Twentieth Century Culture and Deportment / Or the Lady and Gentleman at Home and Abroad; Containing Rules of Etiquette for All Occasions, Including Calls; Invitations; Parties; Weddings; Receptions; Dinners and Teas; Etiquette of the Street; Public Places, Etc., Etc. Forming a Complete Guide to Self-Culture; the Art of Dressing Well; Conversation; Courtship; Etiquette for Children; Letter-Writing; Artistic Home and Interior Decorations, Etc.

by Maud C. Cooke

Screens.

Screens are a necessary object of household adornment. It is not requisite that they should be expensive, but the uses to which they can be put are legion. A plain frame of hard wood, or pine stained, rectangular, three or four inches wide and one inch thick, furnished with feet, and with or without castors, is all that is necessary. Covering may be done with a great variety of materials, cheap or dear. Ornamentation may be applied, embroidered, sketched, outlined, or painted. If the screen is made in two or three parts to fold like clothes bars, feet will not be necessary.

A rustic fire-screen is a unique affair, handsome and useful where there are open fires, as a shield from heat in cold weather, and as a screen for the emptiness of grate or fireplace during the summer. It is formed from natural branches, two straight and two crotched ones, from which all the smaller branches and twigs have been cut away so as to have but little more than protruding knots. When these are well seasoned, rub, brush and rebrush, both with a soft brush and a stiff one, to remove from every crevice in the bark every loose particle of moss and dust. Then, with liquid gold, gild the bark all over, or, if preferred, gild only the bare wood where it is exposed at the ends and where the limbs are cut off, and give a touch of gold to every crack or protuberance, or, if a smoother finish is desired, remove all of the bark and smoothly gild or enamel the whole surface.

The screen, suspended from the upper crosspiece, is a fringed silk rug woven on a hand loom, as old-fashioned carpets were woven. It falls freely from the top, its own weight keeping it in place, but it might be tied to the standards—half way down and at the upper corners—with bows of braid, soft ribbon or with heavy tassel-tipped cords, or a smaller rug without fringe might be suspended by gilt rings and finished at the bottom with a row of tassels in mingled shades.

In a small apartment, where the radiator is an objection, hang on the wall over it a large picture, placing before the unsightly heater a screen of not too high dimensions. If a space is too large for your picture, hang on either side a bracket, on which place a quaint jug or jar.

For a sewing-room, or, in fact, any apartment where the weekly mending is done, a darning screen is wonderfully commodious. Its conveniences consist of two capacious pockets, to hold stockings or any garment fresh from the laundry and needing attention; a handy shelf whereon to place one’s sewing, a tidy little cushion with scissors and loosely swung by ribbons to one side.

ORNAMENTAL SCREEN.

It is a delightful bit of property to serve one, while seated at an open window in summer time or upon an upper veranda with one’s work, looking out over the sea with the perfume of flowers in the air.

Trim the skeleton screen to harmonize with the fittings of the room.

A carpenter constructed the framework for the two panels, with the bar across the top, and the little shelf for twenty-five cents. The pine used was an old packing box. The panels must be three and one-half feet high and eighteen inches wide, made of strips three inches broad. The shelf should be eight inches wide and twelve inches long.

Four yards and one-half of chintz in cream-tinted ground, sprinkled with Dresden nosegays gaily dashed with pink and delicate green color, eight cents a yard. Four grades of delicate pink silesia and two and one-half yards of unbleached muslin for interlining, made an item of fifty cents. Hinges and corners and nail-heads of brass, satin ribbon and tacks, by considerable calculation, can be pressed into the amount of seventy-five cents.

A Saturday morning industriously spent in the upholstery of the little screen presented it in completeness.

Screens can be used to protect from drafts of air, by day or night, to keep the sun from an exposed spot on the carpet, to shade the light from weary eyes, to temporarily close archways that have no doors, and to conceal a door that is not often used. They will divide a large room into two small ones when a sudden influx of company arrives, or even close in a corner for the same hospitable emergency. They make delightful nooks in sitting-rooms for the little folks’ playhouse, or they may screen off, from the morning caller, a temporary sewing-room in the back parlor, and in sleeping-rooms, occupied by more than one person, a cosy dressing-room may be made by their use.