The crewelwork of New England was the first ornamental stitchery
practiced in this country by women of European race, and in their hands
made its first appearance even during the days of privation and nights
of fear which were their portion in this strange new world to which they
had come.
The seed of it was brought by that winged creature of destiny, the
_Mayflower_, hidden in the folds or decorating the borders of the
precious household linen which was a part of the gear of the first
Pilgrims. In its hollow interior there was room for bed dressings and
table napery, even when the high-posted bedsteads and tables which they
had adorned were abandoned, or exchanged for peace of mind and liberty
of action.
It may have declared itself in the very first years of settlement,
before they had encountered the savage antagonism of the aborigines, and
while they still had only the privations incident to pioneer life; or
it may have been after the long struggle for ascendancy and possession
was over, and they could settle down in hard-won homes. Upon neighboring
or contiguous farms there they gradually drew together the threads of
memory concerning former peaceful occupations, and wove them once more
into the warp of daily life. They could visit one another, exchanging
domestic experiences, or reminiscences of spiritual struggles of their
own or of fellow Pilgrims, and old-time hand occupations would be a
mutual lullaby and an exorcism of anxiety.
The real beginning of embroidery as a national art was probably at a
later period, for its previous practice would be but a continuation of
old-world occupations or diversions of life.
The devoted mothers of the American race, who sailed the seas in those
far-off days, might have brought some favorite "piece" of embroidery
among their most intimate belongings, wherewithal to while away the
hours of weary days upon the limitless breadths of ocean. There would be
intervals of calm between storms, and periods when even the merest shred
of a home-practiced art would be doubly and trebly valued, like a
piece of heavenly raiment to a naked and banished angel.
[Illustration: CREWEL DESIGN, drawn and colored, which dates back to
Colonial times.
_In the possession of the Dunham family of Cooperstown._]
The most natural effort of the woman standing in the midst of such new
and strenuous conditions as surrounded the Pilgrim mothers in America,
would be to reproduce something which had meant peace and tranquillity
in former days. We can imagine her, searching the closely packed
iron-bound chests which held most of the worldly goods of the traversing
pilgrims--those famous chests, the boards of which had been carefully
doweled and faithfully put together to resist outward and inward
pressure--packed and repacked with constant misgivings and hopeful
foresight. In those crowded treasure chests it was possible there might
be found skeins of crewel, and even working patterns which some hopeful
instinct had prompted her to preserve.
While the Puritan mother was scheming to add embroidery to her
occupations, she did not forget to train each small maid of the family
to the use of the needle. Ruth and Peace and Harmony and Mercy made
their samplers as faithfully as though they were growing up under the
shade of the apple trees of old England instead of among the blackened
stumps of newly cut forests.
So the old art survived its transplantation and rooted itself in spite
of storms of terror, and during and after the test of fire and blood,
and spread, after the manner of art and knowledge, until it became the
joy and comfort of a new race, a vehicle of feminine dexterity and an
expression of the creative instinct with which in a greater or lesser
degree we are all endowed.
We can easily believe that stores of linen and precious china, as well
as the small wheels for the spinning of the flax, could not be denied to
the devoted women who chose to share the hard fortunes of their Pilgrim
husbands and fathers. It is probable that in one form or another
possessions of crewel embroidery were transported with them.
I know of no well-authenticated specimen which came in actual substance
in that elastic vessel, but undoubtedly there were such, while many and
many existed in the minds and memories of the women of the new colony,
to come to life and take on actual form, color and substance when the
days of their privations were numbered. If such actual treasured things
existed and were preserved through the early days of colonial life,
every stitch of them would hold within itself traditions of tranquillity
in a world where homes stood, and fields were tilled in safety, because
of the vast plains of ocean which lay between them and savage tribes.
In the earliest days of the colonies we could hardly expect more than
the necessary practice of the needle, but when we come to the second
period, when neighborhoods became towns, and cabins grew into more or
less well-equipped farmhouses, Puritan women gladly reverted to the
accomplishments of pre-American conditions. The familiar crewelwork of
England was the form of needlework which became popular.
In looking for materials with which to recreate this art, they had not
at that time far to seek. Wool and flax were farm products, necessities
of pioneer life, and their manufacture into cloth was a well-understood
domestic art.
