Art in Needlework: A Book about Embroidery

By way of résumé, it may be added that for line work, more or less fine, crewel, chain, back and rope stitches, and couched cord are most suitable; crewel for long lines especially, and rope stitch for both curved and straight lines; for a boundary line, buttonhole is most emphatic; for broader lines, herring-bone, feather, and Oriental stitches answer better; ladder-stitch has the advantage of a firm edge on both sides of it. Satin and chain stitches, couching and laying, and basket work make good bands, but are not peculiarly adapted to that purpose.

For covering broad surfaces, crewel, chain, and satin stitches (including, of course, what are called long-and-short and plumage stitches) serve admirably, as does also darning and laid-work; and for gold thread, couching. French knots do best for small surfaces only. The stitches most useful for purposes of shading are mentioned later on.

No sort of classification is possible until the number of stitches has been reduced to the necessary few, and all fancy stitches struck out of the list. Enquiry should also be made into the title of each stitch to the name by which it is known; and the names themselves should be brought down to a minimum.

Reduce them to the fewest any needlewoman will allow, and they are still, if not too many, more than are logically required. Some of them, too, describe not stitches, but ways of using a stitch. The term long-and-short, it has already been explained (page 100), has less to do with a particular stitch than its proportion, and the term plumage-stitch refers more to the direction of the stitch than to the stitch itself. And so with other stitches. It is its oblique direction only which distinguishes stem-stitch from other short stitches of the kind. Running, again, amounts to no more than proportioning stitches to the mesh of the stuff, and taking several of them at one passing of the needle; and darning is but rows of running side by side. 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. The most suitable stitch may not suit every one. Individual preference and individual aptitude count for something. It is not a question of what is demonstrably best, but of what best suits you.

ONE STITCH, OR MANY?

The first thing to be settled with regard to the choice of stitch is whether to employ one stitch throughout, or a variety of stitches. Much will depend upon the effect desired. Good work has been done in either way; but one may safely say, in the first place, that it is as well not to introduce variety of stitch without good cause—there is safety in simplicity—and in the second, that stitches should be chosen to go together, in order that the work may look all of a piece. When the various stitches are well chosen, it is difficult at a glance to distinguish one from another.

A great variety of stitches in one piece of work is worrying, if not bewildering. It is as well not to use too many, to keep in the main to one or two, but not to be afraid of using a third, or a fourth, to do what the stitch or stitches mainly relied upon cannot do.

It tends also towards simplicity of effect if you use your stitches with some system, not haphazard, and in subordination one to the other; there must be no quarrelling among them for superiority. You should determine, that is to say, at the outset, which stitch shall be employed for filling, which for outline; or which for stalks, which for leaves, and which for flowers. Or, supposing you adopt one general stitch throughout, and introduce others, you should know why, and make up your mind to employ your second for emphasis of form, your third for contrast of texture, or for some other quite definite purpose.

It is not possible here to point out in detail the system on which the various examples illustrated have been worked; the reader must worry that out for herself. But one may just point out in passing how well the various stitches go together in some few instances.

Nothing could be more harmonious, for example, than the combination of knot, chain, and buttonhole stitches in Illustration 24; or of ladder, Oriental, herring-bone, and other stitches in Illustration 72. Again, in Illustration 85 the contrast between satin-stitch in the bird and couched cord for the clouding is most judicious, as is the knotting of the bird's crest. Laid floss contrasts, again, admirably with couched gold in Illustrations 47, 48, 49, and satin-stitch with couching in Illustration 91, where the gold is reserved mainly for outline, but on occasion serves to emphasise a detail.

Couched gold and surface satin-stitch are used together again in Illustration 58, each for its specific purpose. The harmony between appliqué work and couching or chain-stitch outline has been alluded to already.

