Re-Interpreting Old Crochet Designs

I love vintage needlework patterns, and often scour used book stores, thrift shops & the internet for them. An ongoing project I've had for the past 1.5 yrs is going through pattern books that have entered the public domain & digitally remastering the patterns. I used to just scan the books in directly, but when they are so very old, there's so much work to be done afterwords to clean up the black & white illustrations and make the text readable that it sometimes seems hardly worth it. I wanted to see those old patterns in color!

So my brain slowly formed an idea. Why not use my cross stitch software (Macstitch) to interpret (or rather, re-interpret) some of those old patterns? I really don't know why it took me so long to come to this idea - as I've used this software for my own designs for over 3 yrs now. Better late than never, I guess! Anyway, the results so far have been fantastic:

This sample was derived from a 1890's crochet pattern book. For choosing the colours, I just went with the colour descriptions that were in the book and what I could find in my own research online as to what those colours would be like. I certainly don't know if the colouring is authentic to the time period, but I still liked the overall effect. I think this would look lovely as an afghan done in repeating strips, with the background done in Tunisan stitch and the pattern cross stitched on. Another use I can think of is to use the black strip by itself as a frame design on a cross stitch pattern with a Victorian theme.