Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 18, 2025
Embroidery of this kind, however, hardly comes within the scope of practical work. Long, loose stitches want sewing down. Some compromise has to be made between art and beauty. The problem is to make the work strong enough without seriously disturbing its lustrous surface, and the solution of it is "laid-work," at which we arrive thus almost by necessity.
All-over couching may be used with advantage to renew the ground of embroidery so worn as to be unsightly; and is more lasting than laid-work for the purpose. It is laborious to do, but more satisfactory when done than remounting; and one or the other is a necessity sometimes. The effect of age is, up to a certain point, pleasing: rags are not.
Laid-work lends itself also to gradation of colour within certain limits the limits, that is to say, of the straight parallel lines in which the silk is laid: the direction of these is determined often by the lines of sewing which are to cross them. In any case the direction of the threads is here more than ever important. The sewing down must take lines and may form patterns.
You may qualify the colour of a stuff by lightly darning it with silk of another shade, and very subtle tints may be got by thus, as it were, veiling a coloured ground with silks of various hues. The necessity for something like what is called "LAID-WORK" is best shown by reference to satin-stitch. It was said in reference to it that satin-stitches should not be too long.
The diaper which represents the seeding of the flower is not, properly speaking, laid-work: single threads of white purse silk are there couched down with dark. The closer the cross lines the stronger the work, but the less lustrous the effect. Laid-work will not give anything like modelling, and it is not best suited to figure design except where it is quite flatly treated.
It involves no new stitch, but is only another way of using stitches already described. In laid-work, long tresses of silk, as William Morris called them, floss by preference, are thrown backwards and forwards across the face of the stuff, only just piercing it at the edges of the forms, and back again.
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.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking