Part 16

Appliqué must be carefully and exactly done, and is best worked in a frame. It is almost as much a man's work as a woman's. Embroidery proper is properly woman's work; but here, as in the case of tailoring, the man comes in. The getting ready for appliqué is not the kind of thing a woman can do best.

The finishing may sometimes be done in the hand, and very bold, coarse work may possibly be worked throughout in the hand, and outlined with buttonhole-stitch (chain-stitch is not so appropriate); but when a couched outline is employed it must be done in a frame, and, indeed, work with any pretensions to finish is invariably begun and finished in the frame.

To work appliqué you want, in fact, two frames--one on which to mount the material to be embroidered, and another on which to mount the material to be applied. The backing in each case should be of smooth holland. This is stretched on to the frame, and then pasted with stiff starch or what not; the silk or velvet is laid on to it and stroked with a soft rag until it adheres, and is left to dry gently. When dry, the outlines of the complete design are traced upon the one, and those of the details to be applied upon the other. (You may paste, of course, silks of two or three colours upon one backing for this.) The stuff to be applied is then loosened from its frame, the details are cleanly cut out with scissors, or, better still, a knife (in either case sharp), and transferred to their place in the design on the other frame. There they are kept in position by short steel pins planted upright into the stuff until you are sure they fit, and then tacked firmly down, with care that the stitches are such as will be quite covered by the final couching, chain stitch, or whatever is to be your outline.

In the case of silk or other delicate material, peculiar care must be taken that the paste is not moist enough to penetrate the stuff; but an experienced worker has no fear of that.

A firm outline is a condition of appliqué, and couched cord fulfils it most perfectly. Much depends upon a tasteful and tactful choice of colour for it. You fatten your pattern by outlining it with a colour which goes with it (Illustration 62, B). You thin it by one which goes into the ground. Very subtle use may be made of a double outline or of a corded line upon couched floss. There is a double outline to the ornament in Illustration 92: the inner one next to the yellow satin appliqué is of gold, the outer one next the crimson velvet ground is of white sewn with pale blue. This gives emphasis to the bold forms of the leafage. The mid-rib there is of silver couching; the minor veinings are stitched in silk, and are rather insignificant.

The less there is of extra stitching on appliqué the better as a rule. It disturbs the breadth, which is so valuable a characteristic of onlay. In no case is much mixing of methods to be desired; but if appliqué is to be supplemented, it had best be with couching, which is not so much stitching as stitched down, itself another form of applied work.

Appliqué of itself is not, of course, adapted to pictorial work, but that in association with judicious stitching and couching it may be used to admirable decorative purpose in figure design is shown by Miss Mabel Keighley's panel, Illustration 61. What an artist may do depends upon the artist. Miss Keighley's panel indicates the use that may be made of texture in the stuff onlaid.

Appliqué is especially appropriate to bold church work, fulfilling perfectly that condition of legibility so desirable in work necessarily seen oftenest from afar. Broadly designed, it may be as fine in its way as a piece of mediæval stained glass, and it gives to silk and velvet their true worth. The pattern may be readable as far off as you can distinguish colour.

Appliqué work is thought by some to be an inferior kind of embroidery, which it is not. It is not a lower but another kind of needlework, in which more is made of the stuff than of the stitching. In it the craft of the needleworker is not carried to its limit; but, on the other hand, it makes great demands upon design. You cannot begin by just throwing about sprays of natural flowers. It calls peremptorily for treatment--by which test the decorative artist stands or falls. Effective it must be; coarse it may be; vulgar it should not be; trivial it can hardly be; mere prettiness is beyond its scope; but it lends itself to dignity of design and nobility of treatment. Of course, it is not popular.

A usual form of appliqué is in satin upon velvet. Velvet on satin (B, Illustration 62) is comparatively rare; but it may be very beautiful, though there is a danger that it may look like weaving.

Silk upon silk (figured damask) is shown in Illustration 63, designed to be seen from a nearer point of view, and less pronounced in pattern accordingly. The strap work, applied in ribbon, is broken by cross stitches in couples, which take away from the severity of the lines. The grape bunches are onlaid, each in one piece of silk, the forms of the separate grapes expressed by couching. The French knots in the centre of the grapes add greatly to the richness of the surface. The leaves are in one piece. It would have been possible to use two or three, joining them at the veins.

The application of leather to velvet, as in Illustration 94, allows modification in the way of execution, and of design adapted to it. Leather does not fray, and needs, therefore, no sewing over at the edge, but only sewing down, which may be done, as in this case, well within the edge of the material, giving the effect of a double outline. The Chinese do small work in linen, making similar use of the stitching within the outline, but turning the cut edge of the stuff under; it would not do to leave it raw. On a bolder scale, but in precisely the same manner, is embroidered the wonderful tent of François Ier., taken at the battle of Pavia, and now in the Armoury at Madrid--obviously Arab work. Something of the kind was done also in Morocco, which points to leather work as the possible origin of this method.

Another ingenious Chinese notion is to sew down little five-petalled flowers (turned under at the edges) with long stamen stitches radiating from a central eye of knots.

INLAY, MOSAIC, CUT-WORK.

