I hail from the East of the World – India. I have been studying various hand embroidery designing techniques and I found it interesting to note how culture, history, background so strongly influences the very essence of these patterns.

The Western techniques are also influenced by the above parameters and techiques like cutwork, flipflop, corvette, mardi gras embroidery designs emerge out to the world!

In the Eastern, apart from India a treasure of traditional embroidery comes in from China.  China is the first country in the world that discovered the use of silk for hand silk embroidery.    Silkworms were domesticated as early as 5000 years ago.  The production of silk thread and fabrics gave rise to this beautiful art of embroidery. According to the classical Shangshu, the “regulations on costumes” of 4000 years ago stipulated among other things “dresses and skirts with designs and embroideries”.    In 1958 a piece of silk was found in a tomb of the state of Chu of the Warring Sates Period (475-221 B.C).  It is hand embroidered with a dragon-and-phoenix design.  More than 2000 years old, it is the earliest piece of Chinese embroidery ever unearthed.

In 2005, I wrote about Photo or Embroidery Design – Hunan Silk Embroidery. Today, silk embroidery is practised nearly all over China. The best commercial products, it is generally agreed, come from four provinces: Jiangsu (notably Suzhou), Hunan, Sichuan and Guangdong, each with its distinctive features.   Embroidered works have become highly complex and exquisite today. Take the double-face embroidered “Cat” you see next to this post, representative work of Suzhou embroidery. The artist splits the hair-thin coloured silk thread into filaments-half, quarter 1/12 or even 1/48 of its original thickness– and uses these in embroidering concealing in the process the thousands of ends and joints and making them disappear as if by magic. The finished work is a cute and mischievous-looking cat on both sides of the groundwork. The most difficult part of the job is the eyes of the cat. To give them lustre and life, silk filaments of more than 20 colours or shades have to be used.  Recently, on the basis of two-face embroidery have developed further innovations– the same design on both sides in different colours, and totally different patterns on the two faces of the same groundwork. It seems that possibilities hitherto unknown to the art are still to be explored.

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