Cutwork Embroidery by Machine

Cutwork embroidery is a beautiful form of needlework where portions of the background fabric are cut away and discarded, with the edges worked over in satin stitching.

There are many kinds of cutwork. The simplest form of cutwork is that which contains small open areas, such as eyelets, with no connecting bars.  Richelieu embroidery is cutwork that needs stabilizing bars worked within the cut-away designs.  The edges are connected by bars that are the same width throughout, except possibly on the edges. Traditionally satin stitch fillings were used in the design, and then the openwork was done, cutting away unnecessary background fabric to give a much lighter appearance.  When embroidering cutwork by machine the process is reversed, much like reverse appliqué, where the appliqué outline will be embroidered first, then the fabric cut away and then the remaining of the design will be embroidered.

Cutwork was originally done on linen and reached its zenith in the Renaissance.  Whitework was originally in the domain of nuns, but peasants were needed to help in the making of the church vestments and linens, and were bound to bring home the secrets and use them for their own personal house linens.   I certainly would have.

Cutwork was originally done on linen, not too fine a fabric, and the nuns were known to remove threads from the linen to make the work "lighter".  That was the beginning of drawn work.

From the Ionian Isles and Corfu comes another type of openwork in which buttonholed bars were connected to the edges across a linen surface.  This linen insert was afterward removed and was later known in Venice as Reticella.

Cut work was so called because the background was later removed.  This caused the astonishing discovery of the century that the background linen was not needed at all–the stitches could be built up by themselves.  PUNTO IN ARIA, literally "a stitch in the air" was born.

Cutwork designs with machine embroidery are quick and easy and the results can be very stunning. My daughter came home from Paris a few years ago with a beautiful blouse that cost a fortune. It had a beautiful cutwork design on the back, which was the reason for her purchase. Looking at that blouse, I realized I could do something very similar using machine embroidery techniques. I very quickly became a “Parisian designer” by replicating the cutwork techniques on that blouse, much to my daughter’s chagrin, thinking she had something very unique from Paris.

The moral of that experience is that with machine embroidery, we can do almost anything that used to be done laboriously by hand!

If you want to learn more about cutwork embroidery, be sure to take a look at my Studio monthly March cutwork lesson. But remember, it will only be available until the end of this month!