A danger to be kept in view when working in one stitch only is, lest it should look like a woven textile, as it might if very evenly worked. Some kinds of embroidery seem hardly worth doing nowadays, because they suggest the loom. That may be a reason for some complexity of stitch, in which lurks that other danger of losing simplicity and breadth. The lace-like appearance of the needlework upon fine linen in Illustration 73, results chiefly from the extraordinary delicacy with which it is done, but it owes something also to the variety of stitch and of stitch-pattern employed in it.

OUTLINE.

The use of outline in embroidery hardly needs pointing out. It is often the obvious way of defining a pattern, as, for example, where there is only a faint difference in depth of tint between the pattern and its background; in appliqué work it is necessary to mask the joins; and it is by itself a delightful means of diapering a surface with not too obtrusive pattern.

Allusion to the stitches suitable to outline has been made already (see stitch-groups), as well as to the colour of outlining, à propos of appliqué. It is difficult to overrate the importance of this question of colour in the case of outline; but there are no rules to be laid down, except that a coloured outline is nearly always preferable to a black one. The Germans of the 16th century were given to indulging in black outlines, and you may see in their work how it hardened the effect, whereas a coloured outline may define without harshness. The Spaniards, on the other hand, realised the value of colour, and would, for example, outline gold and silver upon a dark green ground in red, with admirable effect. A double outline, for which there is often opportunity in bold work, may be turned to good account. Among the successful combinations which come to mind is an appliqué pattern in yellow and white upon dark green, outlined first with gold cord, and then, next the green, with a paler and brighter green. Another is a pattern chiefly in yellow upon purple, outlined first with yellow couched with gold, and next the ground with silver. In the case of couched cord or gold, the colour of the stitching counts also.

Stitches from the edge of a leaf or what not, inwards, alternately long and short, though they form an edge to the leaf, are not properly outlining. This is rather a stopping short of solid work than outlining, though it often goes by that name.

The first condition of a good outline stitch is that it should be, as it were, supple, so as to follow the flow of the form. At the same time it should be firm. Fancy stitches look fussy; and a spikey outline is worse than none at all.

There is absolutely no substantial ground for the theory that outlines should be worked in a stitch not used elsewhere in the work. On the contrary, it is a good rule not to introduce extra stitches into the work unless they give something which the stitches already employed will not give. The simplest way is always safest.

An outline affords a ready means of clearing up edges; but it should not be looked upon merely as a device for the disguise of slovenliness. Unless the colour scheme should necessitate an outline, an embroidress, sure of her skill, will often prefer not to outline her work, and to get even the drawing lines within the pattern, by VOIDING. She will leave, that is to say, a line of ground-stuff clear between the petals of her flowers, or what not; which line, by the way, should be narrower than it is meant to appear, as it looks always broader than it is. It is more difficult, it must be owned, thus to work along two sides of a line of ground-stuff than to work a single line of stitching, but it is within the compass of any skilled worker; and skilled workers have delighted in voiding even when their work was on a small scale necessitating fine lines of voiding (Illustrations 39 and 40).

In work on a bold scale there is no difficulty about it; and it would be remarkable that it is so seldom used, were it not that the uncertain worker likes to have a chance of clearing up ragged edges, and that voiding implies a broader and more dignified treatment of design than it is the fashion to affect.

SHADING.

One arrives inevitably at gradation of colour in embroidery; the question is how best to get it. But, before mentioning the ways in which it may be got, it seems necessary to protest that shading is not a matter of course. Perfectly beautiful work may be done, and ought more often to be done, in merely flat needlework; the gloss of the silk and its varying colour as it catches the light according to the direction of the stitching, are quite enough to prevent a monotonously flat effect.

Still, embroidery affords such scope for gradation of colour, not, practically, to be got by any process of weaving, that a colourist may well revel in the delights of colour which silks of various dyes allow. And so long as colour is the end in view there is not much danger that a colourist will go wrong.

