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.
[Illustration: 86. RENAISSANCE CHURCH WORK.]
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 mediaeval 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.
[Illustration: 87. GOTHIC CHURCH WORK.]
No doubt it is difficult to work upon velvet. The stuff is not very
sympathetic, and the stitching has a way of sinking into the pile, and
being, as it were, drowned in it. But the trailing spirals of
split-stitch which play about the applied spots in many a mediaeval altar
cloth hold their own quite well enough to show that silk can be worked
straight on to the velvet.
That gold may be equally well worked straight on to velvet may be seen
in any Indian saddle cloth. Heavy work of this kind may be rather man's
work than woman's; but that is not the point. The question is, how to
get the best results; and the answer is, by working on the stuff.
It may be argued that in this way you cannot get very high relief; but
the occasions for high relief are, at the best, rare. If you want actual
modelling, as in the Spanish work referred to in a previous chapter,
that must, of course, be worked separately, built up, as it were, upon
the canvas and worked over. And there is no reason why it should not,
for in no case does it appear to be stitching. In fact, it aims
deliberately at the effect of chased and beaten metal.
[Illustration: 88. MODERN CHURCH WORK BY MISS SHREWSBURY.]
Heavy applique of any kind affects, of course, not only the thickness
but the flexibility of the material thus enriched--an important
consideration if it is meant to hang in folds.
A PLEA FOR SIMPLICITY.
The simplest patterns are by no means the least beautiful. It is too
much the fashion to underrate the artistic value of the less pretentious
forms of needlework, and especially of flat ornament, which
has, nevertheless, its own very important place in decoration. As for
geometric pattern, that is quite beneath consideration--it is so
mechanical! Mechanical is a word as easily spoken as another; but if
needlework is mechanical, that is more often the fault of the
needlewoman than of the mechanism she employs. The Orientals, who
indulged so freely in geometric device, were the least mechanical of
workers. It is our rigid way of working it which robs geometric ornament
of its charm. The needleworker has less than ever occasion to be afraid
of geometric pattern; for it is peculiarly difficult to get in it that
appearance of rule-and-compass-work which makes ornament so dull.
The one real objection to geometric pattern is that it is nowadays so
cheaply and so mechanically got by _weaving_ that, however freely it may
be rendered, there is a danger of its suggesting mechanical production,
which embroidery emphatically ought not to do. There is a similar
objection nowadays to some stitches, such, for example, as chain-stitch
and back-stitch, which suggest the sewing-machine.
Embroidery does not to-day take quite the place it once did. It was
used, for example, by the early Coptic Christians to supplement
tapestry. That is to say, what they could not weave they stitched; it
was only to get more delicate detail than their tapestry loom would
allow, that they had recourse to the needle. Needlework was, in fact, an
adjunct to weaving. Later, in mediaeval times, the Germans of Cologne,
for their church vestments and the like, wove what they could, and
enriched their woven figures with embroidery.
Again, a great deal of Oriental embroidery, and of peasant work
everywhere, is merely the result of circumstances. Where money is scarce
and time is of no account, it answers a woman's purpose to do for
herself with her needle what might in some respects be even better done
on the loom. Her preference for handwork is not that it has artistic
possibilities, but that it costs her less. She would in many cases
prefer the more mechanically produced fabric, if she could get it at the
same price. We do not find that Orientals reject the productions of the
power-loom--which they would do if they had the artistic instincts with
which we credit them.
[Illustration: 89. SIMPLE STITCHING ON LINEN.]
It results from our conditions of to-day that there are some kinds of
needlework we admire, which yet are not worth our doing, such, for
example, as the all-over work, which does not amount to more than simple
diaper, and which really is not so much embroidering on a textile as
converting it into one of another kind. Glorified instances of this kind
of work occur in the shawl work of Cashmere, and in those beautiful bits
of Persian stitching which remind one of carpet-work in miniature, if
they are not in fact related to carpet-weaving.
Embroidery was at one time the readiest, and practically the only, means
of getting enrichment of certain kinds. To-day we get machine
embroidery. As machinery is perfected, and learns to do what formerly
could be done only by the needle, hand-workers get pushed aside and fall
out of work. Their chance is, in keeping always in advance of the
machine. There is this hope for them, that the monotony of machine-made
things produces in the end a reaction in favour of handwork--provided
always it gives us something which manufacture cannot. Possibly also
there is scope for amateurs and home-artists in that combination of
embroidery and hand-weaving with which the power-loom, though it has
superseded it, does not enter into competition.
[Illustration: 90. SIMPLE COUCHING ON LINEN.]
