Jacobean embroidery

Jacobean embroidery refers to embroidery styles that flourished in the reign of King James I of England in first quarter of the 17th century.

The term is usually used today to describe a form of crewel embroidery used for furnishing characterized by fanciful plant and animal shapes worked in a variety of stitches with two-ply wool yarn on linen. Popular motifs in Jacobean embroidery, especially curtains for bed hangings, are the Tree of Life and stylized forests, usually rendered as exotic plants arising from a landscape or terra firma with birds, stags, squirrels, and other familiar animals.^[1][2]

Early Jacobean embroidery often featured scrolling floral patterns worked in colored silks on linen, a fashion that arose in the earlier Elizabethan era. Embroidered jackets were fashionable for both men and women in the period 1600-1620, and several of these jackets have survived.

Often based on tree of life imagery, curving branches with large flowers were a typical design. Early crewel embroideries exclusively used wool thread on linen (modern crewel embroidery encompasses a broader range with the only requirement being extensive use of crewel stitch variations).^[3]

Jacobean embroidery was carried by British colonists to Colonial America, where it flourished. The Deerfield embroidery movement of the 1890s revived interest in colonial and Jacobean styles of embroidery.

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  Pattern of a slip with flowers taken from a 17th-century embroidered curtain^[2]
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  Design of a leaf from a bed curtain dated 1659, worked in blue, green, and yellow worsted wool yarn on linen.^[1]
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  Sketch of a leaf worked in indigo, brown, and light green^[1]
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  Portion of a 17th-century hanging "with a conventional representation
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  Embroidered wool-work curtain of the 17th or 18th century^[2]

• 1600–1650 in fashion
• Crewel embroidery
• Margaret Laton's embroidered jacket
• Christopher Shawe
• Oes

• Christie, Mrs. Archibald (Grace Christie), Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving, London, John Hogg, 1912, online at Project Gutenberg
• Fitzwilliam, Ada Wentworth and A. F. Morris Hands, Jacobean Embroidery, Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor, Keegan Paul, 1912

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jacobean embroidery.

• Surviving Jacobean embroidered jacket as the Museum of Costume
• Jacobean Embroidery, by Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands, 1912, from Project Gutenberg