The use of shading in embroidery is rather to get gradation of colour than relief of form. As to the stitch to be employed, that is partly a personal matter, partly a question of what is to be done. The stitch must be adapted to the kind of shading, or the shading must be designed to suit the stitch. It makes all the difference in the world, whether your shading is deliberately done, or whether one shade is meant to merge into another. In the best work it is always done with decision. There is nothing vague or casual, for example, about the shading of Mr. Crane's animals on Illustration 74. Everywhere the shading is drawn, either in lines or as a sharply defined mass. Given a drawing in which the shadows are properly planned and crisply drawn like that, and you may use what stitch you please.

The more natural way of shading is to let the stitches follow the lines of the drawing, and so make use of them to express form, as with the strokes of the pen or pencil upon paper. Thus, in mediæval figurework prior to the 15th century, the faces were usually done in split stitch, worked concentrically from the middle of the cheek outward, and so suggesting the roundness of the face (Illustration 87). But just as there is a system of shading according to which the draughtsman makes all his strokes in one direction (slanting usually), so the embroidress may, if she prefer, take her stitches all one way; and in the 15th and 16th centuries the fashion was to work flesh in short-satin stitches always in the vertical direction (Illustration 79). The term "long-and-short-stitch" is frequently used by way of describing the stitch. It does not, as I have said, help us much. The stitches are in the first place only satin-stitches worked not in even rows, as in Illustration 40, but so that there is no line of demarcation between one row and another. And this, in the case of gradated colour, makes the shading softer. The words long-and-short apply strictly only to the outer row of stitches. You begin, that is to say, with alternately long and short stitches. If you work after that with stitches of equal length, they necessarily alternate or dovetail. If the form to be worked necessitates radiation in the stitching, there results a texture something like the feathering of a bird's breast (Illustration 85), whence the name plumage-stitch, another term describing not so much a stitch as the use of a stitch.

No matter what the stitch, one must be able to draw in order to express form: it is rather more difficult to draw with a needle than with a pen, that is all. True, the designer may do that for you, and make such a workmanlike drawing that there is no mistaking it; but it takes a skilled draughtsman to do it.

In flattish decorative work, where the drawing is in firm lines, as in Illustration 87, the task of the embroidress is relatively easy—there is not much shading, for example, in the drapery of King Abias, and the vine leaves are merely worked with yellower green towards the edges. Even where there is strong shading, a draughtsman who knows his business may make shading easy by drawing his shadows with firm outlines. The taste of the artist who designed the roses in Illustration 75 is too pictorial to win the heart of any one with a leaning towards severity of design; too much relief is sought; but the way he has got it shows the master workman; he has deliberately laid in flat washes of colour, each with its precise outline, which the worker had only to follow faithfully with flat tambour work. A design like that, given the working drawing, asks little of the worker beyond patient care: of the designer it asks considerable knowledge.

A yet more pictorial effect is produced in much the same way, this time in satin stitch, in Illustration 76. The artist has for the most part drawn his shadows with crisp brush strokes, which the worker had no difficulty in following; but there is some rounding of the birds' bodies which a merely mechanical worker could not have got. In fact, there are indications that this is the work more of a painter than of an embroidress, who would have acknowledged by her stitches the feathering of the birds' necks as well as their roundness.

You can embroider, of course, without knowing much about drawing; but you cannot go far in the direction of shading (not drawn for you, or only vaguely drawn) without the appreciation of form which comes only of knowing and understanding. There is evidence of such knowledge and understanding in the working of the lion in Illustration 77. That is not a triumph of even stitching; but it is a triumph of drawing with the needle. 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.

This is not said wholly in praise of shading. Embroidery ought, for the most part, to do very well without it. The point to insist upon is that, if shading is employed at all, it should mean something, and not be mere fumbling after form.

The charm of shading in embroidery is not the roundness of form which you get, but the gradation of colour which it gives. This may be very delicately and subtly got by split-stitch, which renders that stitch so valuable in the rendering of flesh tints. But the blending of colour into colour which is universally admired is not quite so admirable as people think. One may easily employ too many shades of colour, easily merge them too imperceptibly one into the other, getting only unmeaning softness. An artist prefers to see few shades employed, and those chosen with judgment and placed with deliberate intention. If they mean something, there is no harm in letting it be seen where they meet: broad masses give breadth: vagueness generally means ignorance. That is, perhaps, why one dislikes it, and why it is so common.