A step beyond the process of onlaying is INLAY, where one material is not laid on to the other, but into it, both being perhaps backed by a common material. The process is, in fact, precisely analogous to that inlay of brass and tortoiseshell which goes by the name of its inventor, Boule. The work is difficult, but thorough. It does not recommend itself to those who want to get effect cheaply. The process is suited only to close-textured stuffs, such as cloth, which do not fray.

The materials are not pasted on to linen, as in the case of appliqué. The cloth to be inlaid is placed upon the other, and both are cut through with one action of the knife, so that the parts cannot but fit. The coherent piece of material (the ground, say, of the pattern) is then laid upon a piece of strong linen already in a frame; the vacant spaces in it are filled up by pieces of the other stuff, and all is tacked down in place. That done, the work is taken out of the frame, and the edges sewn together. The backing can then, if necessary, be removed; and in Oriental work it generally was.

Inlay lends itself most invitingly to COUNTERCHANGE in design, as seen in the stole at A, Illustration 62. Light and dark, ground and pattern, are there identical. You cannot say either is ground; each forms the ground to the other. And from the mere fact of the counterchanging you gather that it is inlaid, and not onlaid.

Prior to inlaying in materials which are at all likely to fray, you first back them with paper, thin but tough, firmly pasted; then, having tacked the two together, and pinned them with drawing-pins on to a board, you slip between it and the stuff a sheet of glass, and with a very sharp knife (kept sharp by an oilstone at hand) cut out the pattern. What was cut out of one material has only to be fitted into the other, and sewn together as before, and you have two pieces of inlaid work--what is the ground in one forming the pattern in the other, and vice versâ. By this ingenious means there is absolutely no waste of stuff. You get, moreover, almost invariably a broad and dignified effect: the process does not lend itself to triviality. It was used by the Italians, and more especially by the Spaniards of the Renaissance, who borrowed the idea, of course, from the Arabs.

In India they still inlay in cloth most marvellously, not only counterchanging the pattern, but inlaying the inlays with smaller patternwork, thus combining great simplicity of effect with wonderful minuteness of detail. They mask the joins with chain-stitch, the colour of it artfully chosen with regard to the two colours of the cloth it divides or joins. Further, they often patch together pieces of this kind of inlay.

Inlay itself is a sort of PATCHWORK. You cut pieces out of your cloth, and patch it with pieces of another colour, covering the joins perhaps, as on Illustration 64, with chain stitch, which gives it some resemblance to cloisonné enamel, the cloisons being of chain-stitch.

Where there is no one ground stuff to be patched, but a number of vari-coloured pieces of stuff are sewn together, they form a veritable Mosaic, reminding one, in coloured stuffs, of what the mediæval glaziers did in coloured glass. Admirable heraldic work was done in Germany by this method; and it is still employed for flag making. The stuffs used should be as nearly as possible of one substance. In patchwork of loosely-textured material each separate piece of stuff may be cut large, turned in at the edge, and oversewn on the wrong side.

The relation of CUT-WORK to inlay is clear--in fact, the one is the first step towards the other. You have only to stop short of the actual inlaying, and you have cut-work. Fill up the parts cut out in Illustration 65 with coloured stuff, and it would be inlay. The needlewoman has preferred to sew over the raw edges of the stuff, and give us a perfect piece of FRETWORK in linen. It is part of the game in cut-work to make the fret coherent, whole in itself. The design should tell its own tale. "Ties" of buttonhole-stitch, or what not, are not necessary, provided the designer knows how to plan a fret pattern. Their introduction brings the work nearer to lace than embroidery. The sewing-over may be in chain-stitch, satin-stitch (as in Illustration 65), or in buttonhole-stitch--which last is strongest.

As, in the case of appliqué, inlay, and mosaic, an embroidered outline is usually necessary to cover the join, so in the case of cut-work sewing-over is necessary to keep the edges from fraying. It may sometimes be advisable to supplement this outlining by further stitching to express veining, or give other minute details--just as the glassworker, when he could not get detail small enough by means of glazing, had recourse to painting to help him out. But there is danger in calling in auxiliaries. It is best to design with a view to the method of work to be employed, and to keep within its limits. To worry the surface of applied, inlaid, or cut stuff with finnikin stitchery, is practically to confess either the inadequacy of the design or the fidgetiness of the worker. It should need, as a rule, no such enrichment.

EMBROIDERY IN RELIEF.

Embroidery being work upon a stuff, it is inevitably raised, however imperceptibly, above the surface of it. But there is a charm in the unevenness of surface and texture thus produced; and the aim has consequently often been to make the difference of level between ground-stuff and embroidery more appreciable by UNDERLAY or padding of some kind. The abuse of this kind of thing need not blind us to the advantages it offers.

There are various ways of raising embroidery, the principal of which are illustrated on the sampler overleaf.

In sprig A the underlay is of closely-woven cloth, darker in colour than would be advisable except for the purpose of showing what it is: it is as well in the ordinary way to choose a cloth more or less of the colour the embroidery is to be. The cloth is cut with sharp scissors carefully to shape, but a little within the outline, and pasted on to the linen. When perfectly dry, it is worked over with thick corded silk couched in the ordinary way.

The raised line at B reveals the way the stem in Illustration 86 was worked. Two cords of smooth string (macramé, for example) are twisted and tacked in place. Over this floss is worked in close satin-stitch.