It is not so much for geometric ornament as for simple pattern that I
here make my plea, for that reticent work of which so much was at one
time done in this country--mere back-stitching, for example, or what
looks like it, in yellow silk upon white linen; or the modest diaper,
archaic, if you like, but inevitably characteristic, in which the
naivete of the sampler seems always to linger; or again, the admirably
simple work in Illustration 89. This last does not show so delicately in
the photographic reproduction as it should, because, being in grey and
yellow on white linen, the relative value of the two shades of colour is
lost in the process. In the original the broader yellow bands are much
more in tone with the ground, and do not assert themselves so much. Such
as it is, only an artist could have designed that border-work, and any
neat-handed woman could have embroidered it.
Think again of the delicate work in white on white, too familiar to need
illustration, which makes no loud claim to be art, but is content to be
beautiful! Is that to be a thing altogether of the past now that we have
Art Needlework? Art needlework! It has helped put an end to the patience
of the modern worker, and to inspire her too often with ambitions quite
beyond her powers of fulfilment.
What one misses in the work of the present day is that reticent and
unpretending stitchery, which, thinking to be no more than a labour of
loving patience, is really a work of art, better deserving the title
than a flaunting floral quilt which goes by the name of "art
needlework"--designed apparently to worry the eye by day and to give bad
dreams by night to whoever may have the misfortune to sleep under it. Is
anyone nowadays modest enough to do work such as the couching in outline
in Illustration 90? Yet what distinction there is about it!
EMBROIDERY DESIGN.
Perfect art results only when designer and worker are entirely in
sympathy, when the designer knows quite what the worker can do with her
materials, and when the worker not only understands what the designer
meant, but feels with him. And it is the test of a practical designer
that he not only knows the conditions under which his design is to be
carried out, but is ready to submit to them.
The distinction here made between designer and embroiderer is not
casual, but afore-thought, notwithstanding the division of labour it
implies. Enthusiasm has a habit of outrunning reason. Because in some
branches of industry subdivision of labour has been carried to absurd
excess, it is the fashion to demand in all branches of it the autograph
work of one person, which is no less absurd. To try and link together
faculties which Nature has for the most part put asunder, is futile.
That designer and worker should be one and the same person is an ideal,
but one only very occasionally fulfilled. When that happens
(Illustrations 61 and 88) it is well. 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.
The fact is, you can only make out all the world to be designers by
reducing design to what all the world can do. And that is not much.
There is a point of view from which it does not amount to design at all.
The study of design forms part of the education of an embroidress, not
so much that she may design what she works, but that she may know in the
first place what good design is, and, in the second, be equal to the
ever-recurring occasion when a design has to be modified or adapted. If,
in thus manipulating design not hers, she should discover a faculty of
invention, she will want no telling to exercise it. A designer wants no
encouragement to design--she designs.
There would be no occasion to insist upon this, were it not for the
prevalence at the present moment of the idea that a worker, in whatever
art or handicraft, is in artistic duty bound to design whatever she puts
hand to do. That is a theory as false as it is unkind; let no
embroidress be discouraged by it. Let her, unless she is inwardly
impelled to invent, remain content to do good needlework. That is her
art. Her business as an artist is to make beautiful things. Co-operation
in the making of them is no crime.
And what, then, about originality? Originality is a gift beyond price.
But it is not a thing which even the designer should struggle after. It
comes, if it is there. There is a revengeful consolation for the pain we
suffer from design about us writhing to be up-to-date, in the thought
that its contortions tell what pain it cost to do. The birth of beauty
is a less agonising travail; and the thing to seek is beauty, not
novelty. Whoever planned the lines of the border in Illustration 91, or
treated the leafage in Illustration 92, was not trying to be original,
but determined to do his best. Artists and workers of individuality and
character are themselves, without being so much as aware that
originality has gone out of them.
[Illustration: 91. RENAISSANCE ORNAMENT.]
To assume, then, that every needlewoman is, or can ever be, competent to
design what she embroiders, is to make very small account of design. How
is it possible to take design seriously and yet think it is to be
mastered without years of patient study, which few workwomen can or will
devote to it? Any cultivated woman may for herself invent (if it is to
be called invention) something better worth working than is to be bought
ready to work. And that may do for many purposes, so long as it does not
claim to be more than it is; but in the case of really important work,
to be executed at considerable cost not only of material, but of patient
labour, surely it is worth giving serious thought to its design. The
scant consideration commonly given to it shows how little the worker is
in earnest. Or has she thought? And is she persuaded that her artless
spray of flowers, or the ironed-off pattern she has bought, is all that
art could be? It would be rude to tell her she was wasting silk! How
should she know?
The only way of knowing is to study, to look at good work, old work by
preference; it is worth no one's while to praise that unduly. And if in
all that is now so readily accessible she finds nothing to admire,
nothing which appeals to her, nothing which inspires her, then her case
is hopeless. If, on the other hand, she finds only so much as one style
of work sympathetic to her, studies that, lets its spirit sink into her,
tries to do something worthy of it, then she is on the right road.