FIGURE EMBROIDERY.

To an accomplished needlewoman embroidery offers every scope for art, short of the pictorial; and the artist is not only justified in lavishing work upon it, but often bound to do so, more especially when it comes to working with materials in themselves rich and costly. A beautiful material, if you are to better it (and if not why work upon it at all?), must be beautifully worked. Costly material is worth precious work; and there should be by rights a preciousness about the needlework employed upon it, preciousness of design and of execution. To put the value into the material is mere vulgarity.

It seems to an artist almost to go without saying, that the labour on work claiming to be art should be in excess of the value of the stuff which goes to make it. What we really prize is the hand work and the brain work of the artist; and the more precious the stuff he employs, the more strictly he is bound to make artistic use of it. I do not mean by that pictorial use. You can get, no doubt, with the needle effects more or less pictorial—most often less; but, when got, they are usually at the best rather inferior to the picture of which they are a copy.

Work done should be better always than the design for it, which was a project only, a promise. The fulfilment should be something more. A design of which the promise is not likely to be fulfilled in the working-out is, for its purpose, ill-designed. To say that you would rather have the drawing from which it was done (and that is what you feel about "needle pictures") is most severely to condemn either the designer or the worker, or perhaps both. Only a competent figure painter, for example, can be trusted to render flesh with the needle; her success is in proportion to her skill with the implement, but in any case less than what might be achieved in painting: then why choose the needle?

Admitting that a painter who by choice or chance takes to the needle may paint with it satisfactorily enough, that does not go to prove the needle a likely tool to paint with. It is anything but that. There was never a greater mistake than to suppose, as some do who should know better, that, to raise embroidery to the rank of art, figure work is necessary. The truth is that only by rare exception does embroidered figure work rise to the rank of art: the rule is that it is degraded, the more surely as it aims at picture. And that is why, for all that has been done in the way of wonderful picture work, say by the Italians and the Flemings of the Early Renaissance, the pictorial is not the form of design best suited to embroidery.

Needlework, like any other decorative craft, demands treatment in the design, and the human figure submits less humbly to the necessary modification than other forms of life. Animals, for instance, lend themselves more readily to it, and so do birds; fur and feathers are obviously translatable into stitches. Leaves and flowers accommodate themselves perhaps better still; but each is best when it is only the motive, not the model, of design. If only, then, on account of the greater difficulty in treating it, the figure is not the form of design most likely to do credit to the needle, and it is absurd to argue that, figure work being the noblest form of design, therefore the noblest form of embroidery must include it.

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. Those conditions should be a law to the needlewoman. What though she be a painter too? She is painting now with a needle. It is futile to attempt what could be better done with a brush. She should be content to work the way of the needle. Common sense asks that much at least of loyalty to the art she has chosen to adopt.

Wonderful and almost incredibly pictorial effects have been obtained with the needle; but that does not mean to say it was a wise thing to attempt them. The result may be astonishing and yet not worth the pains. The pains of flesh-painting with the needle (if not the impossibility of it for all practical purposes) is confessed by the habit which arose of actually painting the flesh in water colour upon satin. Paint on satin, if you like. There may be occasions when there is no time to stitch, and it is necessary for some ceremonial and more or less theatric purpose to paint what had better have been worked. The more frankly such work acknowledges its temporary and makeshift character the better. Scene painting is art, until you are asked to take it for landscape painting. Anyway, the mixture of painting and embroidery is not to be endured; and it is a poor-spirited embroidress who will thus confess her weakness and call on painting to help her out. It does not even do that, it fails absolutely to produce the desired effect. The painting quarrels with the stitching, and there is after all no semblance of that unity which is the very essence of picture.

