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Updated: August 16, 2024
In working in the hand, you take a rather shorter stitch back than in crewel-stitch, piercing with the needle the thread which is to form the next stitch. In working on a frame, you bring your needle always up through the last-made satin-stitch in order to start the next. Whichever way it is done, split-stitch is often difficult to distinguish without minute examination from chain-stitch.
The stitch occurs in most of the old English embroidery in wool; but it is astonishing, when one comes to examine the quilts and curtains of a couple of hundred years or so ago, how very little of the woolwork on them is in crewel-stitch. And that appears to have been the prevailing practice to use crewel-stitch for stems and outlines, and for little else but the very simplest forms.
To work the embroidery it is necessary to line the Tussore with fine unbleached muslin, and to work with Tussore silk and Japanese gold thread. The Tussore silk costs 1d. the skein, and is dyed in every shade of Oriental colouring. Three to four shades of a colour are used to work in a flower, and two shades of green for the leaves. The stitch is crewel-stitch worked very close.
The way to work solid crewel-stitch will be best explained by an instance. Suppose a leaf to be worked. You begin by outlining it; if it is a wide leaf, you further work a centre line where the main rib would be, and then work row within row of stitches until the space is filled.
The only piece of embroidery entirely in crewel-stitch which I could find for illustration is worked, as it happens, in silk; nor was the worker aware that in so working she was doing anything out of the common. CHAIN and TAMBOUR STITCH are in effect practically the same, and present the same rather granular surface.
One of the first things she did on her arrival at the school was to present Kitty Sharston with a white work-bag embroidered with cherries in crewel-stitch, and with a cherry-colored ribbon running through it. She had spent from five to six shillings on the bag, and had denied herself a little to purchase it. Kitty received it with rapture, and used to bring it into Mrs.
If you proceed in the same way your next stitch will be full length. In so doing the thread is apt to untwist itself, and wants constantly re-twisting. The stitch is useful for single lines and for outlining solid work. The muddled effect of much crewel work is due to the confusion of this stitch with crewel-stitch proper. In effect it resembles rope-stitch, but it is more simply worked.
Instance B, however, is worked in the hand, and D in a frame from which very fact it follows that the worker is naturally disposed to regard B as akin to crewel-stitch and D to satin-stitch, between which two stitches "dovetail" may be regarded as the connecting link. The petals at B are worked in the method illustrated in the diagram overleaf.
Happily it was kept in the way it should go by a strict adherence to traditional pattern, which for the time being seems to have gone completely out of fashion. One would fancy at first sight that the work was almost entirely in crewel-stitch. As a matter of fact, there is little which answers to the name, as an examination of the back of the work shows plainly enough.
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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