Domestic animals had shared the tremendous experiment of transplantation
of a fragment of the English race, and had suffered, no doubt, with
their masters and owners, the struggles with savages and unaccustomed
circumstances, but they had survived and increased "after their kind."
Even through the strenuous wars against their very existence by
uncivilized man, they lived and increased. Cows "calved," and sheep
"lambed," and wool in abundance was to be had.
The enterprising Puritan woman pulled the long-fibered straggling lock
of wool, sorted out and rejected from the uniform fleeces, carded it
with her little hand cards into yard-long finger-sized rolls, and
twisted it upon her large wheel spindle, producing much such thread as
an Italian peasant woman spins upon her distaff to-day as she walks upon
the shore at Baiæ.
If the pioneer was a natural copyist, she doubled and twisted it, to
make it in the exact fashion of the English crewel; if adventurous and
independent, she worked it single threaded. This yarn had all the pliant
qualities necessary for embroidery, and was in fact uncolored crewel.
[Illustration: TESTER embroidered in crewels in shades of blue on white
homespun linen. Said to have been brought to Essex, Mass., in 1640, by
Madam Susanna, wife of Sylvester Eveleth.
_Courtesy of Essex Institute, Salem, Mass._
To the right, raised embroidery on black velvet. Nineteenth century
American.]
So, also, the production of flax thread, when the crop of flax was
grown, and the long stems had struggled upward to their greatest
heights, and finished themselves in a cloud of multitudinous blue
flax flowers, beautiful enough to be grown for beauty alone, they pulled
and made into slender bundles, and laid under the current of the brook
which neighbored most pioneer houses, until the thready fibers could be
washed and scraped from the vegetable outer coat, the perishable parts
of their composition, and combed into separateness. Then it was ready
for the small flax wheel of the housewife. Every woman had both wool
wheel and flax wheel, the latter of all grades of beauty, from those
made for the use of queens and ladies of high degree--royal for
elaboration--to the modest ashen wheel, derived from a long line of
industrious and careful foremothers, or copied by the clever Pilgrim
fathers, from some adventurous wheel which had made the long voyage from
civilized Holland to uncivilized America.
For color, the simplest and most at hand expedient was a dip in the
universal indigo tub, which waited in every "back shed" of the Puritan
homestead. One single dip in its black-looking depths and the skein of
spun lamb's wool acquired a tint like the blue of the sky. Immersion of
a day and night gave an indelible stain of a darker blue, and a week's
repose at the bottom of the pot made the wool as dark in tint as the
indigo itself. For variety in her blues, the enterprising housewife used
the sunburned "taglocks" which were too hopelessly yellow for webs of
white wool weaving, and gave them a short immersion in the tub, with the
result of a beautiful blue-green, tinged through and through with a
sunny luster, and this color was sun-fast and water-fast, capable of
holding its tint for a century.
We know how knots of living wool grow golden by dragging through dew and
lying in the sun, and how the ladies of Venice sat upon the roofs of
their palaces with locks outspread upon the encircling brims of
crownless hats, in order to capture the true Venetian tint of hair. We
do not know by what alchemy the sun _silvers_ a web spread out to
whiten, and yet _gilds_ the human tresses of ladies and yellows the
"taglocks" of sheep. Chemists may be able to explain, but simple woman,
unversed in the mysteries of chemistry, cannot. Whatever may have been
the science of it, this golden hue added to medium and dark blue a triad
of shades, which proved to be most effective when placed upon pure
white of bleached linen, or the gray-cream of the unbleached web.
The color seekers soon learned that every indelible stain was a dye, and
if little God-fearing Thomas came home with a stain of ineffaceable
green or brown on the knees of his diminutive tow breeches, the mother
carefully investigated the character of it, and if it was unmoved by the
persuasive influence of "soft soap and sun," she added it to a list
which meant knowledge. It is to be hoped that this was often considered
an equivalent for the "trouncing" which was the common penalty of
accident or inadvertence suffered by the Puritan child. In truth,
Solomon's unwholesome caution, "Spare the rod and spoil the child," was
all too strictly observed in those conscience-ridden Puritan days. I had
a child's lively disapproval of Solomon, since the curse of his
sarcastic comment came down with the Puritan strain in my own blood, and
I have a smarting recollection of it.
