Embroidery Definitions — definitions of embroidery techniques, stitches and needlework terms from Apparel Search
Tapestry names a woven textile tradition, and on Apparel Search the word also gathers the celebrated embroidered cloths defined in this section — the Bayeux tapestry and the Quaker tapestry — together with needlepoint. A further fashion-industry use of the name is noted here as well: the company behind Coach handbags changed its corporate name to Tapestry.
Guess who changed their corporate name to tapestry? Do you know the Coach brand handbags, etc. Yes, the company behind Coach changed their name to tapestry.
True tapestry weaving builds a picture the slow way: the design exists only as colored weft threads packed down on a loom, each color carried only where the design needs it, so the finished cloth is the image, front and back, with no ground fabric underneath. Gobelins and Aubusson wall hangings are the classic European products — insulation, status and narrative in one heavy textile. Stitched picture cloth reaches a similar visual end by the opposite route: a finished linen ground receives a design in thread, which makes it lighter, faster to work at large scale, and able to mix techniques — laid work, couching, appliqué — across a single panel. History gave both products the same popular name, and museums still live with the ambiguity: the Bayeux and Quaker works are catalogued under tapestry by everyone, and defined as embroidery by anyone describing how they were made.
Tapestry has become a general metaphor for anything woven from many strands — a life, a history, a brand portfolio. The fashion group's adoption of the name follows that metaphor exactly: separate brands as separate threads, one corporate cloth. For the textile reader the older meanings remain the load-bearing ones, and this section keeps them distinct: woven tapestry as a loom technique, the Bayeux and Quaker cloths as embroideries that carry the name by tradition, and needlepoint as canvas work that carries it by resemblance. Knowing which sense is in play on any given page prevents the commonest error in the subject — describing an embroidered cloth as woven, or crediting a loom with work done by a needle.
Needlepoint's claim on the tapestry name deserves its own note, because in Britain the craft is still widely sold as tapestry: kits of wool, canvas and a printed or painted design, worked in tent stitch until no canvas shows. The resemblance that earned the name is the finished surface — a dense, pictorial textile with the weight and presence of a hanging. Technically the two could hardly differ more, one woven thread by thread on a loom, the other stitched square by square through a ready-made mesh, yet hung side by side they serve the same decorative purpose.
No. Both are embroidery: their designs are stitched in wool onto a linen ground, the Bayeux cloth in laid work and stem stitch and the Quaker panels in crewel embroidery. True tapestry is woven, with the design formed by the weft threads of the loom itself — the shared name is historical usage, not technique.
Tapestry is the corporate name adopted by the company behind Coach handbags and related brands. The change took a word long associated with woven and embroidered picture cloth and applied it to a fashion group built of distinct brands, much as a tapestry is built of many threads.
Needlepoint is canvas work often called tapestry work in Britain, stitched in wool through an open canvas mesh — embroidery again, not weaving. Its counted, fully covered surface imitates the dense picture surface of woven tapestry, which is how the tapestry name attached itself to it.