Part 20

The effect of any stitch is vastly varied, according to the use made of it. Satin-stitch, it was shown (38), worked in twisted silk, ceases to have any appearance of satin; and it makes all the difference whether the stitches are long or short, close together or wide apart. More important than all is the direction of the stitch. By that alone you can recognise the artist in needlework.

The DIRECTION of the stitch deserves consideration from two points of view--that of colour and that of form. First as to colour. It is not sufficiently realised that every alteration in the direction of the stitch means variety of tone, if not of tint. Take a feather in your hand, and turn it about, so that now one side of the quill now the other catches the light; or notice the alternate stripes of brighter and greyer green on a fresh-trimmed lawn, where the roller has bent the blades of grass first this way and then that. So it is with the colour of silken stitches. The pattern opposite (82) looks as if it had been embroidered in two shades of silk; in the work itself it has still more that appearance; but it is all in one shade of brownish gold: the difference which you see is merely the effect of light upon it. The horizontal stitches, as it happens, catch the light; the vertical ones do not. Had the light come from a different point, the effect might have been reversed. If there had been diagonal stitches from right to left, they would have given a third tint; and, if there had been others from left to right, they would have given a fourth.

Suppose a pattern in which the leaves were worked horizontally, the flowers vertically, and the stalks in the direction of their growth, all in one stitch and in one colour, there would be a very appreciable difference in tone between leaves, flowers, and stalks. In gold, the difference would be yet more striking. And that is one reason why gold backgrounds are worked in diapers; not so much for the sake of pattern as to get variety of broken tint.

In the famous Syon Cope the direction of the stitching is frankly independent of the design. That is to say, that, while the pattern radiates naturally from the neck, the stitches do not follow suit, but go all one way--the way of the stuff. This, though rather a brutal solution of the difficulty, saves all afterthought as to what direction the stitches shall take; but it has very much the effect of weaving. The embroiderer of the 13th century was not afraid of that (aimed at it, perhaps?), and was, apparently, afraid of letting go the leading strings of warp and weft.

When stitches follow the direction of the form embroidered, accommodating themselves to it, all manner of subtle change of tone results. You get, not only variety of colour, but more than a suggestion of form.

That is the second point to be considered.

The direction taken by the stitch always helps to explain the drawing; or, if the needlewoman cannot draw, to show that she cannot--as, for example, in the tulip herewith (83). A less intelligent management of the stitch it would be hard to find. The needlestrokes, far from helping in the very slightest degree to explain the folding over of the petals, directly contradict the drawing. The flower might almost have been designed to show how not to do it; but it is a piece of old work, quite seriously done, only without knowing. The embroidress is free, of course, to work her stitches in a direction which does not express form at all, so as to give a flat tint, in which is no hint of modelling; but the intention is here quite obviously naturalistic. The rendering below (84) shows the direction the stitches should have taken. The turn-over of the petals is even there not very clearly expressed, but that is the fault of the drawing (very much on a par with the workmanship), from which it would not have been fair to depart.

A more clever fulfilment of the naturalistic intention is to be seen in Illustration 76. The drawing of the doves is in the rather loose manner of the period of Marie Antoinette; but the treatment of the stitch is clever in its way--the way, as I have said, rather of painting than of embroidery, giving as it does the roundness of the birds' bodies but no hint of actual feathering, such as you find in the bird in Illustration 85. There, every stitch helps to explain the feathering. By a discreet use of what I must persist in calling the same stitch (that is, satin-stitch and the variety of it called plumage-stitch) the embroiderer has rendered with equal perfection the sweep of the broad wing feathers and the fluffy feathering of the breast. It is by means of the direction of the stitch, too, that the drawing of the neck is so perfectly rendered.

The direction of the stitch is varied to some purpose in the head in Illustration 80, where the flesh is all in straight upright stitches, whilst the hair is stitched in the direction of its growth.

The five petals on the satin-stitch sampler (Illustration 36)--to descend from the masterly to the elementary--show something of the difference it makes in what direction the stitch is worked. It matters more, of course, in some stitches than in others; but in most cases the direction of the stitch suggests form, and needs accordingly to be considered.

It scarcely needs further pointing out how the direction of the stitch may help to explain the construction of the form, as in the case of leaves, for example, where the veining may be suggested; or of stalks, where the fibre may be indicated. There is no law as to the direction of stitch, except that it should be considered. You may follow the direction of the forms, you may cross them, you may deliberately lay your stitches in the most arbitrary manner; but, whatever you do, you must do it with intelligent purpose. An artist or a workwoman can tell at once whether your stitch was laid just so because you meant it or because you knew no better.

Having laid your stitches deliberately, it is best to leave them, and not to work over them with other stitching. Stitching over stitching was resorted to whenever elaboration was the fashion; but the simpler and more direct method is the best. The way the veins are laid in cord over the satin-stitch in the lotus leaves in Illustration 40 is the one fault to be found with an all but perfect piece of work.

The stitching over the laid silver mid-rib in Illustration 92 is better judged. It may be said, generally speaking, that except where, as in the case of laid-work, the first stitching was done in anticipation of a second, and the work would be incomplete without it, stitching over stitches should be indulged in only with moderation.

Stitching is sometimes done not merely over stitches, but upon the surface of them, not penetrating the ground-stuff. Unless, in such a case, the first stitching is of such compact character as to want no strengthening, it amounts almost to a sin against practicality not to take advantage of the second stitching to make it firmer.

