Miscellaneous Definitions — accessories, trims, tools and general fashion terms from Apparel Search
Needlework is another term for the handicraft of decorative sewing and textile arts. Anything that uses a needle for construction can be called needlework, and the definition is often broadened to include work made with tools other than a needle when the result and tradition belong with the needle arts. It is the umbrella term over a family of crafts — sewing, embroidery, needlepoint, quilting, applique, lace making and more — united by thread, patience and the hand-guided stitch.
Needlework is another term for the handicraft of decorative sewing and textile arts. Anything that uses a needle for construction can be called needlework. The definition is often expanded to include craft using a long and thin tool, such as crochet hook and tatting shuttles.
Needlework includes (among others):
Crochet, including Filet crochet
Lucet
fabric Making
Marbling on fabric
Silk painting
Smocking
Royal School of Needlework: The International Centre of Excellence for the Art of Hand Embroidery since 1872. Based at the magnificent Hampton Court Palace we offer a thriving education programme for every level. We teach at venues across the UK in Bristol, Birmingham, Rugby, Durham and Glasgow as well as internationally in Dublin, America and Japan. Our renowned Embroidery Studio expertly restores and conserves valuable and historical embroidered pieces and creates stunning bespoke embroidery for fashion, art and royalty.
Loose Needles for Knitting Machinery
| The above article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/needlework). 5/29/06 |
Every family of crafts needs a name for the whole family, and needlework is that name for the arts of the needle. Under it sit dozens of named techniques, each with its own tools, stitches and traditions: embroidery in its regional and historical forms, from crewel and blackwork to goldwork; canvas work and needlepoint; counted cross-stitch; quilting, in which layers are stitched into a single warm textile; applique, in which shapes are sewn onto a ground; smocking, drawn-thread work, cutwork, whitework, lace made with a needle, and the decorative hand sewing of the heirloom tradition. What unites them is stated in the broad definition: a needle is the constructing tool, thread is the material, and the result is both useful and ornamental — decoration carried out by the same instrument that joins a seam.
The breadth is deliberate and sometimes extends further. The definition is often broadened beyond the literal needle, because crafts such as crochet (worked with a hook), knitting (worked with two or more needles, which keeps it inside the term comfortably), tatting (worked with a shuttle) and lacemaking with bobbins grew up in the same hands, the same workbaskets and the same tradition of domestic textile art. Shops, guilds, magazines and exhibitions that serve one of these crafts generally serve them all under the needlework banner, and a needleworker's skills transfer: tension, counting, finishing and an eye for thread behave alike across the whole family.
Needlework was for centuries a core part of girls' education and women's skilled labor, taught at home and at school, and its teaching artifact survives everywhere: the sampler, a cloth on which a learner stitched alphabets, verses, patterns and a repertoire of stitches as both practice and proof of skill. Beyond education, needlework clothed households in made and mended garments, produced the embroidered textiles that marked wealth and ceremony, and in many periods was professional work as well as domestic — guild embroiderers, quilters and lacemakers supplied courts and churches. The modern craft revival treats needlework as art and recreation, with contemporary stitchers using the traditional vocabulary of stitches for work their great-grandmothers would recognize in technique and not in subject.
For reference purposes the term's generosity is the point. A dictionary user who meets an unfamiliar stitch art — a piece of bargello, a smocked dress, a whitework collar — may not know its specific name, but needlework places it correctly: hand textile art made with a needle, part of the decorative sewing tradition, to be looked up under its own specific term once identified. The umbrella holds because the crafts beneath it share tools, materials, skills and a continuous shared history.
Needlework is the handicraft of decorative sewing and textile arts. Anything that uses a needle for construction can be called needlework, from embroidery and needlepoint to quilting and applique.
Embroidery in its many forms, needlepoint and canvas work, counted cross-stitch, quilting, applique, smocking, drawn-thread and cut work, and hand sewing of decorative kinds are all needlework. Knitting and crochet are sometimes included by extension, though they use their own tools.
Sewing is the practical joining of cloth, while needlework emphasizes the decorative and artistic side of work with a needle. The fields overlap: fine hand sewing, such as heirloom sewing and dressmaking finishes, is often classed as needlework.