Diapering,
after so many graceful and ever-varying forms to be found almost always upon mediæval works of the needle.
The garments worn by high personages in the embroidery, and meant to imitate a golden textile, were done in gold passing sometimes by itself, sometimes with coloured silk thread laid down alternately aside it, so as to lend a tinge of green, crimson, pink, or blue, to the imagined tissue of the robe, as if it were made of a golden stuff shot with the adopted tint.
For putting on this gold passing, it was of course required to sew it down. Now, from this very needful and mechanical requirement, those mediæval needlewomen sought and got an admirable as well as ingenious element of ornamentation, and so truthful too. Of this our ladies at this day, seem, from their work, to have a very narrow, short idea. Taking thin (usually red) silk, and while fastening the golden or silver passing, they dotted it all over in small stitches set exactly after a way that showed the one same pattern. So teeming were their brains in this matter that hardly the same design in diapering is twice to be found upon the same embroidered picture. With no other appliance they were thus enabled to lend to their draperies the appearance of having been, not wrought by the needle, but actually cut out of a piece of textile, and for which they have been sometimes mistaken.
Of the many samples here of this kind of diapering we select one or two—[Nos. 1194-5], p. 21, which is so very fine, and of itself quite enough for showing what we wish to point out, and to warrant our praises of the method; [No. 8837], p. 200, is another worth attention.