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Updated: July 1, 2025
By way of résumé, it may be added that for line work, more or less fine, crewel, chain, back and rope stitches, and couched cord are most suitable; crewel for long lines especially, and rope stitch for both curved and straight lines; for a boundary line, buttonhole is most emphatic; for broader lines, herring-bone, feather, and Oriental stitches answer better; ladder-stitch has the advantage of a firm edge on both sides of it.
This brick house, magnificent by comparison with other dwellings in this country, seemed to us, on nearer acquaintance, only a thin, crude shell of a house, half unfinished, with bare rooms, the plastering already discolored. In point of furnishing it had not yet reached the "God bless our Home" stage in crewel.
Not crewel work, not church embroidery, not anything which would admit of the use of modern art colors, but genuine, old-fashioned worsted work. Mrs. Cameron delighted in the flaring scarlets, pinks, greens, blues, and mauves of thirty years ago. She admired with all her soul the hard, staring flowers which these colors produced. They looked, she said, substantial and durable.
If the cabinetry of New England is a digression, it is perhaps excusable on the ground of its close connection with the crewel work of New England, of which we are treating, and to which we shall have something of a sense of novelty in returning, since at least the complexion of our colonial embroidery has experienced a change.
This breastpin, with the hair of the three heads of the house intertwined, was the only symbol in all the world of their harmony or union. Around her shoulders she had thrown, according to her wont, a home-knit crewel shawl of black and purple. Her hair, thick and straight and pasted down over the temples of her small head, looked like a long-used wig.
We can easily believe that stores of linen and precious china, as well as the small wheels for the spinning of the flax, could not be denied to the devoted women who chose to share the hard fortunes of their Pilgrim husbands and fathers. It is probable that in one form or another possessions of crewel embroidery were transported with them.
For work in the hand, CREWEL-STITCH is perhaps, on the whole, the easiest and most useful of stitches; whence it comes that people sometimes vaguely call all embroidery crewel work; though, as a matter of fact, the stitch properly so called was never very commonly employed, even when the work was done in "crewel," the double thread of twisted wool from which it takes its name.
This was the celebrated crewel work, of which there is no fault to be found in the execution and design of its higher grades, but which, like all fancy work that becomes the rage and is cheapened and multiplied without any regard to reason, degenerated to the most impossible designs and the worst execution attainable.
This brick house, magnificent by comparison with other dwellings in this country, seemed to us, on nearer acquaintance, only a thin, crude shell of a house, half unfinished, with bare rooms, the plastering already discolored. In point of furnishing it had not yet reached the "God bless our Home" stage in crewel.
In solid crewel the stitches should quite cover the ground without pressing too closely one against the other. It does not seem that Englishwomen of the 17th century were ever very faithful to the stitch we know by the name of crewel. Old examples of work done entirely in crewel-stitch, as distinguished from what is called crewel work, are seldom if ever to be met with.
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