CHURCH WORK.

It is customary to draw a distinction between church, or ecclesiastical as it is called, and other embroidery; but it is a distinction without much difference. Certain kinds of work are doubtless best suited to the dignity of church ceremonial, and to the breadth of architectural decoration; accordingly, certain processes of work have been adopted for church purposes, and are taken as a matter of course--too much as a matter of course. The fact is, work precisely like that employed on vestments and the like (Illustration 86) was used also for the caparison of horses and other equally profane purposes.

Practical considerations, alike of ceremonial and decoration, make it imperative that church work should be effective: religious sentiment insists that it should be of the best and richest, unsparingly, and even lavishly given; common sense dictates that the loving labour spent upon it should not be lost. And these and other such considerations involve methods of work which, by constant use for church purposes, have come to be classed as ecclesiastical embroidery. But there is no consecrated stitch, no stitch exclusively belonging to the church, none probably invented by it. For embroidery is a primitive art--clothes were stitched before ever churches were furnished; and European methods of embroidery are all derived from Oriental work, which found its way westwards at a very early date. Phrygia (sometimes credited with the invention of embroidery) passed it on to Greece, and Greece to Italy, the gate of European art.

Christianity produced new forms of design, but not new ways of work. The methods adopted in the nunneries of the West were those which had already been perfected in the harems of the East.

Embroidery for the church must naturally take count of the church, both as a building and as a place of worship; but, as apart from all other needlework, there is no such thing as church embroidery; and the branding of one very dull kind of thing with that name is in the interest neither of art nor of the church, but only of business. "Ecclesiastical art" is just a trade-term, covering a vast amount of soulless work. There is in the nature of things no reason why art should be reserved for secular purposes, and only manufacture be encouraged by the clergy. The test of fitness for religious service is religious feeling; but that is hardly more likely to be found in the output of the church furnisher (trade patterns overladen with stock symbols), than in the stitching of the devout needlewoman, working for the glory of God, in whose service of old the best work was done.

Many of the examples of old work given on these pages are from church vestments, altar furniture, and the like; information on that point will be found in the descriptive index of illustrations at the beginning of the book; but they are here discussed from the point of view of workmanship, with as little reference as possible to religious or other use: that is a question apart from art.

The distinguishing features of church work should be, in the first place, its devotional spirit, and, in the second, its consummate workmanship. In it, indeed, we might expect to find work beyond the rivalry of trade controlled by conditions of time and money. Even then it would be but the more perfect expression of the same art which in its degree ennobled things of civic and domestic use.

Church embroidery, as usually practised in these days, is not only the most frigid and rigid in design, but the hardest and most mechanical in execution--which last arises in great part from the way it is done. It is not embroidered straight upon the silk or velvet which forms the groundwork of the design, but separately on linen. The pattern thus worked is cut out, and either pasted straight on to the ground-stuff, or, if the linen is at all loose, first mounted on thin paper and then cut out and pasted on to the velvet, where it is kept under pressure until it is dry. In either case the edges have eventually to be worked over.

This habit of working on linen or canvas and applying the embroidery ready worked on to the richer stuff, though early used on occasion, does not seem to have been common until a period when manufacture generally usurped the place of art. The work in Illustration 87 was done directly on to the silk. In the latter half of the 18th century there was a regular trade in embroidery ready to sew on, by which means purveyors could turn out in a day or two what would have taken months to embroider.

Even if it had been the invariable mediæval practice to work sprays or what not upon canvas and apply them bodily to the velvet, that would not make it the more workmanlike or straightforward way of working. If needle stitches are the ostensible means of getting an effect upon a stuff, it seems only right they should be stitched upon that stuff. To work the details apart and then clap them on to it, stands to embroidery very much in the relation of hedge-carpentering to joinery. Nor is it usually happy in result. Occasionally, as in the case of Miss C. P. Shrewsbury's vine-leaf pattern (Illustration 88), it disarms criticism. More often it looks stuck-on. A way of avoiding that look is to add judicious after-stitching on the stuff itself; and this must not be confined to the sewing on or outlining merely, but allowed to wander playfully over the field, so as to draw your eye away from the margin of the applied patch, and lead you to infer that, some of the needlework being obviously done on the velvet, all of it is. But to disguise in this way the line of demarcation, even if you succeed in doing it, is at best the art of prevarication.

No doubt it is difficult to work upon velvet. The stuff is not very sympathetic, and the stitching has a way of sinking into the pile, and being, as it were, drowned in it. But the trailing spirals of split-stitch which play about the applied spots in many a mediæval altar cloth hold their own quite well enough to show that silk can be worked straight on to the velvet.

That gold may be equally well worked straight on to velvet may be seen in any Indian saddle cloth. Heavy work of this kind may be rather man's work than woman's; but that is not the point. The question is, how to get the best results; and the answer is, by working on the stuff.

It may be argued that in this way you cannot get very high relief; but the occasions for high relief are, at the best, rare. If you want actual modelling, as in the Spanish work referred to in a previous chapter, that must, of course, be worked separately, built up, as it were, upon the canvas and worked over. And there is no reason why it should not, for in no case does it appear to be stitching. In fact, it aims deliberately at the effect of chased and beaten metal.

Heavy appliqué of any kind affects, of course, not only the thickness but the flexibility of the material thus enriched--an important consideration if it is meant to hang in folds.