Contemporary Embroidery Design by Joan Nicholson

Author:Joan Nicholson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

70 Though these birds are all composed of simple triangles, variety of species can be suggested by altering their posture

71 On a bold striped fabric a large piece of contrasting material is applied with an amusing embroidery suitable for a child’s room

In the past the women who worked these embroideries had much more leisure than women of today, and since life went at a much slower pace generally they did not consider it extraordinary to spend several years on one piece of work. Today the type of design we choose will need to demand a lot less time spent on the working. A subject similar to these historic examples may be chosen, but the design needs to be such that the technique involved in the execution is less laborious. In this respect appliqué, with the addition of a certain amount of stitchery, gives a rich effect and is appropriate on many articles today that would in the past have been solidly embroidered. The use of counterchange can also provide a rich effect with a simple design. A cushion could be made with the back and front of two different colours. For instance, one half could be black and the other white, with the same design in white on the black, and vice versa. In Elizabethan times, in no case were both sides of a cushion or pillow embroidered. Today, when the design is not so ponderous and the execution not so tedious, it is very satisfactory to be able to reverse the cushion and have a variation of colour or design on the back. This counterchanging of colour and design has many possibilities, especially when embroidering larger articles. A cot cover could be divided into small squares of patchwork of two colours and a simple motif used throughout, the colour only changing from square to square. In canvas work counterchange is also very attractive, especially when using small repeating patterns, perhaps for a stool top or a chair seat. In many cases the most effective embroideries have not a great deal of variety of shape and incident, but are the ones where one or two simple shapes are used again and again in variations of a few interesting colour combinations. Sometimes they merely rely for their effect on the decorative pattern produced by repeating a motif over a large area, together with the wonderful variety of texture a few intelligently used stitches can produce (45, 77-79).

One of the most important things that help us to start doing creative embroidery on our own is to see what has been done, and is being done today, by various individuals up and down the country.

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