Part 6

84. MORE EXPRESSIVE LINES OF STITCHING--To compare with Illustration 83.

85. SATIN AND PLUMAGE STITCHES chiefly, the bird's crest in French knots, the clouds about him in knotted braid. The direction of the stitch is most artfully chosen, and the precision of the work is faultless. The satin ground is of brilliant orange-red; the crane, white, with black tail feathers, scarlet crest, and yellow beak and legs; the clouds, black and white and blue. Japanese. (Mrs. L. F. D.)

86. RENAISSANCE CHURCH WORK IN GOLD AND SILVER, partly flat, partly in relief, upon pale blue satin, with touches of pink and crimson silk to give emphasis. Spanish. 18th century. Compare the stem with Illustration 66, B. (V. & A. M.)

87. GOTHIC CHURCH WORK--The flesh, &c., in split-stitch; the vine-leaves green, getting yellower as it nears the crimson silk ground. Part of a cope embroidered with a representation of the Tree of Jesse. English. Ca. 1340. (V. & A. M.)

88. MODERN CHURCH WORK ON LINEN, in long-and-short stitch. Veins padded with embroidery cotton and worked over with two threads of filo-floss, a green and a blue; the rest of the leaves worked in one shade of stout floss. All this applied to velvet with a couching of brown filoselle, and the tendrils added. Designed and executed by Miss C. P. Shrewsbury. (The property of the artist.)

89. SIMPLE STITCHING ON LINEN, the broader bands in a canvas stitch in yellow, the finer lines in back-stitch in pale grey silk. Italian. (Mrs. L. F. D.)

90. SIMPLE COUCHED OUTLINE WORK, in purplish silk cord upon linen. Part of an altar-cloth. Italian. 16th century. (V. & A. M.)

91. RENAISSANCE ORNAMENT--Most gracefully designed arabesque. The raised outline (couched) has somewhat the effect of cloisons, the satin-stitch (in colours) of brilliant enamel. It is upon a white satin ground. The foreshortened face in the picture is painted upon satin. Italian. Ca. 1700. (V. & A. M.)

92. APPLIQUÉ DESIGN, in yellow satin upon crimson velvet--Double outline; next the red, white, sewn with pale blue; next the yellow, gold. Midrib of the leaf couched silver. Spanish, 16th century. (V. & A. M.)

93. SATIN-STITCH--except that the heart-shaped features at the base and the lily-shaped flowers, of which only the tips are shown, are outlined with fine white cord. Part of a fan, worked by Miss Buckle, from a design by L. F. D. (The property of the worker.)

94. LEATHER APPLIQUÉ UPON VELVET--The stitching well within the edge of the leather.

ERRATA.

Page 30. Diagram belongs to G (Stem-Stitch) described on page 32, not C (Thick Crewel-Stitch).

Page 125, 2nd line. For "lower" read "upper."

ART IN NEEDLEWORK.

EMBROIDERY AND STITCHING.

Embroidery begins with the needle, and the needle (thorn, fish-bone, or whatever it may have been) came into use so soon as ever savages had the wit to sew skins and things together to keep themselves warm--modesty, we may take it, was an afterthought--and if the stitches made any sort of pattern, as coarse stitching naturally would, that was embroidery.

The term is often vaguely used to denote all kinds of ornamental needlework, and some with which the needle has nothing to do. That is misleading; though it is true that embroidery does touch, on the one side, tapestry, which may be described as a kind of embroidery with the shuttle, and, on the other, lace, which is needlework pure and simple, construction "in the air" as the Italian name has it.

The term is used in common parlance to express any kind of superficial or superfluous ornamentation. A poet is said to embroider the truth. But such metaphorical use of the word hints at the real nature of the work--embellishment, enrichment, added. If added, there must first of all be something it is added to--the material, that is to say, on which the needlework is done. In weaving (even tapestry weaving) the pattern is got by the inter-threading of warp and weft. In lace, too, it is got out of the threads which make the stuff. In embroidery it is got by threads worked on a fabric first of all woven on the loom, or, it might be, netted.