God-fearing Thomas and his brothers added to their mother's artistic
equipment not only a list of variously shaded brown from the bark of the
black walnut tree, and of yellows from the leaves and twigs of the
sumac and wild cherry, but numberless others. She was an untiring color
hunter, an experimenter with the juices of plants and flowers and
berries, and with every unwash-outable stain. She set herself to the
exciting task of repetition and variation. She tried the velvet shell of
young butternuts upon threads of her white wool, and found a spring
green, and if she spread over it a thinnest wash of hemlock bark, they
were olive, and if she dipped them in mitigated indigo, lo! they were of
the green of sea hollows. The butternut in all stages of its growth,
from the smallest and greenest to the rusty black of the ripe ones, and
the blackest black of the dried shell, was a mine of varied color; and
the brass kettle of from ten to twenty quarts capacity, which served so
many purposes in domestic life, could be tranquilly carrying out some of
her propositions in the corner of the wide chimney while dinner was
cooking, or in the ashes of the burned-out embers while the household
slept.
[Illustration: QUILTED COVERLET made by Ann Gurnee.]
[Illustration: HOMESPUN WOOLEN BLANKET with King George's Crown
embroidered with home-dyed blue yarn in the corner. From the Burdette
home at Fort Lee, N. J., where Washington was entertained.
_Courtesy of Bergen County Historical Society, Hackensack, N. J._]
[Illustration: CHEROKEE ROSE BLANKET, made about 1830 of homespun wool
with "Indian Rose" design about nineteen inches in diameter worked in
the corners in home-dyed yarns of black, red, yellow, and dark green.
From the Westervelt collection.
_Courtesy of Bergen County Historical Society, Hackensack, N. J._]
It was interesting and skillful work to extract these colors, and the
emulation of it and the glory of producing a new one was not without
its excitement. There was a certain "fast pink" which was the secret
of one ingenious ungenerous Puritan woman, who kept the secret of the
dye, when rose pink was the unattainable want of feminine New England.
She died without revealing it, and as in those days there were no
chemists to boil up her rags and test them for the secret, the "Windham
pink," so said my grandmother, "made people sorry for her death,
although she did not deserve it." This little neighborly fling passed
down two generations before it came to me from the later days of the
colony.
Yellows of different complexions were discovered in mayweed, goldenrod
and sumac, and the little-girl Faiths and Hopes and Harmonys came in
with fingers pink from the handling of pokeberries and purple from
blackberry stain, tempting the sight with evanescent dyes which would
not keep their color even when stayed with alum and fortified with salt.
All this made Mistress Windham's memory the more sad. A good reliable
rose red was always wanting. Madder could be purchased, for it was
raised in the Southern colonies, but the madder was a brown red. Finally
some enterprising merchantman introduced cochineal, and the vacuum was
filled. With a judicious addition of logwood, rose red, wine red and
deep claret were achieved.
The dye of dyes was indigo, for the blue of heaven, or the paler blue of
snow shadows, to a blue which was black or a black which was blue, was
within its capacity. And the convenience of it! The indigo tub was
everywhere an adjunct to all home manufactures. It dyed the yarn for the
universal knitting, and the wool which was a part of the blue-gray
homespun for the wear of the men of the household. "One-third of white
wool, one-third of indigo-dyed wool, and one-third of black sheep's
wool," was the formula for this universal texture. Perhaps it was not
too much to say that the gray days of the Pilgrim mother's life were
enriched by this royal color.
The soft yarns, carefully spun from selected wool, took kindly to the
natural dyes, and our friend, the Puritan housewife, soon found herself
in possession of a stock of home-manufactured material, soft and
flexible in quality, and quite as good in color as that of the lamented
English crewels. The homespun and woven linens with which her chests
were stocked were exactly the ground for decorative needlework of the
kind which she had known in her English childhood, long before questions
of conscience had come to trouble her, or the boy who had grown up to be
her husband had been wakened from a comfortable existence by the
cat-o'-nine-tails of conscience, and sent across the sea to stifle his
doubts in fighting savagery.
