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O'Shaughnessy said they would make all its little clothes with every care, and they should tell of the love. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy is the daintiest needleworker I have ever seen; she was taught by the nuns at St. Catherine's in the "ould country." She was all patience with poor, unskilled Cora Jane, and the little outfit that was finally finished was dainty enough for a fairy.
Hours are frightfully long, the disabilities of the French needleworker being in many points the same as those of her English sister. In short, even skilled labor has many disabilities, the saving fact being that unskilled is in far less proportion than across the Channel, the present system of education including many forms of industrial training.
But, though the pattern be a veritable flower garden, the embroidress will not forget, to use the happy phrase of William Morris, that she is gardening with silks and gold threads. Let the needleworker study the work of the needle in preference to that of the brush; let her aim at what stuff and threads will give her, and give more readily than would something else.
There was a time, however, when the fabrics used in the making up of clothing were home-made, when the seamstress and the needleworker stitched and embroidered upon cloths spun if not actually woven by the housewife and her handmaidens.
The patient labour expended by the amateur artist, the needleworker, and the connoisseur of home art a generation or two ago has provided the collector to-day with an exceptionally interesting class of curio, for there is much to admire in amateur craftsmanship, and especially in the handiwork of the needlewoman and the weaver and decorator of so many beautiful textiles which have been preserved to us.
Edward the Confessor wore State robes which had been beautifully embroidered with gold by his accomplished wife, Edgitha. In the Royal Rolls of Edward III., in 1335, we find allusion to two vests of green velvet embroidered respectively with sea sirens and coats of arms. The tunics worn over armour offered great opportunities to the needleworker.
The pin poppet, as its name denotes, was, however, intended originally for the requirements of the early needleworker who at the dames' school won renown in those great achievements the samplers of old. These, however, do not exhaust the wood-carving curios of the workbox, but they may serve to remind collectors of what they may hope to discover in their hunt for household curios.
But the attempt to realise it commonly works out in one of two ways: either a good design is spoilt in the working for want of executive skill on the part of the designer, or good workmanship is spent on poor design, as good, perhaps, as one has any right to expect of a skilled needleworker.
Covers of pocket books and tobacco pouches were covered over with similar legends, like a delightful beadwork tobacco pouch in the Taunton Castle Museum, on which is the motto or sentiment, "LOVE ME FOR I AM THINE, 1631," wrought by a seventeenth-century needleworker.
Appliqué work is thought by some to be an inferior kind of embroidery, which it is not. It is not a lower but another kind of needlework, in which more is made of the stuff than of the stitching. In it the craft of the needleworker is not carried to its limit; but, on the other hand, it makes great demands upon design. You cannot begin by just throwing about sprays of natural flowers.
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