Page:Embroidery and Fancy Work.djvu/148

144 sufficiently prominent, unscrew your work, and take it to a worker in metals, who will mount it in a narrow, strong, brass frame A jeweler would probably be able to do this himself or could get it done for you.

This repoussée work can be applied to many uses. Plaques or platters, ornamental false hinges, keyhole plates, bellows covers, panels and picture frames, and a large variety of other articles of household use or home decoration, can all be easily made when the rudiments are once thoroughly learned. Cups can be made by working the brass flat and having it made up and a bottom put in by a tinsmith. The patterns should be bold and conventional. Petty work, always inartistic is peculiarly out of place on metals.

To polish brass, the best way probably is to rub it thoroughly with rotten stone or tripoli and turpentine, finishing it off with chamois leather and oil. In your designs avoid, in the beginning, any unnecessary inside lines. The simple outlines of a bird or fish are very striking and arabesque designs have an excellent effect.

For the benefit of those who aspire to more elaborate work on heavier metal. I will quote the directions given by Mr. Leland, who was the pioneer in the revival of this art in both America and England. Amateurs owe him a debt of gratitude for the invention of the mode described above of hammering thin brass. Formerly the only way known of doing respoussée work was by the use of the pitch bed described in the following extract.

"You will, as you use thicker sheets, wish to hammer sometimes from the back into the raised patterns, either to produce a deeper relief, or to smoothe and correct inequalities. For this purpose you must make a bed of so-called pitch or composition, which, when hard, yields only gradually under the hammer. You have already learned that in hammering on a soft pine board, it was necessary to work on some basis which resisted while it