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74. PART OF A DESIGN BY WALTER CRANE.

The use of shading in embroidery is rather to get gradation of colour than relief of form. As to the stitch to be employed, that is partly a personal matter, partly a question of what is to be done. The stitch must be adapted to the kind of shading, or the shading must be designed to suit the stitch. It makes all the difference in the world, whether your shading is deliberately done, or whether one shade is meant to merge into another. In the best work it is always done with decision. There is nothing vague or casual, for example, about the shading of Mr. Crane's animals on Illustration [74]. Everywhere the shading is drawn, either in lines or as a sharply defined mass. Given a drawing in which the shadows are properly planned and crisply drawn like that, and you may use what stitch you please.

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75. SHADING IN CHAIN-STITCH.

The more natural way of shading is to let the stitches follow the lines of the drawing, and so make use of them to express form, as with the strokes of the pen or pencil upon paper. Thus, in mediæval figurework prior to the 15th century, the faces were usually done in split stitch, worked concentrically from the middle of the cheek outward, and so suggesting the roundness of the face (Illustration [87]). But just as there is a system of shading according to which the draughtsman makes all his strokes in one direction (slanting usually), so the embroidress may, if she prefer, take her stitches all one way; and in the 15th and 16th centuries the fashion was to work flesh in short-satin stitches always in the vertical direction (Illustration [79]). The term "long-and-short-stitch" is frequently used by way of describing the stitch. It does not, as I have said, help us much. The stitches are in the first place only satin-stitches worked not in even rows, as in Illustration [40], but so that there is no line of demarcation between one row and another. And this, in the case of gradated colour, makes the shading softer. The words long-and-short apply strictly only to the outer row of stitches. You begin, that is to say, with alternately long and short stitches. If you work after that with stitches of equal length, they necessarily alternate or dovetail. If the form to be worked necessitates radiation in the stitching, there results a texture something like the feathering of a bird's breast (Illustration [85]), whence the name plumage-stitch, another term describing not so much a stitch as the use of a stitch.

No matter what the stitch, one must be able to draw in order to express form: it is rather more difficult to draw with a needle than with a pen, that is all. True, the designer may do that for you, and make such a workmanlike drawing that there is no mistaking it; but it takes a skilled draughtsman to do it.