Page:Every Woman's Encyclopedia Volume 1.djvu/669

 ^u NEEDLEWORK This section of Every Woman's Encyclopaedia will form a practical and lucid guide to the many branches of needlework. It will be fully illustrated by diagrams and photographs, and, as in other sections of this book, the directions given are put to a practical test before they are printed. Among the subjects dealt with will be : Embroidery Knitting Darning with a Sewing Embroidered Collars and Crochet Machine Blouses Braiding What can be done with Lace Work Art Patchwork Ribbon Drawn Thread VVork Plain Needlework German. Appliqtii Work Tattim; Presents Monogram Designs^ Netting Serving Machines etc., etc. MEEDLEW^ORK PICTURES By Mrs. F. NEVILL JACKSON Author of "y4 History of Hand-made Lace" etc. The Justification of Needlework Pictures— Petit Point Pictures— Stump Work — The Combinaticn oE Brushwork and Needlework— Portraits and Colour Sketches in Needlework now Fashionable Cnglish women have always been famous for their skill in embroidering pictures, and although some people would maintain that it is false art to imitate with one medium the effects usually ob- tained by another, fme exponents of the art of needlework picture embroidery declare that in the working cf pictures there are certain con- ventions which must be regarded, and that their needlecraf t is not necessarily used for imitating the effect of painted canvas. It were false art to try, as Miss Lin wood did at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to make needlework look like painted pictures ; but it is legitimate art if, realising the limita- tions of the needle, we depict scenes from nature with a due regard to conventions and the limitations of the medium. One of the most important of these con- ventions is that the stitches shall be so placed that their direction assists in repre- senting the object. Thus the folds of a dress are worked; as they flow round the figure. A fir tree. 'would be worked in a series of fan- like stitches, as the foliage grows ; the leaves of an oak, on the contrary, would be in oval raised effects, or in twisted chenele knots. French knots are often seen repre- senting the woolly coat of a sheep, lamb, or poodle ; or in the mane of a lion, wheji this strangely shaped beast of heraldic growthappearsinearh^ needlework pictures. Petit point pictures are worked by the patient needlewoman. This stitch, the single cibss on fine canvas — the gobhn stitch, as it is sometimes called— is perfectly distintt from the double cross on two-strand canvas which was the terror of our childhood and one of the horrors of the early and mid-Victorian era. Petit point stitch closely resembles tapestry, and beautiful bination of combined brushwork and needlework