thread. They can
easily be made to overlap like fish scales, and most elaborately
embossed pictures have been worked in this way. There is a vestment in
the cathedral at Granada which is a marvel to see; but not the thing to
do, surely.

Relief is easily overdone, in figure work so easily that one may say
safety is to be found only in the most delicate relief. To make figures
look round is to make them look stuffed. That stuffy images are to be
found in mediaeval church work is only too true. In Gothic art one finds
this quaint, perhaps, but it is perilously near the laughable. The point
of the ridiculous is plainly overpassed in English work of the 17th
century, which degenerates at last into mere doll work--the dolls duly
stuffed and dressed in most childish fashion, their drapery, in actual
folds, projecting. Some really admirable needlework was wasted upon this
kind of thing, which has absolutely no value, except as an object-lesson
in the frivolity of the Stuarts and their on-hangers.

QUILTING.

A most legitimate use of padding is in the form of QUILTING, where it
serves a useful as well as an ornamental purpose. To quilt is to stitch
one cloth upon another with something soft between (or without anything
between). Our word "counterpane" is derived from "contre-poinct," a
corruption of the French word for back-stitch, or "quilting" stitch, as
it was called.

If you merely stitch two thicknesses of stuff together in a pattern,
such as that on Illustration 69, the stuff between the stitches has a
tendency to rise: the two layers of stuff do not lie close except where
they are held together by the stitching, and a very pleasantly uneven
surface results. This effect is enhanced if between the two stuffs there
is a layer of something soft. If, now, you keep down the groundwork of
your design by comparatively frequent stitches diapering it, you get a
pattern in relief, more or less, according to the substance of your
padding.

Another way is to pad the pattern only, as in Illustration 70, where the
padding is of soft cord.

[Illustration: 69. QUILTING, DONE IN CHAIN-STITCH FROM THE BACK.]

A cunning way of padding is first to stitch the outline of the design,
and then from the back to insert the stuffing. You first pierce the
stuff with a stiletto, and, having pushed in the cord, cotton, or what
not, efface as far as possible the piercing: the stuffing has then not
much temptation to escape from its con