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They worked crewel bed hangings and cross-stitch and tent-stitch upholstery in the seventeenth century, and in still earlier times richly ornamented linens and other fabrics with flowers and scriptural subjects. Writing in reference to Queen Mary, the wife of William III, Sir Charles Sedley said: "When she rode in coach abroad She was always knotting thread."
Even the pitcher and basin were elaborately ornamented with peonies, the colour of the sampler in crewel work over the washstand; and on the bureau, between two crocheted mats of an intricate pattern, there was a pincushion in the shape of a monstrous tomato. Yes, it was all ready for them, she reflected, while she stood in the doorway and surveyed the results of her handiwork.
A solid filling in stem stitch should be worked in lines as illustrated in the squirrel in fig. 44. This little beast is taken from the curtain shown in Plate VII., and is a good example of the life and interest that the introduction of such things adds to embroideries. The stitches just described were largely used in crewel work.
The thing which was different and showed either a cropping-out of original thought or a bias toward the style of embroidery lately introduced by the famous school of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was an over-and-over stitch instead of the old crewel method.
If the pioneer was a natural copyist, she doubled and twisted it, to make it in the exact fashion of the English crewel; if adventurous and independent, she worked it single threaded. This yarn had all the pliant qualities necessary for embroidery, and was in fact uncolored crewel. Said to have been brought to Essex, Mass., in 1640, by Madam Susanna, wife of Sylvester Eveleth.
"So your son, the son of the man who has been my legal adviser and confidant and friend for thirty years, is going to join the Crewel and Tootings in their assaults on established decency and order! He's out for cheap political preferment, too, is he? By thunder! I thought that he had some such thing in his mind when he came in here and threw his pass in my face and took that Meader suit.
The thinner and looser quality needs to be worked in a frame, and with smooth silk not tightly twisted. With regard to the thread to work with: The coarser kinds of flax are best waxed before using. The crewel to be preferred is that not too tightly twisted.
"So your son, the son of the man who has been my legal adviser and confidant and friend for thirty years, is going to join the Crewel and Tootings in their assaults on established decency and order! He's out for cheap political preferment, too, is he? By thunder! I thought that he had some such thing in his mind when he came in here and threw his pass in my face and took that Meader suit.
She went to a wardrobe and stooping down took from a bottom drawer where long ago it had been stored away under everything else a shawl that had been her grandmother's; a brindled crewel shawl, sometimes worn by superannuated women of a former generation; a garment of hideousness.
By degrees, it all became mixed up in a delicious confusion. The rooks, and the bees, and the gardener made one continuous murmur to her, like the swishing of summer waves upon a sandy shore, or the moaning of soft winds in the tree tops. Then the crewel work slipped off her lap, and Lady Kynaston slept.
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