Page:Embroidery and Fancy Work.djvu/290

286 handsome design. Or you may have a number of small round fans, the sticks being worked in heavy chain-stitch, and appropriate designs in outline can be worked (after you have all your pieces in place) on each fan. These should be arranged with as little stiffness as possible, and then the spaces between must be filled in with a mosaic of small pieces. Care must be taken to arrange the colors harmoniously, using neutral tints to separate violently contrasting hues. Having arranged all your pieces to your own satisfaction, the next step is to work all the seams with fancy stitches in various colors. All your odds and ends of embroidery silks will now be useful. Spangles, gold and silver thread, and flat gold braids are also used with good effect. Great attention must be paid to "keeping the balance true." That is, the ornamentation must be evenly distributed, not massed in any one spot. The same thing is true of the colors, which should be so managed as to avoid any patchy effects. All sorts of fancy stitches can be used for working the seams. Brier, coral, buttonhole, and point russe stitches are the most common, but a clever worker can make up many ornamental ones to suit her own fancy. For instance, a wide row of herringbone of black silk can have a fan of three or five stitches of a bright color worked at each point. For another place, the herringbone can be of the color and the fans of black. Railroad stitch is very pretty also; it is quickly worked.

I recently saw a most beautiful quilt, a description of which may prove suggestive to some of my readers. The centre was a square of embroidered satin, the corners of which were cut off by the rounding edges of four large Japanese fans, of the folding kind. The mounts or upper parts of these fans were made of alternate strips of two contrasting colors, black, I think, being one of these in all the fans. Across these a Japanesque floral pattern