Probably the Puritan mother could stop thinking for a while about the
training of Thomas and Peace and Harmony, and the rest of the dozen and
a half of children which were the allotted portion of every Puritan
wife, while she selected out intervals of her long busy days, as one
selects out bits of color from bundles of uninteresting patches, and
devoted them to absolutely superfluous needlework.
What a joy it must have been to ponder whether she should use deep pink
or celestial blue for the flowers of her pattern, instead of remembering
how red poor baby Thomas's little cushions of flesh had grown under the
smart slaps of her corset board when he overcame his sister Faith in a
fair fight about nothing, and what a relief the making of crewel roses
must have been from the doubts and cares of a constantly increasing
family!
She sorted out her colors, three shades of green, three of cochineal
red, two of madder--one of them a real salmon color--numberless shades
of indigo, yellows and oranges and browns in goodly bunches, ready for
the long stretches of fair solid white linen split into valances or
sewed into a counterpane. Truly she was a happy woman, and she would
show Mistress Schuyler, with her endless "blue-and-white," what she
could do with _her_ colors! Then she had a misgiving, and reflected for
a moment on the unregeneracy of the human soul, and that poor Mistress
Schuyler's quiet airs of superiority really came from her Dutch blood,
for her mother was an English Puritan who had married a Hollander, and
her own husband revealed to her in the dead of night, when all hearts
are opened, his belief that "Brother Schuyler had been moved to emigrate
much more by greed of profitable trade with the savages than by longings
for liberty of conscience."
She went back to her "pattern," which she just now remembered had been
lent her by poor Mistress Schuyler, and was soon absorbed in making
long lines of pin pricks along the outlines of the pattern, so that she
could sift powdered charcoal through and catch the shapes of leaves and
curves on her fair white linen.
Her foot was on the rocker of the cradle all the time, and the last baby
was asleep in it. The hooded cherry cradle which had rocked the three
girls and four boys, counting the wee velvet-scalped Jonathan, against
whose coming the cradle had been polished with rottenstone and whale oil
until it shone like mahogany.
Should the roses of the pattern be red or pink? and the columbines blue
or purple? She could make a beautiful purple by steeping the sugar paper
which wrapped her precious cone of West Indian "loaf sugar," and
sugar-paper purple was reasonably fast. So ran the thoughts of the dear,
straight-featured Puritan wife as she sorted her colors and worked her
pattern.
At this period of her experience of the new life of the colonies, the
chief end of her embroidery was to help in creating a civilized home, to
add to what had been built simply for shelter and protection, some of
the features which lived and grew only in the atmosphere of safety and
content. Hospitality was one of the features of New England life, and
the first addition to the family shelter was a bedroom, which bore the
title of the "best bedroom," and a tall four-post bed, which was the
"best bed." The adornment of this holy altar of friendship was an urgent
duty.
When I began this allusion to the "best bedroom," I left the housewife
sorting her tinted crewels for its adornment, and she still sat, happily
cutting the beautiful homespun linen into lengths for the two bed
valances, the one to hang from the upper frame which surrounded the top
of her four-post bedstead, and the other, which hung from the bed frame
itself, and reached the floor, hiding the dark space beneath the bed.
The "high-post bedstead" had long groups of smooth flutes in the upward
course of its posts, and no footboard, a plain-sawed headboard and
smooth headposts. There must be a long curtain at the head of the bed,
which would hide both headboard and plain headposts, and this curtain
she meant should have a wide border of crewelwork at the top and bunches
of flowers scattered at intervals on its surface.
[Illustration: BED SET. Keturah Baldwin pattern, designed, dyed, and
worked by The Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework. Deerfield,
Mass.]
[Illustration: BED COVERS worked in candle wicking.
_Courtesy of Colonial Rooms, John Wanamaker, New York_]
None of Mistress Schuyler's "blue-and-white" for her! It should carry
every color she could muster, and the upper valance should have the same
border as the head curtain. The lower valance would not need it, for the
counterpane would hang well over, and she meant somehow to bend the
border design into a wreath and work it in the center of the
counterpane, and double-knot a fringe to go entirely around it, the same
as that which should edge the upper valance.