Measure yourself with the best, not with the common run of work; and if
that should put you out of conceit with your own work, no great harm is
done; sooner or later you have got to come to a modest opinion of
yourself, if ever you are to do even moderate things.
[Illustration: 92. LEAF TREATMENT IN APPLIQUE.]
But the "best" above referred to does not necessarily mean the most
masterly. The best of a simple kind is not calculated to discourage
anyone--rather, it looks as if it must be easy to do that; and in trying
to do it you learn how much goes to the doing it. Good design need not
be of any great importance or pretensions. It may be quite simple, if
only it is right; if the lines are true, the colour harmonious; if it is
adapted to its place, to its use and purpose, to execution not only with
the needle but in the particular kind of needlework to be employed.
There has of late years been something of a revival of needlework design
in schools of art, and some very promising and even most accomplished
work has been done; but in many instances, as it seems to me, it is
rather design which has been translated into needlework, than design
clearly made for execution with the needle. A really appropriate and
practical design for embroidery should be schemed not merely with a view
to its execution with the needle, but with a view to its execution in a
particular stitch or stitches--and possibly by a particular embroidress.
To be safe in designing work so minute as that on Illustration 93, one
must be sure of the needlewoman who is to execute it.
[Illustration: 93. DELICATE SATIN-STITCH--WORKED BY MISS BUCKLE.]
My reference to old work must not be taken to imply that design should
be in imitation of what has been done, or that it should follow on those
lines. Design was once upon a time traditional; but the chain of
tradition has snapped, and now conscious design must be eclectic--that
is to say, one must study old work to see what has been done, and how
it has been done, and then do one's own in one's own way. It is at least
as foolish to break quite away from what has been done as to tether
yourself to it. And in what has been done you will see, not only what is
worth doing, but what is not. That, each must judge for herself. For my
part, it seems to me the thing best worth doing is ornament. Any way,
this much is certain (and you have only to go to a museum to prove it),
that there is no need for needleworkers, unless their instinct draws
them that way, to take to needle painting, to pictures in silk, or even
to flower stitching.
The limitations of embroidery are not so rigidly marked as the
boundaries of many another craft. There is little technical difficulty
in representing flowers, for example, very naturally--too naturally for
any dignified decorative purpose. Embroiderer or embroidery designer
will, as a matter of fact, be constantly inspired by flower forms, and
silk gives the pure colour of their petals as nearly as may be. 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. Let her work according to
the needle: take that for her guide, not be misled by what some other
tool can do better; do what the needle can do best, and be content with
that. That is the way to Art in Needlework, and the surest way.
EMBROIDERY MATERIALS.
Embroidery is not among the things which have to be done, and must be
done, therefore, as best one can do them. It is in the nature of a
superfluity: the excuse for it is that it is beautiful. It is not worth
doing unless it is done well, and in material worth the work done on it.
If you are going to spend the time you must spend to do good work, it is
worth while using good stuff, foolish to use anything else. The stuff
need not be costly, but it should be the best of its kind; and it should
be chosen with reference to the work to be done on it, and _vice versa_.
A mean ground-stuff suggests, if it does not necessitate, its being
embroidered all over, ground-work as well as pattern; a worthier one,
that it should not be hidden altogether from view; a really beautiful
one, that enough of it should be left bare of ornament that its quality
may be appreciated.
[Sidenote: STUFFS.]
It goes without saying, that for big, bold stitching a proportionately
coarse ground-stuff should be used, and for delicate work, one of finer
texture; whether it be linen, woollen cloth, or silk, your purpose will
determine.
Linen is a worthy ground-stuff, which may be worked on with flax thread,
crewel, or silk, but they should not be mixed. Cotton is hardly worth
embroidering. Of woollen stuffs, good plain cloth is an excellent ground
for work in wool or silk, but it is not pleasant to the touch in
working. Serge, if not too loose, may serve for curtains and the like,
but it is not so well worth working upon. Felt is beneath contempt.
The nobler the material, the more essential it is that it should be of
the best. Poor satin is not "good enough to work on;" it looks poorer
than ever when it is embroidered.
Satin should be stretched upon the frame the way of the stuff, and it
should not be forgotten that it has a right and a wrong way up. If it is
backed, the linen should be fine and smooth: on a coarse backing, the
satin gets quickly worn away, as you may see in many a piece of old work
that has gone ragged.
"Roman satin" and what is called "_satin de luxe_" (perhaps because it
is not so luxurious as it pretends to be) are effective ground-stuffs
easy to work upon; but there is an odour of pretence about satin-faced
cotton.