l stitches
by the plainest and least mistakable names? It will be seen, if we
reduce them to their native simplicity, that they fall into
fairly-marked groups, or families, which can be discussed each under its
own head.

Stitches may be grouped in all manner of arbitrary ways--according to
their provenance, according to their effect, according to their use, and
so on. The most natural way of grouping them is according to their
structure; not with regard to whence they came, or what they do, but
according to what they are, the way they are worked. This, at all
events, is no arbitrary classification, and this is the plan it is
proposed here to adopt.

The use of such classification hardly needs pointing out.

A survey of the stitches is the necessary preliminary, either to the
design or to the execution of needlework. How else suit the design to
the stitch, the stitch to the design? In order to do the one the artist
must be quite at home among the stitches; in order to do the other the
embroidress must have sympathy enough with a design to choose the stitch
or stitches which will best render it. An artist who thinks the working
out of his sketch none of his business is no practical designer; the
worker who thinks design a thing apart from her is only a worker.

This is not the moment to urge upon the needlewoman the study of design,
but to urge upon the designer the study of stitches. Nothing is more
impractical than to make a design without realising the labour involved
in its execution. Any one not in sympathy with stitching may possibly
design a beautiful piece of needlework, but no one will get all that is
to be got out of the needle without knowing all about it. One must
understand the ways in which work can be done in order to determine the
way it shall in any particular case be done.

Certain stitches answer certain purposes, and strictly only those. The
designer must know which stitch answers which purpose, or he will in the
first place waste the labour of the embroidress, and in the second miss
his effect, which is to waste his own pains too. The effective worker
(designer or embroiderer) is the one who works with judgment--and you
cannot judge unless you know. When it is remembered that the character
of needlework, and by rights also the character of its design, depends
upon the stitch, there will be no occasion to insist further upon the
necessity of a comprehensive survey of the stitches.

A stitch may