Art in Needlework Part 1

Art in Needlework.

by Lewis F. Day and Mary Buckle.

PREFACE.

Embroidery may be looked at from more points of view than it would be possible in a book like this to take up seriously. Merely to hover round the subject and glance casually at it would serve no useful purpose. It may be as well, therefore, to define our standpoint: we look at the art from its practical side, not, of course, neglecting the artistic, for the practical use of embroidery is to be beautiful.

The custom has been, since woman learnt to kill time with the needle, to think of embroidery too much as an idle accomplishment. It is more than that. At the very least it is a handicraft: at the best it is an art.

This contention may be to take it rather seriously; but if one esteemed it less it would hardly be worth writing about, and the book, when written, would not be worth the attention of students of embroidery, needleworkers, and designers of needlework to whom it is addressed. It sets forth to show what decorative st.i.tching is, how it is done, and what it can do. It is ill.u.s.trated by samplers of st.i.tches; by diagrams, to explain the way st.i.tches are done; and by examples of old and modern work, to show the artistic application of the st.i.tches.

A feature in the book is the series of samplers designed to show not only what are the available st.i.tches, but the groups into which they naturally gather themselves, as well as the use to which they may be put: and the back of the sampler is given too: the reader has only to turn the page to see the other side of the st.i.tching--which to a needlewoman is often the more helpful. Lest that should not be enough, the st.i.tches are described in the text, and a marginal note shows at a glance where the description is given. This should be read needle and thread in hand--or skipped. Samplers and other examples of needlework are uniformly on a scale large enough to show the st.i.tch quite plainly.

The examples of old work ill.u.s.trate always, in the first place, some point of workmanship; still they are chosen with some view to their artistic interest.

In other respects Art is not overlooked; but it is Art in harness.

Design is discussed with reference to st.i.tch and stuff, and st.i.tch and stuff with reference to their use in ornament. It has been endeavoured also to show the effect needlework has had upon pattern, and the ways in which design is affected by the circ.u.mstance that it is to be embroidered.

The joint authorship of the work needs, perhaps, a word of explanation.

This is not just a man's book on a woman's subject. The scheme of it is mine, and I have written it, but with the co-operation throughout of Miss Mary Buckle. Our cla.s.sification of the st.i.tches is the result of many a conference between us. The description of the way the st.i.tches are worked, and so forth, is my rendering of her description, supplemented by practical demonstration with the needle. She has primed me with technical information, and been always at hand to keep me from technical error. With reference to design and art I speak for myself.

My thanks are due to the authorities at South Kensington for allowing us to handle the treasures of the national collection, and to photograph them for ill.u.s.tration; to Mrs. Walter Crane, Miss Mabel Keighley, and Miss C. P. Shrewsbury, for permission to reproduce their handiwork; to Miss Argles, Mrs. Buxton Morrish, Colonel Green, R.E., and Messrs.

Morris and Co., for the loan of work belonging to them; and to Miss Chart for working the cross-st.i.tch sampler.

I must also acknowledge the part my daughter has had in the production of this book: without her constant help it could never have been written.

LEWIS F. DAY.

_January 1st, 1900._

ART IN NEEDLEWORK.

EMBROIDERY AND St.i.tCHING.

Embroidery begins with the needle, and the needle (thorn, fish-bone, or whatever it may have been) came into use so soon as ever savages had the wit to sew skins and things together to keep themselves warm--modesty, we may take it, was an afterthought--and if the st.i.tches made any sort of pattern, as coa.r.s.e st.i.tching naturally would, that was _embroidery_.

The term is often vaguely used to denote all kinds of ornamental needlework, and some with which the needle has nothing to do. That is misleading; though it is true that embroidery does touch, on the one side, _tapestry_, which may be described as a kind of embroidery with the shuttle, and, on the other, _lace_, which is needlework pure and simple, construction "in the air" as the Italian name has it.

The term is used in common parlance to express any kind of superficial or superfluous ornamentation. A poet is said to embroider the truth.

