1 post tagged “needlework”

I was looking through vintage needlework books one day last week - notably Thérèse de Dillmont's Encyclopedia of Needlework from 1884, which covers pretty much everything you can do with thread from basic hand-sewing through knitting and crochet to amazingly complex lacemaking and embroidery. The book is sprinkled with DMC product placement, since they published her, but except for a couple illustrations out of order, the instructions and diagrams are clear, readable, and understandable, and she defines all her terms so you don't have to go in with a pre-existing knowledge of 19th-century British knitting jargon.

A couple things surprised me - I noticed at least three techniques that I'd thought were fairly recent innovations, and certainly aren't widely known in the relevant communities today, but there they were in a 125-year-old book presented as basic skills everyone should have in their repertoire:

- Gridding the fabric of a large needlework project. She describes it for canvaswork, but it's definitely applicable to "linen embroidery". Most of the LiveJournal cross_stitch community were mystified when we were instructed to do this for a stitch-along project, but it's really caught on.

- Stitching on waste canvas to work counted embroidery on plain cloth, apparently such a common thing that she didn't even explain the concept, just gave a couple helpful tips. I suspect a modern product designed to be easily removed from under the embroidery is much easier to use than standard needlework canvas (or not, giving that I've heard people grouse about how hard pulling the threads out is), but even with the product available, many stitchers are unfamiliar with the technique.

- The "foundation single crochet", even if she called it "plain stitches for a chain" - Doris Chan has popularized the technique (if you know it, you probably learned it from the "special stitches" section of a pattern she wrote) and I'd thought she invented it because I'd never even heard of it through years of crochet until I came across it in several of her patterns. Apparently not. (This is why noted knitter Elizabeth Zimmermann referred to many techniques and designs she developed as having been "unvented", on the premise that they must have been done before but were lost to common knowledge.)

It's also interesting to note that many of the colors of DMC products are still sold under the same shade number they were in 1884 - and that "Cordonnet 6 fils pour Crochet" is now "Cordonnet special", but the sizes that are still available match the vintage sizes. Now that I know this, I'm trying to decide if I'm insane enough to put "work a length of vintage lace to trim up an otherwise-boring garment" on my 2009 goal list.