Fabric Decoration with Embroidery
Senior 2 · Fine Arts
Fabric Decoration with Embroidery
Lesson 1 of 5
18 min
Look at a school badge, the name stitched on a sports shirt, a decorated table mat or the neckline of a dress from a tailor's shop. Each one is embroidery: decorating fabric with stitches made by a needle and thread. Embroidery is found in almost every culture. Hausa tailors in northern Nigeria cover the chest of the great babban riga robe with spirals and a famous pattern called “eight knives”; Kuba women in the Congo embroider raffia cloth woven by men. Once you can stitch, you can decorate clothes, bags, cushions and wall hangings, and make items to give or sell.
Every embroidered design, however complicated, is built from two things: lines and areas. An outline stitch draws the shape, like a pencil line. A fill stitch colours it in, like paint. Many designs use both: the fill gives solid colour, and a neat outline worked around it hides any uneven edges and makes the shape stand out from the background.
Umutoni wants a sunflower about 6 cm across on her bag. She sorts each part of the design into line or area:
The famous Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry at all: it is embroidery, stitched in wool on linen in the 1070s, probably in England, and about 70 m long. It tells the story of the Norman conquest of England in 1066. In this scene a bishop blesses a meal. Look at the outlines of the figures, the table and the lettering: they are lines of small stitches. Now look at the coloured clothes and the lions below: long threads have been laid side by side to fill each area, then held down with short stitches across them.
Chain stitch can do both jobs. In this traditional Kazakh rug, rows of chain stitch outline every flower and leaf; inside the large pale flower, more rows of chain stitch follow the shape round and round until the whole area is filled.
Tip
Line or area? Before you choose any stitch, ask that question about each part of the design. Lines take outline stitches; areas take fill stitches. In the exam, name the stitch AND say why: “satin stitch, because the petal is a small area”.
Define outline stitch and fill stitch, and give one example of each.
Solution: an outline stitch makes a line, such as backstitch; a fill stitch covers an area, such as satin stitch.
Sort these parts of a bird motif into lines or areas: the body, the legs, the wing, the beak outline.
Solution: lines: the legs and the beak outline. Areas: the body and the wing.
Why do embroiderers often work an outline around a shape they have already filled?
Solution: the outline covers any uneven ends of the fill stitches and separates the shape clearly from the background, so it looks sharper.
Is the Bayeux Tapestry woven or embroidered? Explain how you know.
Solution: embroidered. The pictures were stitched onto a finished linen cloth with wool, using outline stitches for lines and laid threads for areas; nothing was woven into the cloth on a loom.
Remember
Sources and credits
