Crewel embroidery

Crewel embroidery is decoration of surface embroidery with the help of wool and embroidery stitches. The art is some thousand years old. The word crewel is originated from an ancient word that means curl in the staple. The wool used in the crewel is of fine quality. Crewel is an art of stitching by hand using thread and wool

The crewel embroidery is usually done on finely woven fabric generally on linen and cotton. Since the stitches of crewel embroidery is very heavy hence the fabric used in it needs to be very strong. Generally the crewel embroidery is done with the help of particular crewel needles and chenille needles. The design is turned on piece of fabric by sketching the outlines on the fabric with the help of sketching pens. The crewel embroidery designs ranges from traditional to contemporary.

Crewel embroidery is very colorful as different crewel stitches are turned on in crewel work to make it more enriching and colorful even the threads used in crewelwork are finer and thicker this makes the embroidery more visible and dimensional. Some stitches used in crewel work are like, split stitch, satin stitch, stem stitch and chain stitch these stitches are used with different purposes like, stem stitch to create outline form, satin stitch is done to fill flat areas in a design. There is one more stitch called seed stitch which is used with the purpose of creating shaded effect.