But such metaphorical use of the word hints at the real nature of the work--embellishment, enrichment, _added_. If added, there must first of all be something it is added _to_--the material, that is to say, on which the needlework is done. In weaving (even tapestry weaving) the pattern is got by the inter-threading of warp and weft. In lace, too, it is got out of the threads which make the stuff. In embroidery it is got by threads worked _on_ a fabric first of all woven on the loom, or, it might be, netted.

There is inevitably a certain amount of overlapping of the crafts. For instance, take a form of embroidery common in all countries, Eastern, Hungarian, or nearer home, in which certain of the weft threads of the linen are _drawn out_, and the needlework is executed upon the warp threads thus revealed. This is, strictly speaking, a sort of tapestry with the needle, just as, it was explained, tapestry itself may be described as a sort of embroidery with the shuttle. That will be clearly seen by reference to Ill.u.s.tration 1, which shows a fragment of ancient tapestry found in a Coptic tomb in Upper Egypt. In the lower portion of it the pattern appears light on dark. As a matter of fact, it was wrought in white and red upon a linen warp; but, as it happened, only the white threads were of linen, like the warp, the red were woollen, and in the course of fifteen hundred years or so much of this red wool has perished, leaving the white pattern intact on the warp, the threads of which are laid bare in the upper part of the ill.u.s.tration.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 1. TAPESTRY, SHOWING WARP.]

It is on just such upright lines of warp that all tapestry, properly so called, is worked--whether with the shuttle or with the needle makes no matter--and there is good reason, therefore, for the name of "tapestry st.i.tch" to describe needlework upon the warp threads only of a material (usually linen) from which some of the weft threads have been _withdrawn_.

The only difference between true tapestry and drawn work, an example of which is here given, is, that the one is done on a warp that has not before been woven upon, and the other on a warp from which the weft threads have been _drawn_. The distinction, therefore, between tapestry and embroidery is, that, worked on a warp, as in Ill.u.s.tration 1, it is tapestry; worked on a mesh, as in Ill.u.s.tration 3, it is embroidery.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 2. DRAWN WORK.]

With regard, again, to lace. That is itself a web, independent of any groundwork or foundation to support it. But it is possible to work it _over_ a silken or other surface; and there is a kind of embroidery which only floats on the surface of the material without penetrating it.

A fragment of last century silk given in Ill.u.s.tration 35 shows plainly what is meant.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 3. St.i.tCHING ON A SQUARE MESH.]

Embroidery is enrichment by means of the needle. To embroider is to work _on_ something: a groundwork is presupposed. And we usually understand by embroidery, needlework in thread (it may be wool, cotton, linen, silk, gold, no matter what) upon a textile material, no matter what. In short, it is the decoration of a material woven in thread by means still of thread. It is thus _the_ consistent way of ornamenting stuff--most consistent of all when one kind of thread is employed throughout, as in the case of linen upon linen, silk upon silk. The enrichment may, however, rightly be, and oftenest is, perhaps, in a material n.o.bler than the stuff enriched, in silk upon linen, in wool upon cotton, in gold upon velvet. The advisability of working upon a precious stuff in thread _less_ precious is open to question. It does not seem to have been satisfactorily done; but if it were only the background that was worked, and the pattern were so schemed as almost to cover it, so that, in fact, very little of the more beautiful texture was sacrificed, and you had still a sumptuous pattern on a less attractive background--why not? But then it would be because you wanted that less precious texture there.

The excuse of economy would scarcely hold good.

In the case of a material in itself unsightly, the one course is to cover it entirely with st.i.tching, as did the Persian and other untireable people of the East. But not they only. The famous Syon cope is so covered. Much of the work so done, all-over work that is to say, competes in effect with tapestry or other weaving; and its purpose was similar: it is a sort of amateur way of working your own stuff. But in character it is no more nearly related to the work of the loom than other needlework--it is still work _on_ stuff. For all-over embroidery one chooses, naturally, a coa.r.s.e canvas ground to work on; but it more often happens that one chooses canvas because one means to cover it, than that one works all over a ground because it is unpresentable.

