I think wool has to be prominent in crewel, though I incorporate other threads as well into mine. Since crewel was actually wool, then if it doesn't have wool, surely it would be just embroidery?
I am doing an all red cushion at the moment. It's floral, traditional, and I wanted to do the 'berries' in bullion knots. That's a nuisance in wool, so I did them with pearl cotton which makes them more berry-like and shiny, but I still feel the overall piece is still crewel - so where it begins and ends I don't know!
Perhaps it is like that old saying about what makes one promiscuous ? Someone who has done it one more time than you! Ergo, how many different threads makes it not crewel? lol
I also hated home ec. With 3 girls in my family we were taught to sew and cook early so I already knew the basics and that's all we ever did-cook hard boiled eggs, etc. and those gathered skirts! I was thrilled when my son had to take home ec in middle school and had to do laundry, etc. Having the school teach it made his jobs at home much more acceptable to him, not to mention how much better able he was to take care of himself later in life. I heard of a school somewhere where on of the requirements for all students was to take apart an electric motor and put it back together.
When my x and I were redoing an old farmhouse he did all the cool stuff, like wiring, carpentry, etc. and I got to make the curtains and occasionally was allowed to paint. After our divorce he went on to discover his interest in cooking and I discovered I loved woodworking.
When I was in grad school taking a women's lit class, the prof was all about elevating women's roles. She especially championed cooking, which I do not excel at and have little interest in. I asked what about women who do not fit the traditional women's model? She continued on her "Goddess" theme and never did address the blurring of gender roles. Of course there is the male chef, women cook, male tailor, woman seamstress thing.
I am thankful that my children have a more open view of gender roles in their lives.
I think some of it may also be about having to be dependent on someone else for things, like meals, or fixing things, or building things, or home finances. My mother and MIL were very ill equipped to handle daily life decisions, much less major ones, when their husbands died. Life never does turn out to be what we expected or prepared for does it?
Hi Cheryl, I'm sure you'll understand how frustrating it was to grow up in the 40's. My boy cousin was lucky enough to get an Erector Set for a gift and used to allow me, if I was very nice to him, to play with it. When I asked my parent's to buy me one they were horrified because girls didn't play with things like that.
I think I would have adored doing something in the engineering world. My husband did a lot of designing and drafting of circuit boards at home and I was always fascinated. He even let me actually watch over his shoulder make a suggestion on occasion, so I suppose I wasn't too bad at it and possibly could have learned properly. Remembering his personality, I'm sure if I said something very stupid he would have told me to bug off.
There's no such thing as 'just embroidery' ;-) Stitching grammarians would say you've done free style or surface embroidery.
I too have used pearl cotton as well as other threads that aren't typically used for hand embroidery. Matter of fact, instead of using the hard to work with rayon and metallic threads suggested for a design, I substituted multiple strands of Gutterman 'metallic' polyester thread. It was a joy to work with!!!
A relative in her 90's trotted out a piece I had done for her when I was about 6 - an embroidered thing of a Mexican kid in a serape - talk about sloppy! It came in its own green plastic frame and I think a companion piece came with it, but can't remember it. But she has treasured it lo these many years and I was touched that she hadn't heaved it long ago. Course, I still have a small jewelry box she brought me from Lake George when I was five and still use as a sewing basket a round woven basket she brougth from Canada.
Labeling, of course, is simply using a word so that someone else knows what you're talking about. Crewel embroidery is the simplest term for embroidering with crewel threads. It also conjures up images of Jacobean crewel, but the Bayeaux tapestry is also crewel embroidery (If I remember that correctly - crewel threads on linen).
Wool-on-wool embroidery is a peculiar type of embroidery which hails from Australia, but other regions of the country do wool-on-wool - just not like the Australians do it.
Part of the problem is that we are really unaware of so much because we usually just "do" what we have found we like to do (like cross stitch or canvas embroidery - using limited stitches), and we don't know what else is out there. It's a vast world of embroidery. After all, the word embroidery simply means to embellish. That can take many forms. Including combining genres (blackwork with drawn or pulled thread on a band sampler, as an example).
So the simplest answer is, "I embroider!" But even that, today, could mean machine or hand. A bank manager asked me the other day about my small business. She had no idea what embroidery was, and thought it must be like the machine embroidery on my jacket.
my first project; crosstitch, pattern was a teddybear sitting in a highchair. i still have it. i reframed it under glass. and yes it is my lil treasure from grammie.
Oh, indeed they did. Very slimy. Topped with butter, too. They turned an extremely horrid translucent colour. Every time I have a nice crisp Greek village salad, or a cucumber sandwich on brown bread with real butter (yummy), I am soooo thankful. Dawne
Much better way of doing things. My Grandson who is 5 years old learns to cook something (or at least helps) every Friday at his kindergarten class. I find that amazing ... and he loves it. He surprised his Mum with a rainbow cookie this past Friday. :-))
I actually learned something somewhat decent in cooking class. The instructor had us take a can of those refrigerator biscuits and make pizzas out of them by flattening out the dough. As long as the sauce and meat are cold ingredients, they turn out perfect. You just bake for the time specified for the biscuits. When I'm playing Aunt, we've had pizza night at our house and the kids got to customize their own pizza toppings.
Cooking was much better than the Sewing section of the Home Ec class, where somehow one girl managed to get her thumb caught under the needle on the sewing machine. Yeech!
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