Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The physicist J Robert Oppenheimer said of the structure of life and of the universe ‘It is not arranged in a line nor a square nor a circle but with a wonderful randomness suggestive of unending growth and improvisation’. What a reassuring sentence that is to embroiderers who long to be free to follow their own lines of thought and who (even in these days when one can say with some truth that needle- craft has burst beyond the narrow confines of yesterday) are all too frequently thwarted by friends and teachers who oppose originality. At this point a word of warning is necessary. No one can successfully experiment unless one understands with what one is experimenting. It follows therefore that a sound knowledge of traditional methods of embroidery and stitches is essential before one begins to overthrow all restrictions. Experimenting for experiment’s sake is most stimulating but the moment of truth can be a grim one if the experiment though dazzling to the eye and satisfying to the inventor is never going to lead to any- thing worthwhile. Those who have a practical turn of mind apart from the artists who realize that art serves no useful purpose deserve some consideration. After all it scarcely needs stressing that artists are in the minority. A large amount of creative work is done for domestic and ecclesiastical purposes and it is obvious that it must be reasonably durable and capable of being cleaned. There is a great deal of talk today about disposable embroidery and I do agree that some work should be considered as such but that which is supposed to be wearable should surely last for a season and since ecclesiastical embroidery is so expensive it is only reason- able to expect it to have a life of at least a decade. We must also consider posterity. Think how much our culture would have suffered if all the embroideries which were created hundreds of years ago had been disposed of. Is it then a vicious circle? Must creative and experimental work be regarded as an end in themselves? Of course not.