Ancient Craft to refine motor skills

Embroidery is a very ancient art practiced by people in country sides of all over world and has origins in China and near East. Sewing actually gave way to fine skill of embroidery. People used this craft to consume time effectively and tastefully to decorate the clothing and house linens.

Embroidery: A forgotten Craft

Embroidery a forgotten craft to teach eye-hand coordination, concentration and fine motor skill, is on verge of becoming extinct from school syllabus. Patience, attention and development of well coordinated motor skill enhance focus and concentration.

This exclusive subject is replaced in schools by other easy and fast machines and techniques and have created a deficit of attention and controlled behavior.

Material needed for embroidery are cloth, needles, scissors and colorful threads. Basic stitches are running stitch, cross stitch, chain stitch and Satin stitch and so on.

Artisans create beautiful needlepoint quilts, throws and embellish the silk and cotton clothing with colorful embroidery. Sequins, beads, silk ribbons, fine gold and silver wires (Zardozi work) are used to embellish embroideries to make the piece more lavish and exquisite.

Embroidery: Sequin Work, Applique work and Satin Stitch

I was always fascinated with needlepoint work and tried my hands on it in grade 3 in school where I learned the fine art of embroidery. It takes lot of time and patience to start and complete the work.

I started with folding square handkerchiefs and then decorating one corner of it tracing beautiful small designs using carbon paper and butter paper and some small project designs from design books.

Choosing different thread colors to fill the design and learning new stitches for each design and patterns was fun. Freehand sketching, needlepoint and silk thread and mirror work were my favorite.

Continuous support from my mother in furnishing the required embroidery material at home, stitching the finished projects and scoldings from her to focus more on studies than embroidery, to save my eyesight, still looks just yesterdays conversations.

My eyesight is still my best companion! Recently started to have blurry vision, so outsourced thread filling across needlepoint, to my daughters for weekend projects:) I need to adjust my focus with a pair of glasses soon, to save my vision.

Embroidery Stitches

I have used following embroidery stitch techniques in different projects, created with silk, cotton, linen, muslin clothes, Canvas, matts, nets, using needlepoint and wood frame:

1. Satin Stitch work

2. Patch work

3. Mirror work

4. Shadow work

5. Button hole stitch

6. Cross stitch

7. Chain stitch

8. Sindhi Stitch

9. Smoking stitch

10. Katha Work

11. Lazy Daisy

12. Stem stitch

13. Back stitch

14. Knot stitch

15. Rose stitch.

Published inImage Journal·Following

Shikha Saxena

Jun 15, 2021·3 min read