With text describing the history of Grand Square, from Playford's Hunsdon House in 1657, to its use in cotillions and quadrilles (where it was called Grand Quarré), to Henry Ford in 1925 who was the first to add the reverse.
I have been making images showing the movements of various square dance calls, mostly Plus level calls, designed to go on teeshirts. This was inspired by the old Tech Squares shirts, which I gather are no longer obtainable. Of course, these have my designs, not theirs.
I don't want to sell teeshirts, but I would be happy to make my designs available to anyone who wants to make their own.
I use an internet based company called Spread Shirt to print shirts on demand. Feel free to use whatever company you like, but my instructions below will be assuming you use Spread Shirt, I assume other companies behave similarly.
Spread Shirt is supposed to print SVG images, but I have been unable to get that function to work well (the colors come out wrong), so on this page I provide png files. If you want to play with SVG files look at my library of call images which is more extensive than what is here. All of these images contain transparencies, but none contains a more sophisticated use of the alpha channel.
I generally print shirts with an image for the front and one for the back, but of course you may chose only to print one on the front (which is cheaper). Spread Shirt prints at 200dpi and on the front of a men's teeshirt allows an image to be 13 inches wide, and on the back only 12 inches and a bit. So these png files have widths of either 2600 or 2400 pixels. Women's teeshirts have a smaller printable area, but Spread Shirt will let you scale an image smaller.
Spread Shirt's women's tees are surprisingly small, and I've pretty much given up using them, they never seem to fit. Some of my friends like the tank tops instead (which have an even smaller printable area).
Your first choice is what kind of shirt and what color you want. I find their basic "Men's T-Shirt" perfectly adequate, and that the designs show up against khaki colored backgrounds (at least for my color blind eyes).
Download whatever images from this page you wish, and then upload them onto Spread Shirt, select them and apply one to the front and one to the back of your shirt. Then scale the image to fill as much of the printable area as you wish.
In the following I display a picture of an image on a shirt, if you click on it you should go to the image itself.
I started this page with a few plus calls, and it has grown. I'm now adding an interesting diagram of quadrille figures from 1822, a country dance figure, some sword locks, and who knows what next.
In 1822 Thomas Wilson published The Quadrille and Cotillion Panorama
and in it he had a diagram showing many of the figures used in quadrilles
(which was what most dances in a square formation were called then). It's an
interesting display, though the text isn't entirely legible a tee-shirt.
Wilson's image is in the public domain.
The image I supply is based on the scan done by the Library of Congress, and I don't have as much control over the size as I normally do. It is 2158 pixels wide or about 10.75 inches at 200dpi. (Click on the teeshirt at right to download.)
The figure named "Double Triangles" was invented by Thomas Wilson in 1811. When the
(R)SCDS first interpreted it (in "There's Nae Luck Aboot The Hoose", Book 10, 1935)
they changed it into reels for
three on opposite sides — which gives the 1s a vaguely similar track and
gets everyone involved.
Then in Book 15, 1949, for the dance "Lord Rosslyn's Fancy" they invented a completely different figure, nothing like the original and have used that since. Note that the new figure starts in a different position, so the rest of the dance needs to be altered to use it.
This image is designed for the front. I suggest pairing it with a "Double Triangle Sword Lock" for the back to show yet another meaning of the term.
The Scottish Country Dancers have invented a picto-graphical way of displaying a country dance which they call a "crib diagram." I don't know what the licensing terms might be for the ones other people have created, so I turned my attention to using the same technique for describing English Country Dances. And since a large number of the early Scottish Country Dances were actually Country Dances from London, this works fairly well.
