White Threads

When you look at stitches on old embroideries, you come to realise something: there is often more than one way to make a particular stitch.

For something as simple as cross stitch, there is more than one way to do it. Basically, you just need to make a cross.

You can do \ first, and / second.

You can do / first, and \ second.

You can do all the / / / / / / stitches first, and then come back along the line with the \ \ \ \ \ \ stitches.

You can do all the \ \ \ \ \ \ stitches first, and then come back along the line with the / / / / / / stitches.

You can have them crossing any which way. (The cross stitch police haven’t always existed! I have seen lovely old examples of cross stitch in museums that have the stitches crossing any way they please.)

All of these variations make cross stitch. All of them *can* be said to be right (though some people’s sensibilities do not like the any-which-way version). Sometimes one will be better in a certain situation than others.

And so it is when I am looking at old embroideries, trying to identify stitches. I may find a stitch that has a few variations on how it is made. Which one is correct? And how could I know?

I can’t really know for sure, but what I can do is look at the historical examples that exist and see which method was used the most. This might be the “correct” version. Or it might not.

Why might they differ?

In times past, most people were probably learning the stitches from someone else. That person would have learned it from someone else, and they would have from yet another person. Very few people would have had access to a stitch dictionary to teach them the “correct” way to do it (though even a stitch dictionary would have what I call *a* correct way, not necessarily *the* correct way). And so, like whispers that change as they pass along the line of people, the stitch method may have also changed a little as it passed along the line of people. And each time, the stitch method would have been passed on to the next person as the “correct” way.

This still happens today. Students take their teachers word as gospel (as fallible as we teachers are!). The number of times I have heard “[insert name of respected embroidery teacher] taught me to always do it like this”…! And for that student, the way they were taught becomes the “correct” way.

Personally, for me, the “best” way to do a stitch is the one that creates the “best” result. And even that is subjective. When I’m working Hardanger embroidery, I like my needlewoven bars to be very narrow. I like them to be this way because having studied many old historical pieces, I know that this is the way they were historically done. So the way I teach them is to make them nice and narrow.

Many of my students, however, have had previous teachers who have taught them to make them as wide as the kloster block they are adjacent to. And so, for them, this is the correct way.

So how do you know what is the “right” way, and which method you should use?

If you want to be true to an historical style, use the method that best emulates the historical appearance. If you are just “being creative” with little regard to any historical roots, then use the method that most suits the effect you are trying to achieve. The “right” way is the one that most suits your purpose.