It was a luxurious bed dressing when it was finished, and nothing in it
of material to differentiate it from the embroideries which were being
done in England at the very time. There were no original features of
design or arrangement. The close-lapping stitches were set in exactly
the same fashion, and, considering the absolute necessity of growing and
manufacturing all the materials, it was a wonderful performance.
It was not alone bed hangings which were subjects of New England
crewelwork; there were mantel valances, which covered the plain wooden
mantels and hung at a safe distance above the generous household fires.
These were wrought with borders of crewelwork, and finished with
elaborate thread and crewel fringes. They were knotted into
diamond-shaped openings, above the fringes, three or four rows of them,
the more the better, for in the general simplicity of furnishing, these
things were of value. Then there were table covers and stand covers and
wall pockets of various shapes and designs, and, in short, wherever the
housewife could legitimately introduce color and ornamentation,
crewelwork made its appearance.
In the very infancy of the art of embroidery in America, the primitive
needlewoman was possessed of means and materials which fill the
embroiderers of our rich later days with envy. Homespun linen is no
longer to be had, and dyes are no longer the pure, simple, hold-fast
juices which certain plants draw from the ground; and try as we may to
emulate or imitate the old embroidered valances which hung from the
testers of the high-post bedsteads and concealed the dark cavities
beneath, and the coverlet besprinkled with bunches of impossible flowers
done in home-concocted shades of color upon heavy snow-white linen, we
fall far short of the intrinsic merits of those early hangings.
There are many survivals of these embroideries in New England families,
who reverence all that pertains to the lives of their founders. Bed
hangings had less daily wear and friction than pertained to other
articles of decorative use, and generally maintained a healthy existence
until they ceased to be things of custom or fashion. When this time came
they were folded away with other treasures of household stuffs, in the
reserved linen chest, whence they occasionally emerge to tell tales of
earlier days and compare themselves with the mixed specimens of
needlework art which have succeeded them, but cannot be properly called
their descendants.
The possession of a good piece of old crewelwork, done in this country,
is as strong a proof of respectable ancestry as a patent of nobility,
since no one in the busy early colonial days had time for such work save
those whose abundant leisure was secured by ample means and liberal
surroundings. The incessant social and intellectual activity demanded by
modern conditions of life was uncalled for. No woman, be she gentle or
simple, had stepped from the peaceful obscurity of home into the field
of the world to war for its prizes or rewards. If the man to whom she
belonged failed to win bread or renown, the women who were bound in his
family starved for the one or lived without the luster of the other.
I have shown that even in the early days of flax growing and indigo
dyeing the New England farmer's wife had come into her heritage, not
only of materials, but of the implements of manufacture. She had the
small flax wheel which dwelt in the keeping room, where she could sit
and spin like a lady of place and condition, and the large woolen wheel
standing in the mote-laden air of the garret, through which she walked
up and down as she twisted the yarn.
Later, the colonial dame, if she belonged to the prosperous class--for
there were classes, even in the beginning of colonial life--had her
beautifully shaped mahogany linen wheel, made by the skillful artificers
of England or Holland, more beautiful perhaps, but not more capable than
that of the farm wife, whittled and sandpapered into smoothness by her
husband or sons, and both were used with the same result.
The pioneer woodworker had a lively appreciation of the new woods of the
new country, and made free use of the abundant wild cherry for the
furniture called for by the growing prosperity of the settlements, its
close grain and warm color giving it the preference over other native
woods, excepting always the curly and bird's-eye maple, which were
novelties to the imported artisan.
I remember that "curly maple" was a much prized wood in my own
childhood, and that after carefully searching for the outward marks of
it among the trees of the farm, I asked about the shape of its leaves
and the color of its bark, so that I might know it--for children were
supposed to know species of trees by sight in my childhood. "Why," said
my mother, "it looks like any other maple tree on the outside; it is
only that the wood is curly, just as some children have curly hair."
Even now, after all these years, a plane of curly maple suggests the
curly hair of some child beloved of nature.
