ine. There is this hope for them, that the monotony of machine-made
things produces in the end a reaction in favour of handwork--provided
always it gives us something which manufacture cannot. Possibly also
there is scope for amateurs and home-artists in that combination of
embroidery and hand-weaving with which the power-loom, though it has
superseded it, does not enter into competition.

[Illustration: 90. SIMPLE COUCHING ON LINEN.]

It is not so much for geometric ornament as for simple pattern that I
here make my plea, for that reticent work of which so much was at one
time done in this country--mere back-stitching, for example, or what
looks like it, in yellow silk upon white linen; or the modest diaper,
archaic, if you like, but inevitably characteristic, in which the
naivete of the sampler seems always to linger; or again, the admirably
simple work in Illustration 89. This last does not show so delicately in
the photographic reproduction as it should, because, being in grey and
yellow on white linen, the relative value of the two shades of colour is
lost in the process. In the original the broader yellow bands are much
more in tone with the ground, and do not assert themselves so much. Such
as it is, only an artist could have designed that border-work, and any
neat-handed woman could have embroidered it.

Think again of the delicate work in white on white, too familiar to need
illustration, which makes no loud claim to be art, but is content to be
beautiful! Is that to be a thing altogether of the past now that we have
Art Needlework? Art needlework! It has helped put an end to the patience
of the modern worker, and to inspire her too often with ambitions quite
beyond her powers of fulfilment.

What one misses in the work of the present day is that reticent and
unpretending stitchery, which, thinking to be no more than a labour of
loving patience, is really a work of art, better deserving the title
than a flaunting floral quilt which goes by the name of "art
needlework"--designed apparently to worry the eye by day and to give bad
dreams by night to whoever may have the misfortune to sleep under it. Is
anyone nowadays modest enough to do work such as the couching in outline
in Illustration 90? Yet what distinction there is about it!

EMBROIDERY DESIGN.

Perfect art results only when designer and worker are entirely in
sympathy, when the designer knows quite what the worker can do with her
materials,