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What the stitches are it is not easy to say. The mystery of many a stitch is to be unravelled only by literally picking out the threads, which one is not always at liberty to do, although, in the ardour of research, a keen embroidress will do it not without remorse in the case of beautiful work, but relentlessly all the same.
The embroidress entirely in sympathy with her materials will not want telling that the needle lends itself better to forms less fixed in their proportions than the human figure; the decorator will feel that there is about fine ornament a nobility of its own which stands in need of no pictorial support; the unbiassed critic will admit that figure design of any but the most severely decorative kind is really outside the scope of needle and thread; and that the desire to introduce it arises, not out of craftsmanlikeness, but out of an ambition which does not pay much regard to the conditions proper to needlework.
The designer must know which stitch answers which purpose, or he will in the first place waste the labour of the embroidress, and in the second miss his effect, which is to waste his own pains too.
A really appropriate and practical design for embroidery should be schemed not merely with a view to its execution with the needle, but with a view to its execution in a particular stitch or stitches and possibly by a particular embroidress. My reference to old work must not be taken to imply that design should be in imitation of what has been done, or that it should follow on those lines.
The distinction between the stitches so far described is plain enough, and an all-round embroidress learns to work them; but workers end in working their own way, modifying the stitch according to the work it is put to do, and produce results which it would be difficult to describe and pedantic to find fault with.
"You know Jane Eccles, one of my tenants in Bank Buildings the embroidress who adopted her sister's orphan child?" "I remember her name. She obtained, if I recollect rightly, a balance of wages for her due to the child's father, a mate, who died at sea. Well, what has befallen her?" "A terrible accusation has been preferred against her," rejoined Mrs.
The term split-stitch describes no new stitch, but a particular treatment to which a crewel or a satin stitch is submitted. The foregoing summaries of stitches are only by way of suggestion, something to set the embroidress thinking for herself. She must choose her own method; but it would help her, I think, to schedule the stitches for herself according to her own ways and wants.
There would be no occasion to insist upon this, were it not for the prevalence at the present moment of the idea that a worker, in whatever art or handicraft, is in artistic duty bound to design whatever she puts hand to do. That is a theory as false as it is unkind; let no embroidress be discouraged by it. Let her, unless she is inwardly impelled to invent, remain content to do good needlework.
In it the embroidress works with short, straight strokes of the needle, just as a pen draughtsman lays side by side the strokes of his pen; but, as she cannot, of course, leave off her stroke as the penman does, she has perforce to bring back the thread on the under side of the stuff, so that, if very carefully done, the work is the same on both sides.
The short satin and split stitches are not placed with the regularity so dear to the human machine, but they express the design perfectly. The embroiderer of that lion was an artist, perhaps the artist who designed it. "It might be a man's work," was the verdict of an embroidress. At all events it is the work of some one who could draw, and only a draughtsman or draughtswoman could have worked it.
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