The beautiful curly, spotted and satiny maple wood was, however, "out of
fashion" when the roving shipmasters began to bring in logs of Santo
Domingo mahogany in the holds of their far-wandering barks, and the
cabinetmakers to cut beautiful shapes of sideboards, and curving legs
and backs of chairs, as well as the tall carved headposts and the head
and footboards of luxurious beds from them. It was not only that they
were a repetition of English luxury, but that they made more of
themselves in plain white interiors, by reason of insistent color, than
the blond sisterhood of maples could do. Cherry, which shared in a
degree its depth of color, held its world for a longer period, but no
wood could withstand the magnificence of pure mahogany red, with the
story of its vegetable life written along its planes in lines and waves,
deepening into darks, and lightening into ocher and gold along its
surfaces.
If the cabinetry of New England is a digression, it is perhaps excusable
on the ground of its close connection with the crewel work of New
England, of which we are treating, and to which we shall have something
of a sense of novelty in returning, since at least the complexion of our
colonial embroidery has experienced a change.
So, in spite of the success of the early Puritan woman in producing
tints necessary to the various needs of colored crewelwork, the
supremacy of indigo as a dye led to a lasting fashion of embroidery
known as "blue-and-white." It was the assertion of absolute and tried
merit in materials which led to its success. We sometimes see this
emergence of persistent goodness in instances of some human career,
where indefatigable integrity outruns the glamour of personal gift. This
was the fortune of the "blue-and-white," which not only created a style,
but has achieved persistence and has broken out in revivals all along
the history of American embroidery. It has been somewhat identified with
domestic weaving, for the loom has always been a member of the New
England family, the great home-built loom, standing in the far end of
the kitchen, capable of divers miracles of creation between dawn and
sunset.
On this much-to-be-prized background of homespun linen the different
shades of indigo blue could be, and were, very effectively used, and it
is worthy of note that it repeated the simple contrasts of the Canton
china or the "blue Canton" which were the prized gifts brought to their
families by the returning New England seamen in the profitable "India
trade," which soon became a commercial fact.
"Blue-and-white" had at first been evolved by tight-bound
circumstances. Excellent practice in shades of blue had given it a
certified place in the embroidery art of America, but we do not find it
in collections of old English embroidery. It is one of the small
monuments which mark the path of the woman colonist, narrowed by
circumstances, which created a recognized style. It is not to be
wondered at that blue-and-white crewelwork made a place for itself in
the history of embroidery which was a permanent one. The circumstances
of Puritan life being so simple and direct would induce a corresponding
simplicity of taste, and simplicity is apt to seize upon first
principles.
Every colorist knows that strong but peaceful contrast is one of the
first laws of color arrangement, and the unconscious yoking of white and
blue placed one of the strongest color notes against unprotesting and
receptive white. This made a new manner or style of embroidery. Its
permanence may have been influenced by the art of one of the oldest
peoples of the world, and as we have said, the prevalence of Canton
china upon the dressers and filling the mantel closets and serving the
tables of the rich, was beginning to appear in all houses of growing
prosperity, even where pewter ware and dishes carved from wood still
held the place of actual service.
The Puritan housewife could arrange her grades of blue according to the
Chinese colors of this oldest domestic art of the world, and be
correspondingly happy in the result. Chinese design, however, had no
influence in the growing practice of embroidery, and here also an
instinctive law prevailed. She recognized that even the highly
artificial landscape art of her idolized plates would not suit the
flexible and broken surfaces of her equally cherished linen, or the
surroundings of her life.
It was small wonder that this became a favorite style of embroidery and
has in it the seeds of permanence. A table setting of snow-white or
cream-white homespun, scalloped and embroidered in lines of blue
crewels, shining with the precious Canton blue, was, and would be even
at this day, a thing to admire.
The first deviation from the habitual crewelwork is to be found in the
"blue-and-white," for although the same stitch was employed, it was
more often in outline than solid. The designs were sketches instead of
"patterns" as had formerly been the case. Although this variety of work
comes under the head of colonial crewelwork, there was in it the
beginning of the changes and variety effected by differing circumstances
and influences--those vital circumstances which leave their traces
constantly along the history of needlework. It was owing to various
reasons that outline embroidery largely took the place of solid
crewelwork.
