Mary Buckle

“ 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, [240] 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. ”

“ 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 [234] 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. ”

“ What the stitches are it is not easy to say. The mystery of many a stitch is to be unravelled only by literally picking out the threads, which one is not always at liberty to do, although, in the ardour of research, a keen embroidress will do it—not without remorse in the case of beautiful work, but relentlessly all the same.
The only piece of embroidery entirely in crewel-stitch which I could find for illustration (15) is worked, as it happens, in silk; nor was the worker aware that in so working she was doing anything out of the common. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Embroidery is merely an affair of stitching; and the first thing needful alike to the worker in it and the designer for it is, a thorough acquaintance with the stitches; not, of course, with every modification of a modification of a stitch which individual ingenuity may have devised—it would need the space of an encyclopædia to chronicle them all—but with the broadly marked varieties of stitch which have been employed to best purpose in ornament. ”

“ Any one not in sympathy with stitching may possibly design a beautiful piece of needlework, but no one will get all that is to be got out of the needle without knowing all about it. One must understand the ways in which work can be done in order to determine the way it shall in any particular case be done.
Certain stitches answer certain purposes, and strictly only those. The designer must know which stitch answers which purpose, or he will in the first place waste the labour of the embroidress, [11] and in the second miss his effect, which is to waste his own pains too. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a great deal of Eastern work in which surface satin-stitch, or its equivalent, floats so loosely upon the face of the stuff that it can only be described as flimsy. Nothing could be more beautiful in its way than certain Soudanese embroidery, in which coloured floss in stitches an inch or more long lies glistening on the stuff without any interruption of threads to fasten it down. ”

“ 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 enrichment may, however, rightly be, and oftenest is, perhaps, in a material nobler than the stuff enriched, in silk upon linen, in wool upon cotton, in gold upon velvet. The advisability of working upon a precious stuff in thread less precious is open to question. It does not seem to have been satisfactorily done; but if it were only the background that was worked, and the pattern were so schemed as almost to cover it, so that, in fact, very little of the more beautiful texture was sacrificed, and you had still a sumptuous pattern on a less attractive background—why not? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The famous Syon cope is so covered. Much of the work so done, all-over work that is to say, competes in effect with tapestry or other weaving; and its purpose was similar: it is a sort of amateur way of working your own stuff. But in character it is no more nearly related to the work of the loom than other needlework—it is still work on stuff. For all-over embroidery one chooses, naturally, a coarse canvas ground to work on; but it more often happens that one chooses canvas because one means to cover it, than that one works all over a ground because it is unpresentable. ”

“ Needlework was, in fact, an adjunct to weaving. Later, in mediæval 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. ”

“ Satin-stitch is par excellence the stitch for fine silkwork. I do not know if the name of "satin-stitch" comes from its being so largely employed upon satin, or from the effect of the work itself, which would certainly justify the title, so smooth and satin-like is its surface. Given a material of which the texture is quite smooth and even, showing no mesh, satin-stitch seems the most natural and obvious way of working upon it. In it the embroidress works with short, straight strokes of the needle, just as a pen draughtsman lays side by side the strokes of his pen ”

“ 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. ”

“ To embroider is to work on something: a groundwork is presupposed. And we usually understand by embroidery, needlework in thread (it may be wool, cotton, linen, silk, gold, no matter what) upon a textile material, no matter what. In short, it is the decoration of a material woven in thread by means still of thread. It is thus the consistent way of ornamenting stuff—most consistent of all when one kind of thread is employed throughout, as in the case of linen upon linen, silk upon silk. ”

“ 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 [236] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Laid-work is not, at the best, a very strong or lasting kind of embroidery (it needs to be carefully covered up even as it is worked) , but by no other means is the silky beauty of coloured floss so perfectly set forth. It is hardly worth doing in anything but floss.
Laid-work lends itself also to gradation of colour within certain limits—the limits, that is to say, of the straight parallel lines in which the silk is laid: the direction of these is determined often by the lines of sewing which are to cross them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The mere work line—or "stroke-stitch," not crossed (D) , is a perfectly fair way of getting a delicate effect; but the design has a way of working out rather less happily than it promised.
The addition of such stroke-stitches to solid cross-stitch (E) is not at best a very happy device. It strikes one always as a confession of dissatisfaction on the part of the worker with the simple means of her choice. As a device for, as it were, correcting the stepped outline it is at its worst. Timid workers are always afraid of the stepped outline which a coarse mesh gives. ”

“ The precision of line a skilled worker can get in floss is wonderful. An Oriental will get sweeping lines as clean and firm as if [96] they had been drawn with a pen, and this not merely in the case of an outline, but in voided lines of which each side has to be drawn with the needle. The voided outline, by the way, as on Illustrations 39, 40, is not only the frankest way of defining form, but seems peculiarly proper to satin-stitch; and it is a test of skill in workmanship: it is so easy to disguise uneven stitching by an outline in some other stitch. ”

“ 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 ”