of it is "laid-work," at which we arrive thus almost by
necessity.

[Illustration: 46. LAID-WORK SAMPLER.]

It involves no new stitch, but is only another way of using stitches
already described. In laid-work, long tresses of silk, as William Morris
called them, floss by preference, are thrown backwards and forwards
across the face of the stuff, only just piercing it at the edges of the
forms, and back again. These silken tresses are then caught down and
kept, I will not say close to the ground, but in their place upon it, by
lines of stitching in the cross direction.

Laid-work is not, at the best, a very strong or lasting kind of
embroidery (it needs to be carefully covered up even as it is worked),
but by no other means is the silky beauty of coloured floss so perfectly
set forth. It is hardly worth doing in anything but floss.

Laid-work lends itself also to gradation of colour within certain
limits--the limits, that is to say, of the straight parallel lines in
which the silk is laid: the direction of these is determined often by
the lines of sewing which are to cross them. In any case the direction
of the threads is here more than ever important. The sewing down must
take lines and may form patterns.

The sampler, Illustration 46, wants little or no explanation. It
illustrates the various ways of laying. In the leaf the floss is sewn
down with split-stitch, which forms the veining. Elsewhere it is kept in
place by "couching," a process presently to be described. For the
outlines, split-stitch and couching are employed. The last row of laid
work in the grounding is purposely pulled out of the straight by the
couching in order to give a waved edge. The diaper which represents the
seeding of the flower is not, properly speaking, laid-work: single
threads of white purse silk are there couched down with dark.

[Illustration: 47. JAPANESE LAID-WORK.]

For the transverse stitching, for which also it is best to use floss,
either split-stitch may be used, as in the leaf in the sampler,
Illustration 46, or a thread may be laid across and sewn down--couched,
as it is called--as in the flower. The closer the cross lines the
stronger the work, but the less lustrous the effect.

Laid floss may be employed to glorify the entire surface of a linen
material, as in the sampler or for the pattern only upon a ground worth
showing, as in Illustrations 47, 48, 49.

Laid-work will not give anything like modelling, and it is no