Satin-stitch must not be too long, and it is often a serious consideration with the designer how to break up the surfaces to be covered so that only shortish stitches need be used. You might follow the veining of a leaf, for example, and work from vein to vein. But all leaves are not naturally veined in the most accommodating manner. Treatment is accordingly necessary, and so we arrive at a convention appropriate to embroidery of this kind. It takes a draughtsman properly to express form by stitch distribution. The Chinese convention in the lotus flowers (Illustration 40) is admirable.
[Illustration: 39. SATIN-STITCH IN FINE TWISTED SILK.]
It is the rule of the game to lay satin-stitch very evenly. Worked in floss, the mere surface of satin-stitch is beautiful. A further charm lies in the way it lends itself to gradation of colour. Beautiful results may be obtained by the use of perfectly flat tints of colour, as in Illustration 40; but the subtlest as well as the most deliberate gradation of tint may be most perfectly rendered in satin-stitch.
[Sidenote: TO WORK SURFACE SATIN-STITCH.]
SURFACE SATIN-STITCH (not the same on both sides), though it looks very much like ordinary satin-stitch, is worked in another way. The needle, that is to say, after each stitch is brought _immediately_ up again, and the silk is carried back on the upper instead of the under side of the stuff. Considerable economy of silk is effected by thus keeping the thread as much as possible on the surface, but the effect is apt to be proportionately poorer. Moreover, the work is not so lasting as when it is solid. The satin-stitch on Illustration 58 is all surface work. It looks loose, which it is always apt to do, unless it is kept stretched on the frame, on which, of course, satin-stitch is for the most part worked. Very effective Indian work is done of this kind--loose and flimsy, but serving a distinct artistic purpose. It is to embroidery of more serious kind what scene painting is to mural decoration.
[Illustration: 40. CHINESE SATIN-STITCH.]
Embroidery is often described as being in "long-and-short-stitch," a term properly descriptive not of a stitch, but of its dimensions. Whether you use stitches of equal or of unequal length is a question merely of the adaptation of the stitch to its use in any given instance; there is nothing gained by calling an arrangement of alternating stitches, "long and short," or by calling them "plumage-stitch," or, which is more misleading, "feather-stitch," when they radiate so as to follow the form, say, of a bird's breast. The bodies of the birds in Illustrations 40 and 85 are in plumage-stitch so called. This adaptation of stitch to bird or other forms gives the effect of fine feathering perfectly. But why apply the term "satin-stitch" exclusively to parallel lines of stitches all of a length?