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.
[Illustration: 74. PART OF A DESIGN BY WALTER CRANE.]
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.
[Illustration: 75. SHADING IN CHAIN-STITCH.]
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 mediaeval 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.
[Illustration: 76. SHADING IN SHORT STITCHES.]
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.
[Illustration: 77. SHADING IN LONG-AND-SHORT AND SPLIT STITCHES.]
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.
[Illustration: 78. CHINESE CHAIN-STITCHING.]
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).
[Illustration: 79. FIFTEENTH CENTURY FIGURE WORK.]
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.
[Illustration: 80. SIXTEENTH CENTURY ITALIAN FIGURE WORK.]
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.
[Illustration: 81. CHINESE FIGURES.]
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.
[Illustration: 82. INFLUENCE OF STITCH-DIRECTION UPON COLOUR.]
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.
[Illustration: 83. MEANINGLESS DIRECTION OF STITCH.]
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.
[Illustration: 84. MORE EXPRESSIVE LINES OF STITCHING.]
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.
[Illustration: 85. SATIN AND PLUMAGE STITCHES.]
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.