Embroidery Design
When I first began my career as an embroidery sketcher in 1974, artwork was sketched by hand with a charcoal pencil. In those days up until the 1990s, the embroidery industry operated much as it did in the early years of the 20th century.
When a drawing was approved by a client, the charcoal drawing was turned over and recorded by making a rubbing. The design was numbered and rubbed off in a large book consisting of blank pages.
Embroidery artists used a whalebone stay from a Victorian corset, which had one end sharpened, to rub the back of the sketch into the ruboff book. These altered stays were known as 'rubbing bones'.
The drawing was then given to the embroidery sample maker. She also rubbed the sketch onto her fabric using the same method, and filled in the open areas with stitches to create her sample. Nowadays embroidery design and manufacturing is done via computer...and mainly overseas.
Here are few samples from my old rubbing book.
When I first began my career as an embroidery sketcher in 1974, artwork was sketched by hand with a charcoal pencil. In those days up until the 1990s, the embroidery industry operated much as it did in the early years of the 20th century.
When a drawing was approved by a client, the charcoal drawing was turned over and recorded by making a rubbing. The design was numbered and rubbed off in a large book consisting of blank pages.
Embroidery artists used a whalebone stay from a Victorian corset, which had one end sharpened, to rub the back of the sketch into the ruboff book. These altered stays were known as 'rubbing bones'.
The drawing was then given to the embroidery sample maker. She also rubbed the sketch onto her fabric using the same method, and filled in the open areas with stitches to create her sample. Nowadays embroidery design and manufacturing is done via computer...and mainly overseas.
Here are few samples from my old rubbing book.