An instance of painted flesh occurs upon Illustration 91. Can any one, in view of the bordering to the picture, doubt that the worker had much better have kept to what she could do, and do perfectly, ornament? An example, on the other hand, of what may be done in the way of expressing action in the fewest and simplest chain stitches (if only you know the form you want to represent and can manage your needle) is given in the wee figures in the landscape above (78).

In speaking of the necessary treatment of the human figure (as of other natural form) in needlework, it is not meant to contend that there is one only way of treating it consistently, or that there are no more than two or three ways. There are various ways, some no doubt yet to be devised, but they must be the ways of the needle. The flesh, of course, is the main difficulty. A Gothic practice, and not the least happy one, was to show the flesh in the naked linen of the ground, only just working the outlines of the features in black or brown. Another way was to work the face in split stitch, as already explained, and over that the markings of the features, the fine lines in short satin-stitches, the broader in split-stitch, as shown in the figure of King Abias in Illustration 87.

The general treatment of the figure there is of course in the manner of the 14th century, better suited, from its severe simplicity, for rendering in needlework than later and more pictorial forms of composition. That needlework can, however, in capable hands, go farther than that is shown in Illustration 79, a rather threadbare specimen of 15th century work, in which the character of the man's face is admirably expressed. It is first worked in short, straight stitches, all of white, and over that the drawing lines are worked in brown. The artist gets her effect in the simplest possible way, and apparently with the greatest ease.

More like painting is the head in Illustration 80, worked in short stitches of various shades, which give something of the colour as well as the modelling of flesh. This is a triumph in its way. It goes about as far as the needle can go, and further than, except under rare conditions, it ought to go. But it may do that and yet be needlework.

Equally wonderful in their miniature way are the faces of the little people on Illustration 81, about the size of your finger nail. They are worked in solid satin-stitch, and the two layers of silk (back and front) give a substance fairly thick but at the same time yielding, so that when the stitches for the mouth and eyes are sewn tightly over it they sink in, and, as it were, push up the floss between and give relief. The nose is worked in extra satin-stitch over the other, and the slight depression at the end of the stitch gives lines of drawing. This trenches upon modelling, but, on such a minute scale, does not amount to very pronounced departure from the flat. The method employed does not lend itself to larger work.

The last word on the question as to what one may do with the needle is, that you may do what you can; but it is best to seek by means of it what it can best do, and always to make much of the texture of silk, and of the quality of pure and lustrous colour which it gives—in short, to work with your materials.

THE DIRECTION OF THE STITCH.

The effect of any stitch is vastly varied, according to the use made of it. Satin-stitch, it was shown (38), worked in twisted silk, ceases to have any appearance of satin; and it makes all the difference whether the stitches are long or short, close together or wide apart. More important than all is the direction of the stitch. By that alone you can recognise the artist in needlework.

The DIRECTION of the stitch deserves consideration from two points of view—that of colour and that of form. First as to colour. It is not sufficiently realised that every alteration in the direction of the stitch means variety of tone, if not of tint. Take a feather in your hand, and turn it about, so that now one side of the quill now the other catches the light; or notice the alternate stripes of brighter and greyer green on a fresh-trimmed lawn, where the roller has bent the blades of grass first this way and then that. So it is with the colour of silken stitches. The pattern opposite (82) looks as if it had been embroidered in two shades of silk; in the work itself it has still more that appearance; but it is all in one shade of brownish gold: the difference which you see is merely the effect of light upon it. The horizontal stitches, as it happens, catch the light; the vertical ones do not. Had the light come from a different point, the effect might have been reversed. If there had been diagonal stitches from right to left, they would have given a third tint; and, if there had been others from left to right, they would have given a fourth.

Suppose a pattern in which the leaves were worked horizontally, the flowers vertically, and the stalks in the direction of their growth, all in one stitch and in one colour, there would be a very appreciable difference in tone between leaves, flowers, and stalks. In gold, the difference would be yet more striking. And that is one reason why gold backgrounds are worked in diapers; not so much for the sake of pattern as to get variety of broken tint.

