EMBROIDERY, the art of producing ornamental needlework-patterns upon fabrics of any kind. This art is coeval with the earliest and rudest manufacture of hair and woolen fabrics. It was one of the most important of the early arts in oriental countries, where it is still practiced with great skill and diligence. It is common among most savage tribes that wear any kind of clothing. The blanket-wrapper of the red Indian is commonly ornamented with E,; the Laplander embroiders upon the rein deer skin that forms his clothes patterns worked with needles of reindeer bone, and thread of reindeer sinews and strips of hide. It is practiced as a domestic art in our own country by all classes, from the princess down to the pauper school-girl, and is carried on in large manufactories by very elaborate machinery.
The Chinese are perhaps the most laborious and elaborate hand-embroiderers of mod ern times; their best work is upon silk. The figures are either in colored silk alone, or in silk combined with gold and silver thread; the figures of men, horses, dragons, etc., being outlined with gold cord, and filled up colored and shaded with silk. The Per sians, Turks, and Hindus also still excel in E. ; they use, besides silk and gold and silver thread, beads, spangles, pearls, and precious stones. The dress-slippers of Turk ish women of all ranks are elaborately embroidered, usually with a precious stone or a glass bead in the middle of the toe-part of the slipper, and a radiating pattern in gold. silver, or brass wire and silk surrounding it. The Turkey carpet is a sort of embroidered fabric. See CARPETS.
Some of the oriental and Indian embroideries include in their work a great variety of materials besides those above mentioned; feathers are largely and very tastefully used; the skins of insects; the nails, claws, and teeth of various animals; nuts, pieces of fur, skins of serpents, etc., are among these. Coins, which are so commonly used as ornaments for the hair of unmarried women in the east, are sometimes also worked into their dresses with the embroidery. This is especially the case with the Turks and Georgians. The Indian women embroider with their own hair and that of animals.
Tapestry is a kind of E., formerly done with the needle, but now chiefly with the shuttle. This kind of work is, in fact, intermediate between E. and weaving, and it is somewhat difficult to determine under which it should be classed, but in accordance with the definition given above, we shall only include needlework under E., and tapes try will be separately treated.
For hand-embroidery, the fabric is usually stretched upon a frame, and the design to be worked is drawn upon it, or some other contrivance is used to guide the worker. If the fabric is sufficiently thin and open, a colored drawing or engraving may be placed behind the and followed with the needle. A sheet of thin transparent paper, with lines upon it corresponding to the threads of the canvas to be worked upon, is sometimes used; this is secured by gum or wax to the drawing; and the design is cop ied by observing the number of small squares occupied by each color, and filling in the corresponding meshes of the canvas. which is a kind of E., is done in a similar manner, the pattern being an engraving on which the lines corresponding to the thread are printed, and the meshes filled up with the required colors, painted in by hand, by women and children, who copy it from the original design of the artist. The name has been given from the fact, that the best patterns have, since 1810, been pub lished by Wittich, a printseller of Berlin.
In France, pricked patterns are sometimes used, one for eaeli color, and colored pow• tiers are dusted through the holes upon the fabric to he worked.
All these devices render the art of E. a mere mechanical operation, requiring no further artistic skill or taste than is exercised in knitting stockings; but when the embroidress draws the design in outline upon the fabric, and works in the colors with her needle under the guidance of her own taste, E. becomes an art that might rank with water-color drawing or oil-paintiug; and it is to be regretted that so much time should be devoted by ladies to the mechanical, and so little effort made in the direction of truly artistic embroidery.