There is inevitably a certain amount of overlapping of the crafts. For instance, take a form of embroidery common in all countries, Eastern, Hungarian, or nearer home, in which certain of the weft threads of the linen are drawn out, and the needlework is executed upon the warp threads thus revealed. This is, strictly speaking, a sort of tapestry with the needle, just as, it was explained, tapestry itself may be described as a sort of embroidery with the shuttle. That will be clearly seen by reference to Illustration 1, which shows a fragment of ancient tapestry found in a Coptic tomb in Upper Egypt. In the lower portion of it the pattern appears light on dark. As a matter of fact, it was wrought in white and red upon a linen warp; but, as it happened, only the white threads were of linen, like the warp, the red were woollen, and in the course of fifteen hundred years or so much of this red wool has perished, leaving the white pattern intact on the warp, the threads of which are laid bare in the upper part of the illustration.

It is on just such upright lines of warp that all tapestry, properly so called, is worked--whether with the shuttle or with the needle makes no matter--and there is good reason, therefore, for the name of "tapestry stitch" to describe needlework upon the warp threads only of a material (usually linen) from which some of the weft threads have been withdrawn.

The only difference between true tapestry and drawn work, an example of which is here given, is, that the one is done on a warp that has not before been woven upon, and the other on a warp from which the weft threads have been drawn. The distinction, therefore, between tapestry and embroidery is, that, worked on a warp, as in Illustration 1, it is tapestry; worked on a mesh, as in Illustration 3, it is embroidery.

With regard, again, to lace. That is itself a web, independent of any groundwork or foundation to support it. But it is possible to work it over a silken or other surface; and there is a kind of embroidery which only floats on the surface of the material without penetrating it. A fragment of last century silk given in Illustration 35 shows plainly what is meant.

Embroidery is enrichment by means of the needle. To embroider is to work on something: a groundwork is presupposed. And we usually understand by embroidery, needlework in thread (it may be wool, cotton, linen, silk, gold, no matter what) upon a textile material, no matter what. In short, it is the decoration of a material woven in thread by means still of thread. It is thus the consistent way of ornamenting stuff--most consistent of all when one kind of thread is employed throughout, as in the case of linen upon linen, silk upon silk. The enrichment may, however, rightly be, and oftenest is, perhaps, in a material nobler than the stuff enriched, in silk upon linen, in wool upon cotton, in gold upon velvet. The advisability of working upon a precious stuff in thread less precious is open to question. It does not seem to have been satisfactorily done; but if it were only the background that was worked, and the pattern were so schemed as almost to cover it, so that, in fact, very little of the more beautiful texture was sacrificed, and you had still a sumptuous pattern on a less attractive background--why not? But then it would be because you wanted that less precious texture there. The excuse of economy would scarcely hold good.

In the case of a material in itself unsightly, the one course is to cover it entirely with stitching, as did the Persian and other untireable people of the East. But not they only. The famous Syon cope is so covered. Much of the work so done, all-over work that is to say, competes in effect with tapestry or other weaving; and its purpose was similar: it is a sort of amateur way of working your own stuff. But in character it is no more nearly related to the work of the loom than other needlework--it is still work on stuff. For all-over embroidery one chooses, naturally, a coarse canvas ground to work on; but it more often happens that one chooses canvas because one means to cover it, than that one works all over a ground because it is unpresentable.

Embroidery is merely an affair of stitching; and the first thing needful alike to the worker in it and the designer for it is, a thorough acquaintance with the stitches; not, of course, with every modification of a modification of a stitch which individual ingenuity may have devised--it would need the space of an encyclopædia to chronicle them all--but with the broadly marked varieties of stitch which have been employed to best purpose in ornament.

They are derived, naturally, from the stitches first used for quite practical and prosaic purposes--buttonhole stitch, for example, to keep the edges of the stuff from fraying; herring-bone, to strengthen and disguise a seam; darning, to make good a worn surface; and so on.

The difficulty of discussing them is greatly increased by the haphazard way in which they are commonly named. A stitch is called Greek, Spanish, Mexican, or what not, according to the country whence came the work in which some one first found it. Each names it after his or her individual discovery, or calls it, perhaps, vaguely Oriental; and so we have any number of names for the same stitch, names which to different people stand often for quite different stitches.