Traditional Embroidery

Traditional Embroidery

Women folks in tribal areas especially in Pakistan have their no match in embroidery skills. The house wives and the rural women remain busy in showing skills on canvas. Now a day it has become a profitable business. Some NGOs are getting lot of profit out of it. But the benefit does not trickle down to the deserving women worker who actually deserve and must be paid up their worth and for their skills. The middleman has become a great mafia. It requires strict action otherwise poverty alleviation specially wide spread amongst women in the third world developing countries will remain a dream.

Embroidery is the art or handicraft of decorating fabric or other materials with designs stitched in strands of thread or yarn using a needle. Embroidery may also use other materials such as metal strips, pearls, beads, quills, and sequins. Sewing machines can be used to create machine embroidery.

The origins of embroidery are lost in time, but examples survive from ancient Egypt, Iron Age Northern Europe and Zhou Dynasty China. It has many roots all around the world and is being done in many different ways because of their cultures.

Embroidery is classified according to the use of the underlying foundation fabric. One classification system divides embroidery styles according to the relationship of stitch placement to the fabric.

In free embroidery, designs are applied without regard to the weave of the underlying fabric. Examples include crewel and traditional Chinese embroidery.

Counted-thread embroidery patterns are created by making stitches over a pre-determined number of threads in the foundation fabric. Counted-thread embroidery is more easily worked on an even-weave foundation fabric such as embroidery canvas, aida cloth, or specially woven cotton and linen fabrics although non-evenweave linen is used as well. Examples include needlepoint and cross-stitch.

A second division classifies embroidery according to whether the design is stitched on top of or through the foundation fabric:

In Surface embroidery, patterns are worked on top of the foundation fabric using decorative stitches and laid threads. Surface embroidery encompasses most free embroidery as well as some forms of counted-thread embroidery (such as cross-stitch).

Canvas work threads are stitched through a fabric mesh to create a dense pattern that completely covers the foundation fabric. Not all canvas work is counted-thread embroidery. There are printed and hand painted canvases where the painted or printed image is meant to serve as a color guide. Stitches are sometimes of the stitcher's choosing.

An important distinction between canvas work and surface embroidery is that surface work requires the use of an embroidery hoop or frame to stretch the material and ensure even stitching tension that prevents pattern distortion. Canvas work tends to follow very symmetrical counted stitching patterns with designs developing from repetition of one or only a few similar stitches in a variety of thread hues. Most forms of surface embroidery, by contrast, are distinguished by a wide range of different stitching patterns used in a single piece of work.