In the famous Syon Cope the direction of the stitching is frankly independent of the design. That is to say, that, while the pattern radiates naturally from the neck, the stitches do not follow suit, but go all one way—the way of the stuff. This, though rather a brutal solution of the difficulty, saves all afterthought as to what direction the stitches shall take; but it has very much the effect of weaving. The embroiderer of the 13th century was not afraid of that (aimed at it, perhaps?), and was, apparently, afraid of letting go the leading strings of warp and weft.

When stitches follow the direction of the form embroidered, accommodating themselves to it, all manner of subtle change of tone results. You get, not only variety of colour, but more than a suggestion of form.

That is the second point to be considered.

The direction taken by the stitch always helps to explain the drawing; or, if the needlewoman cannot draw, to show that she cannot—as, for example, in the tulip herewith (83). A less intelligent management of the stitch it would be hard to find. The needlestrokes, far from helping in the very slightest degree to explain the folding over of the petals, directly contradict the drawing. The flower might almost have been designed to show how not to do it; but it is a piece of old work, quite seriously done, only without knowing. The embroidress is free, of course, to work her stitches in a direction which does not express form at all, so as to give a flat tint, in which is no hint of modelling; but the intention is here quite obviously naturalistic. The rendering below (84) shows the direction the stitches should have taken. The turn-over of the petals is even there not very clearly expressed, but that is the fault of the drawing (very much on a par with the workmanship), from which it would not have been fair to depart.

A more clever fulfilment of the naturalistic intention is to be seen in Illustration 76. The drawing of the doves is in the rather loose manner of the period of Marie Antoinette; but the treatment of the stitch is clever in its way—the way, as I have said, rather of painting than of embroidery, giving as it does the roundness of the birds' bodies but no hint of actual feathering, such as you find in the bird in Illustration 85. There, every stitch helps to explain the feathering. By a discreet use of what I must persist in calling the same stitch (that is, satin-stitch and the variety of it called plumage-stitch) the embroiderer has rendered with equal perfection the sweep of the broad wing feathers and the fluffy feathering of the breast. It is by means of the direction of the stitch, too, that the drawing of the neck is so perfectly rendered.

The direction of the stitch is varied to some purpose in the head in Illustration 80, where the flesh is all in straight upright stitches, whilst the hair is stitched in the direction of its growth.

The five petals on the satin-stitch sampler (Illustration 36)—to descend from the masterly to the elementary—show something of the difference it makes in what direction the stitch is worked. It matters more, of course, in some stitches than in others; but in most cases the direction of the stitch suggests form, and needs accordingly to be considered.

It scarcely needs further pointing out how the direction of the stitch may help to explain the construction of the form, as in the case of leaves, for example, where the veining may be suggested; or of stalks, where the fibre may be indicated. There is no law as to the direction of stitch, except that it should be considered. You may follow the direction of the forms, you may cross them, you may deliberately lay your stitches in the most arbitrary manner; but, whatever you do, you must do it with intelligent purpose. An artist or a workwoman can tell at once whether your stitch was laid just so because you meant it or because you knew no better.

Having laid your stitches deliberately, it is best to leave them, and not to work over them with other stitching. Stitching over stitching was resorted to whenever elaboration was the fashion; but the simpler and more direct method is the best. The way the veins are laid in cord over the satin-stitch in the lotus leaves in Illustration 40 is the one fault to be found with an all but perfect piece of work.

The stitching over the laid silver mid-rib in Illustration 92 is better judged. 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. Unless, in such a case, the first stitching is of such compact character as to want no strengthening, it amounts almost to a sin against practicality not to take advantage of the second stitching to make it firmer.

CHURCH WORK.

It is customary to draw a distinction between church, or ecclesiastical as it is called, and other embroidery; but it is a distinction without much difference. Certain kinds of work are doubtless best suited to the dignity of church ceremonial, and to the breadth of architectural decoration; accordingly, certain processes of work have been adopted for church purposes, and are taken as a matter of course—too much as a matter of course. The fact is, work precisely like that employed on vestments and the like (Illustration 86) was used also for the caparison of horses and other equally profane purposes.

