and columns. By offsetting alternate rows, I achieved the familiar staggered layout.
Because I wanted the white foundation fabric to remain visible rather than filling the canton with blue, each star was embroidered in blue and repeated four times to give it greater definition and presence. The result has a light, open feel that suits the design.
The Second Flag: Recreating My Grandmother's Flag
For the second flag, I wanted something closer to my grandmother's original. I took a photograph of her embroidered piece and traced it using a vector tracing program, recreating the design with arcs and fills. Each color was placed on its own layer in TurtleStitch so that it could be stitched with its own fill pattern, color, and stitch type, much as she had carefully chosen every thread in her original work. The words "Old Glory Long May It Wave" were lettered using Simon Mong's new font, TS Courgette Regular. The words carry more history than most people realize. "Old Glory" began as the name of one specific flag, given in 1824 to Captain William Driver of Salem, Massachusetts, by his mother to celebrate his first command. It sailed with him across the Pacific, and when the Civil War reached Nashville, Driver hid the flag inside a quilt to protect it from Confederate soldiers. After Union forces captured the city, he personally carried it to the Tennessee State Capitol. The original flag eventually made its way to the Smithsonian Institution, where it is preserved today as a testament to those who loved their country enough to protect what it stood for.
The fifty stars were carried over from the first flag's code and added at the end. The result was a heartwarming echo of my grandmother's work, created with code but no less carefully.
The Third Flag: The Betsy Ross Flag
I decided to create a companion piece: the Betsy Ross flag, with its thirteen stars arranged in a circle. Same stripes, different canton. The stars presented another small puzzle. My first instinct was to use a go to block and place each star individually. I knew exactly how to do it, but I also knew it would be tedious: thirteen separate coordinate calculations and thirteen individual placements for what is, at its heart, a simple circle.
So I thought about the problem differently.
The stars are evenly spaced around a circle. A circle can be divided into equal arcs. TurtleStitch has an Arc right block. If a full circle is divided into thirteen equal sections, I can place a star, travel one arc to the next position, place another star, and repeat the process thirteen times around.
The code collapsed from a long list of hardcoded positions into a clean, elegant loop:
That is the kind of moment I love about coding, when the right abstraction transforms a cumbersome problem into something almost obvious. The circle of stars that makes the Betsy Ross flag so distinctive turns out to be one of the simplest parts of the design once you think about it the right way.
The Text
I added the text "America 250" and "1776–2026" above and below each flag to commemorate the Fourth of July and this extraordinary anniversary year.
A Thread Across Time
My grandmother hung her hand stitched flag in her living room because she was proud. Proud of the country she had chosen and proud of the work her own hands had made.
I coded mine for the same reason. I also like to think she would have been proud of what the next generation had become, and proud that her family continued to cherish both creativity and freedom. I turned the three flag designs into potholders for daily use, reminders of both the country I love and the family I cherish.
In 2026, as America turns 250, it feels exactly right to connect one of the oldest textile arts with the newest digital tools and let both of them say the same thing:
"Old Glory, Long May It Wave"
