Caroline Zoob - Hand-stitched home: embroidered inspirations, ideas, and projects

To Caroline Turner and Miranda Money for their unfailing friendship and support

Man is primed to want to decorate a blank surface, whether by placing handprints on the walls of Neolithic caves or by embroidering linen burial cloths for the mummified dead in the Egypt of 2000 BC. The Book of Exodus in the Bible is full of references to embroidery.

Little domestic embroidery survives from before the fifteenth century, and yet it is not hard to imagine that it was used to decorate and add comfort in the simplest of homes for many centuries before.

Today many people associate embroidery in the home with the piles of embroidered tray cloths, doilies, and antimacassars made from patterns published in womens magazines in the first half of the twentieth century. Today our interiors are simpler, yet there is still a place for embroidered detail. It can be as simple as a white flower on the edge of an upholstered chair or a line of running stitch along the edge of a stripe. Conversely, a sparely furnished room with a neutral color palette can be transformed by one or two richly embroidered surfaces. The aim of this book is to suggest ways in which you can add embroidered detail to your home, whatever your personal decorating style may be.

Three small whitework flowers along the edge of the seat of this antique French chair echo the carved decoration on the back of the chair and introduce an embroidered touch to an otherwise austere room.

A vintage directors chair has been given new life with chair backs made from antique French linen, decorated with a simple stylized white flower appliqud to one side.

Inspiration When you decorate a room you gather swatches of fabric, scraps of carpet, little cards of paint colors to set the tone for how you want the room to look. You should also do this when you are thinking of starting an embroidery. Collect materials that will inspire a beautiful design, such as threads, buttons, little frames, old greetings cards and scraps of lace. Keep them around you when you begin to plan how you want your work to look. What works for me is to always have a row of little bottles on my workroom windowsill, in which I display flowers or leaves on stems. The more you surround yourself with pretty colors, textures, and natural finds, the easier you will find it to embroider. Most important of all though is to keep your eyes open to spot the things around you that you can visualize captured in stitches.

An arrangement of garden flowers in my workroom ready for sketching.

A collection of laces, threads, buttons, and fabric is gathered in preparation for starting a new piece.

Material The choice of fabric on which to embroider is very important. I have to confess here a love of antique French linen sheets: from the fine ones with their immaculate monograms worked by nuns to the rough hemp ones with their subtle, slubby weaves. The colors of the sheets vary hugely and they are never truly white. Very often the color and texture of a piece of old linen will be enough to inspire a particular embroidery, such as happened with the .

Not everyone has access to antique linen. If you are buying new fabric, try to find a fabric with a bit of life and texture to it. Many of the fabric houses have started to produce lightweight linens designed to have the look and feel of old fabric, and these are wonderful for embroidery. If you have to use new fabric, wash it at the hottest temperature recommended to pre-shrink it; there is nothing worse than washing your finished work and finding that the material shrinks and your embroidery does not.

Ready-made trims such as this vintage French piping are useful for projects such as the . There are replicas available in a variety of colors.

clockwise from top left: You can find sections of lace at vintage fairs or online. Even the smallest of pieces can be reworked into something lovely; Hanks of handspun linen thread could be embroidered on an open-weave base fabric; A pile of antique linen sheets in various shades of white and buff; Vintage linen threads. Stitching in coarser linen thread gives a more organic, natural look which works well in contemporary interiors.

Collecting fabric for appliqu I consider appliqu to be a form of embroidery and for this technique it is really important to collect as many scraps as you can. Before you give clothes away, think about whether they might not be useful for appliqu. Tell friends that you are collecting fabrics. Remember that the tiniest scraps could work, and the more worn and faded the fabric, the better. It is a good idea to sort them by color/type: red checks, blue stripes, solids, etc. Sometimes you might find fabric in the most unexpected places: for example, the little piece of folded linen in the was the selvage from a piece of nineteenth-century beige-and-ivory ticking I found at a flea market.

Having your own workroom is a luxury, but if you cannot set aside an entire room try to have a closet or set of drawers where you can keep your fabrics and threads in order. The compartmentalized containers sold in hardware shops are useful for this.

A drawer full of antique French mattress tickings, so called because the tight weave kept the ticks out. With their strong weaves and faded colors, and endless variations on a striped theme, they can be used to offset embroidery, or decorated with stitching.

Colors A recent television documentary I watched claimed that no two people see color in the same way. Color is all important in embroidery. The finest stitching in the world will be off-putting if done in garish colors. This is one of the problems with all those dish towels and chair protectors from the 1930s: the curious predilection for combining lilac, orange, ultramarine, bright yellow, and cerise with greenery veering more to the turquoise than the lovely yellowy greens of nature. Very occasionally you find one of these cloths where either the colors have faded over the years, or, even better, the embroiderer eschewed the recommended colors and went off on a frolic of her own, using more subtle colors.

When you start an embroidery, after you have chosen your base cloth, lay out your threads and select the colors. Have the confidence to follow your own preferences. This is one reason why I have not given specific thread color references in this book. One tip when buying embroidery threads: look at them in the natural light. For some reason sewing supply stores are given to burying their carousels of threads in the deepest recesses of their shops, and as the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, Colors seen by candle-light will not look the same by day. For this reason, also, while you might only have time to embroider at night, choose your colors in the daylight hours. There is nothing worse than discovering that you have embroidered half your picture using a different green from the one you started with because when rooting around in your work basket in artificial light it was difficult to tell the difference.