Practical considerations, alike of ceremonial and decoration, make it imperative that church work should be effective: religious sentiment insists that it should be of the best and richest, unsparingly, and even lavishly given; common sense dictates that the loving labour spent upon it should not be lost. And these and other such considerations involve methods of work which, by constant use for church purposes, have come to be classed as ecclesiastical embroidery. But there is no consecrated stitch, no stitch exclusively belonging to the church, none probably invented by it. For embroidery is a primitive art—clothes were stitched before ever churches were furnished; and European methods of embroidery are all derived from Oriental work, which found its way westwards at a very early date. Phrygia (sometimes credited with the invention of embroidery) passed it on to Greece, and Greece to Italy, the gate of European art.

Christianity produced new forms of design, but not new ways of work. The methods adopted in the nunneries of the West were those which had already been perfected in the harems of the East.

Embroidery for the church must naturally take count of the church, both as a building and as a place of worship; but, as apart from all other needlework, there is no such thing as church embroidery; and the branding of one very dull kind of thing with that name is in the interest neither of art nor of the church, but only of business. "Ecclesiastical art" is just a trade-term, covering a vast amount of soulless work. There is in the nature of things no reason why art should be reserved for secular purposes, and only manufacture be encouraged by the clergy. The test of fitness for religious service is religious feeling; but that is hardly more likely to be found in the output of the church furnisher (trade patterns overladen with stock symbols), than in the stitching of the devout needlewoman, working for the glory of God, in whose service of old the best work was done.

Many of the examples of old work given on these pages are from church vestments, altar furniture, and the like; information on that point will be found in the descriptive index of illustrations at the beginning of the book; but they are here discussed from the point of view of workmanship, with as little reference as possible to religious or other use: that is a question apart from art.

The distinguishing features of church work should be, in the first place, its devotional spirit, and, in the second, its consummate workmanship. In it, indeed, we might expect to find work beyond the rivalry of trade controlled by conditions of time and money. Even then it would be but the more perfect expression of the same art which in its degree ennobled things of civic and domestic use.

Church embroidery, as usually practised in these days, is not only the most frigid and rigid in design, but the hardest and most mechanical in execution—which last arises in great part from the way it is done. It is not embroidered straight upon the silk or velvet which forms the groundwork of the design, but separately on linen. The pattern thus worked is cut out, and either pasted straight on to the ground-stuff, or, if the linen is at all loose, first mounted on thin paper and then cut out and pasted on to the velvet, where it is kept under pressure until it is dry. In either case the edges have eventually to be worked over.

This habit of working on linen or canvas and applying the embroidery ready worked on to the richer stuff, though early used on occasion, does not seem to have been common until a period when manufacture generally usurped the place of art. The work in Illustration 87 was done directly on to the silk. In the latter half of the 18th century there was a regular trade in embroidery ready to sew on, by which means purveyors could turn out in a day or two what would have taken months to embroider.

Even if it had been the invariable mediæval practice to work sprays or what not upon canvas and apply them bodily to the velvet, that would not make it the more workmanlike or straightforward way of working. If needle stitches are the ostensible means of getting an effect upon a stuff, it seems only right they should be stitched upon that stuff. To work the details apart and then clap them on to it, stands to embroidery very much in the relation of hedge-carpentering to joinery. Nor is it usually happy in result. Occasionally, as in the case of Miss C. P. Shrewsbury's vine-leaf pattern (Illustration 88), it disarms criticism. More often it looks stuck-on. A way of avoiding that look is to add judicious after-stitching on the stuff itself; and this must not be confined to the sewing on or outlining merely, but allowed to wander playfully over the field, so as to draw your eye away from the margin of the applied patch, and lead you to infer that, some of the needlework being obviously done on the velvet, all of it is. But to disguise in this way the line of demarcation, even if you succeed in doing it, is at best the art of prevarication.