The question of design must have been a rather difficult one, as there
were no designs, and almost no sources of design for needlework, and at
this stage of the art in New England original design seems not to have
suggested itself. It would certainly have been quite natural to have
copied pine trees and broken outlines of hills, but as this class of
embroidery was almost entirely used for hangings and decorative
furnishings, the Pilgrim mothers seem to have had an instinctive sense
that such design was incongruous. Consequently they copied English
models. We find designs of crewelwork of the period in English museums
identically the same as in the New England work, thorned roses and
voluminously doubled pinks, held together in borders of long curved
lines or scattered at regular intervals in groups and bunches.
My grandmother explained to me in that long-ago period, where her great
age and my inquisitive youth met and exchanged our several and
individual surplus of thought and talk, that to a certain extent ladies
of colonial days copied many of their designs from what were called
India chintzes. These chintzes seem to have been the intermediate wear
between homespun of either flax or wool and the creamy satins or the
thick "paduasoy," the more flexible "lutestring" silks, worn by great
ladies of the period, and the wrought India muslins for less
conventional occasions. India chintzes were printed upon white or tinted
grounds of hand-spun cotton, in colors so generously full of substance
as to have almost the effect of brocaded stuffs, and adaptations from
their designs were suitable for embroidery. I remember the
three-cornered and square bits of India chintz which my grandmother
showed me in long-preserved "housewives," or "huz-ifs," as she called
them. They were lengths of domestic linen on which small squares or
triangles of chintz were sewn, making a series of small pockets, each
one stuffed with convenient threads or bits of colored sewing silks, or
needle and thimble. These were pinned at the belt of the active
housewife, and hung swaying against her skirts if she rose from her
sewing, or were conveniently at hand if she sat patching or
embroidering. I remember that some of my grandmother's "huz-ifs" still
held threads of different colored crewels wound on bits of cardboard,
and any embroiderer might envy the convenience of such holders.
I do not see, in fact, why there should not be a revival of "huz-ifs," a
pleasant new fashion, founded upon the old, holding in harmonious
variety all the wonders of modern manufacture, as well as making
mementos of former gowns of one's own and of one's friends. They might
be studied gradations of color and design, and be enriched by harmonious
bindings. If my dwindling time holds out, perhaps I shall institute or
assist at such a renewal of old conveniences, in spite of sharp contrast
of purposes, adding to home costume a grace of pendent color.
I was talking of design, when "huz-ifs" intruded, and was saying that at
the period when "blue-and-white" took on the "outline practice" design
was a difficult question; indeed, it is always a difficult question for
embroiderers. It is so important a part or quality of the art of
embroidery. In fact, it is the business of the successful embroiderer to
know as much about design as she must about stitchery and color.
After the advent of "blue-and-white," embroidery took on many different
features. Curiously enough, when it was confined to decorative uses, its
character immediately changed. Crewelwork of the period was not given to
hangings and furniture, but to clothing. An embroidered apron became of
much more importance than a bed valance or counterpane. The young girl
began by embroidering her school aprons with borders of forget-me-nots
and mullein pinks, in colored crewels.
I remember seeing among my grandmother's savings an apron of gray
unbleached linen, quite dark in color, with a border of single pinks
entirely around it. The design had evidently been drawn from the flower
itself, and the whole performance was essentially different from that
of a slightly earlier period. The materials of homespun linen and
home-dyed crewels were the same. The thing which was different and
showed either a cropping-out of original thought or a bias toward the
style of embroidery lately introduced by the famous school of Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, was an over-and-over stitch instead of the old crewel
method. This over-and-over stitch was apparent in all crewel embroidery
devoted to personal wear, but was never found in articles used for house
or decorative purposes. It was certainly a proper distinction, as the
_flat_ of crewel was not capable of shadow and was more inherently a
part of the textile, as much so, indeed, as a stamped or woven
decoration would have been.
It was not long before the over-and-over stitch demanded silks and
flosses instead of crewels for its exercise, and silk or satin for the
background of its exploits. There were satin bags covered with the most
delicate stitchery, and black silk aprons with wreaths of myrtle done
with silks or flosses, and, finally, satin pelerines exquisitely
embroidered in designs of carefully shaded roses. Although nothing
remarkable or epoch-making happened in the art of embroidery, it
retained an even more than respectable existence. The skill, taste, and
love for the creation of beauty, which were the heritage of the race,
were kept alive.