Costume Word of the Week – Crewel Work Embroidery

CWotW – Crewel Work Embroidery

“Crewel is the art of embroidering by hand with wool thread on linen fabric.”
~ Wool & Hoop

“Crewel Embroidery, or Crewelwork, is a decorative form of surface embroidery using wool and a variety of different embroidery stitches to follow a design outline applied to the fabric. The technique is at least a thousand years old. It was used in the Bayeux Tapestry, in Jacobean embroidery and in the Quaker tapestry.”
~ Wikipedia

“Although crewelwork often used outlined compositional aids in order to guide the stitching, it could equally be constructed without any guides, or only basic and roughly drawn guides, allowing the crewel worker an element of creative freedom, adding details as they progressed.”
~ The Textile Blog

You can find fabric that is already embroidered. The most common is a linen or cotton heavy fabric that has a wool flower motif usually done with a chain stitch. I’ve also found one that’s a cotton velvet with wool embroidery in the same chain stitch. They make great looking period jackets and gowns, but can also add just a bit of detail to a pair of sleeves, a forepart, a stomacher or hat.

My favorite book on Crewel Work Embroidery is A-Z of Crewel Embroidery. The detail of how to do the stitches and examples used is AMAZING. I also like how they don’t just tell you what color to use and what stitch, they also tell you what order to go in.

I used this to do the embroidery on the back of CJ’s F&I coat. Of course it wasn’t real crewel work, as it was cotton DMC floss on a wool coat, but the effect is quite similar.

You don’t use just one stitch in crewel. You use a variety of stitches and combine them to make an amazing assortment of textures. It’s a very free-form kind of embroidery. Russ Ellis once described it as “Painting with thread.” And those words are what really broke down the barriers in my mind of “doing it wrong” because it’s pretty hard to do it wrong, just not the way someone else would have.

You can also find some great videos online at places like YouTube that have instructions on how to do Crewel work, like the one I found here:

Now it’s possible, but difficult, to find crewel embroidery kits at say JoAnn’s and Michaels. But you can find them online. Which is where you’ll probably have to go to get additional wool thread. The needlework shop that used to be close to my house went out of business as the owner retired a few years ago, so I’ve still got some supplies, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about Hedgehog Handworks. If you do crewel work embroidery and you have another supplier, I’d love to hear about them. Please leave the info in a comment below!