g
straightness or impossible curve, it may keep all its interesting
characteristics, but it has to obey other requirements specially
necessary in the particular design. Another point to be noted is that,
since there is freedom of choice of flowers and other objects, only
those perfect and well-formed should be chosen; all accidents of growth
and disease may, happily, be omitted; if anything of this kind is put in
it helps to give the naturalistic look which is to be avoided. Both
sides of a leaf should match, though it may happen in nature, through
misfortune, that one is deformed and small.

In figure work, which, though ambitious, is one of the most interesting
kinds of embroidery, the figures, like all other things, must be treated
with a certain amount of simplicity; very little attempt must be made to
obtain flesh tones, roundness of form, perspective, or foreshortening.
The work should be just sufficiently near to nature to be a good
embroidery rendering of it. However, without overstepping the limits
there is a great deal that may be expressed, such things as character,
gesture, grace, colour, and so on, matters which are after all of first
importance. Detail, if of the right kind, may be filled in, but it is
wrong to attempt what is to the craft very laborious to obtain, for
this would be misdirected energy, which is great waste. A right use of
the figure can be seen in the XIIIth century embroidery pictures, which,
covering mediaeval church vestments, often display episodes from the
lives of the saints. These are some of the masterpieces of the art of
embroidery; observation of nature is carried to a marvellous pitch, but
the execution never sinks into commonplace realism.

Certain restrictions are always present, in making a design, that must
be conformed to, such as, the limit of space, the materials with which
the work is to be carried out, the use to which it will be put, and so
on. These, instead of being difficulties, can afford help in the way of
suggestion and limitation. A bad design may look as if it obeyed them
unwillingly--a form is perhaps cramped, perhaps stretched out in order
to fit its place, instead of looking as if it naturally fitted it
whether the confining lines were there or not. In the early herbals,
illustrated with woodcuts, examples can be found over and over again of
a flower filling a required space simply and well; fig. 23 is taken from
the herbal of Carolus Clusius, printed at An