[EMBROIDERY FOR GIRLS.]
BY SUSAN HAYES WARD.
No. VI.
I am sure the girls who read Harper's Young People know better than to ask, as a lady did of me last summer, "Is that worked in the Keniston stitch?" First, the lady blundered, in forgetting—if indeed she had ever known—that the Royal School for Art Needle-Work is at South Kensington, England; and secondly, she fell into the mistake—which I want especially to warn my girl readers against—in supposing that there is any one stitch called the Kensington stitch. All good embroidery stitches are or should be South Kensington stitches.
A few years ago, while embroiderers here in America were counting the spaces on pieces of canvas, or carefully pushing needles in and out of the holes in perforated paper, pupils and teachers of the new English school were studying out the many stitches they could find in old embroidery, and were introducing them into their work. The so-called "Kensington" stitch is merely a form of stem stitch, taken always in a manner to fit the leaf or flower to be wrought. Its proper name is "feather stitch," because the threads are made to look as if they lapped over one another, like the feathers of a bird's plume. Opus plumarium was its old Latin name. Besides reviving a number of old stitches and introducing very many choice designs, the Royal School of Art Needle-Work has taken great pains to secure suitable materials to work on, and wools and silks of good quality and color with which to work. For the stitch is not the all-important part of embroidery. No matter how even and true the stitches, if the color or design is poor, the work will look shoppy, and not artistic. You wish any one who picks up your work to know at a glance that it is not the handiwork of an ignorant shop-girl, but of a cultivated little lady, and it is by the design and colors you choose that you show whether your eye and taste have had good training.
Fig. 18.
For a good lesson in color pick out from a bunch of wools the greens that seem to you a suitable leaf-color. Then bring in a few leaves from the lawn or garden and lay them beside your wools, and see if the greens you have chosen are not much too vivid. One of my scholars who made this experiment some time ago chose the green of a Brazilian beetle's wing, a color that is only needed in embroidery to give brilliancy to a bug or to a bird's plumage. The greens of nature are a great deal grayer and duller than those you will be likely to choose at first. As for design: In the shops you will find, perhaps, stamped on a single table-cover daisies, buttercups, cat-tails, clovers, wild roses, and grasses, a confused and irregular mass; leave out all but one, keep your clover, for example, and only the leaf of that. Take a real clover leaf, lay it on a piece of paper, and trace it off, with a closed leaf perhaps crossing the stem; then stamp, according to directions in embroidery article No. II., page 75, Vol. II., a row of these, three or four inches apart, across the ends of a piece of crash or linen for a little stand-cover, and draw lines for a finish above and below, as in Fig. 18. Match the color of the leaf as nearly as possible in crewel, and then work around the outer edge of the leaf, taking a long and then a shorter stitch (see A), so that the stitches will be even on the edge of the leaf, but irregular on the inside, and all point toward the stem; leave the light space, and beginning at the stem, work a few lines of stem stitch radiating from the stem, with a few extra stitches filled in where the lines spread apart. A good way to fill in these extra stitches is to bring the needle back, pointing toward the stem as at B. Afterward fill in the light space by putting the needle in and out, pointing the stitches toward the stem, but taking them irregularly according to the space.