General embroidery

General embroidery

Frogging is a late twentieth century English (USA) language term referring to the unpicking of knitting or an embroidered motif, following a mistake or change in a design.

The ground (also called grounding) is the stitched background area to a decorative design. It should be distinguished from the term ground material. GVE

Grounding is a medieval and later English term (both UK and USA) referring to the stitched background area of a pattern. It is also called the ground.

Grounding is a nineteenth century English term referring to the act of filling in the embroidery background after the main pattern is worked.

Laid work is a form of embroidery that is very closely related to couching. Laid work normally has three or more layers of thread (while couching normally has two layers of thread).

Metal thread embroidery is a form of decorative needlework that uses one or more different types of metal thread. This type of work is much more expensive than using ‘normal’ threads, such as linen, silk or wool, and as a result is associated with status and wealth, whether it is secular or religious in nature.

Needleweaving is a form of drawn thread work that involves darning or re-weaving patterns on bare warp or weft threads. The term needleweaving is sometimes used for a form of decorative darning ("chicken scratch"). 

Needlework is an English term referring, during the medieval period, to a technique in which a linen ground was entirely hidden by stitches. From the sixteenth century the term ‘needlework’ was applied to canvas embroidery, whereby the ground is covered by cross stitch, tent stitch or a related stitch (counted thread work). The person (male or female) who carried out this type of work was called a needleworker.

A negative design is an artistic device whereby the design is formed by filling in the background to that design, rather than the design itself. The use of negative designs can be seen, for example, in Assisi embroidery and some forms of Fes embroidery. Also known as void work.

Outline work is a form of embroidery, in which only the outline of the design or pattern is stitched. The rest of the design is left ‘bare’, showing the ground material, or sometimes an applied piece of cloth. The stitches that are often used to work this style of embroidery include back stitch, chain stitch, outline stitch and stem stitch.

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