Embroidery is merely an affair of st.i.tching; and the first thing needful alike to the worker in it and the designer for it is, a thorough acquaintance with the st.i.tches; not, of course, with every modification of a modification of a st.i.tch which individual ingenuity may have devised--it would need the s.p.a.ce of an encyclopaedia to chronicle them all--but with the broadly marked varieties of st.i.tch which have been employed to best purpose in ornament.

They are derived, naturally, from the st.i.tches first used for quite practical and prosaic purposes--b.u.t.tonhole st.i.tch, for example, to keep the edges of the stuff from fraying; herring-bone, to strengthen and disguise a seam; darning, to make good a worn surface; and so on.

The difficulty of discussing them is greatly increased by the haphazard way in which they are commonly named. A st.i.tch is called Greek, Spanish, Mexican, or what not, according to the country whence came the work in which some one first found it. Each names it after his or her individual discovery, or calls it, perhaps, vaguely Oriental; and so we have any number of names for the same st.i.tch, names which to different people stand often for quite different st.i.tches.

When this confusion is complicated by the invention of a new name for every conceivable combination of thread-strokes, or for each slightest variation upon an old st.i.tch, and even for a st.i.tch worked from left to right instead of from right to left, or for a st.i.tch worked rather longer than usual, the task of reducing them to order seems almost hopeless.

Nor do the quasi-learned descriptions of old st.i.tches help us much. One reads about _opus_ this and _opus_ that, until one begins to wonder where, amidst all this parade of science, art comes in. But you have not far to go in the study of the authorities to discover that, though they may concur in using certain high-sounding Latin terms, they are not of the same mind as to their meaning. In one thing they all agree, foreign writers as well as English, and that is, as to the difficulty of identifying the st.i.tch referred to by ancient writers, themselves probably not acquainted with the _technique_ of st.i.tching, and as likely as not to call it by a wrong name. It is easier, for example, to talk of _Opus Anglicanum_ than to say precisely what it was, further than that it described work done in England; and for that we have the simple word--English. There is nothing to show that mediaeval English work contained st.i.tches not used elsewhere. The st.i.tches probably all come from the East.

Nomenclature, then, is a snare. Why not drop t.i.tles, and call st.i.tches by the plainest and least mistakable names? It will be seen, if we reduce them to their native simplicity, that they fall into fairly-marked groups, or families, which can be discussed each under its own head.

St.i.tches may be grouped in all manner of arbitrary ways--according to their provenance, according to their effect, according to their use, and so on. The most natural way of grouping them is according to their structure; not with regard to whence they came, or what they do, but according to what they are, the way they are worked. This, at all events, is no arbitrary cla.s.sification, and this is the plan it is proposed here to adopt.

The use of such cla.s.sification hardly needs pointing out.

A survey of the st.i.tches is the necessary preliminary, either to the design or to the execution of needlework. How else suit the design to the st.i.tch, the st.i.tch to the design? In order to do the one the artist must be quite at home among the st.i.tches; in order to do the other the embroidress must have sympathy enough with a design to choose the st.i.tch or st.i.tches which will best render it. An artist who thinks the working out of his sketch none of his business is no practical designer; the worker who thinks design a thing apart from her is only a worker.

This is not the moment to urge upon the needlewoman the study of design, but to urge upon the designer the study of st.i.tches. Nothing is more impractical than to make a design without realising the labour involved in its execution. Any one not in sympathy with st.i.tching may possibly design a beautiful piece of needlework, but no one will get all that is to be got out of the needle without knowing all about it. One must understand the ways in which work can be done in order to determine the way it shall in any particular case be done.

Certain st.i.tches answer certain purposes, and strictly only those. The designer must know which st.i.tch 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. The effective worker (designer or embroiderer) is the one who works with judgment--and you cannot judge unless you know. When it is remembered that the character of needlework, and by rights also the character of its design, depends upon the st.i.tch, there will be no occasion to insist further upon the necessity of a comprehensive survey of the st.i.tches.

A st.i.tch may be defined as the thread left on the surface of the cloth or what not, after each ply of the needle.

And the simple straightforward st.i.tches of this kind are not so many as one might suppose. They may be reduced indeed to a comparatively few types, as will be seen in the following chapters.