Bead Embroidery Chinese Style

By Yu Han

A delicate craft that has been handed down for thousands of years, bead embroidery was popular among the aristocrats in China's imperial courts and is an important part of modern haute couture, wedding dresses, and other accessories.A step-by-step guide to 25 unique embroidery designs, Bead Embroidery Chinese Style incorporates traditional Chinese design elements, including landscape paintings, bird and flower motifs, and famous poems. Projects are both beautiful and useful, and are simple enough for embroidery beginners.Readers will learn about:•The different bead embroidery tools, techniques, and materials•Over a dozen embroidery stitches for single-bead, multi-bead, free stitches, layered stitches, and more•Small-scale embroidery projects, including jewelry, coasters, pouches, and silk scarves•More advanced projects, including makeup bags, lamp covers, and wall art.Author Han Yu is one of the world's leading experts on bead embroidery. She studied at the prestigious Ecole Lesage, part of Chanel's Metiers d'art, in Paris, and regularly produces pieces for Shanghai and Paris Fashion Weeks, state dignitaries, and celebrities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shanghai Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781938368684

Book preview

PREFACE

Fig. 7 Bead embroidery work desk. At the bottom are hook needles.

In my bead embroidery class, I found students generally fell into two categories: those who are interested in bead embroidery and want to enrich their lives by making with their own hands some of the small practical embroidery items, and those who work as designers in the textile industry and other related professions. Some would like to use bead embroidery for their haute couture or shoes and handbags, and others want to use it for custom-made luxurious wall paper and screens. Although embroidery is not as difficult as it seems, I find students who excel are always those who are patient, humble and have good aesthetic taste and creative energy, regardless of their original intentions.

Fig. 8 Small items of bead embroidery.

To learn bead embroidery, you must have patience: patience to learn and practice until you master the basic stitches with embroidery needles. Only after you have laid a solid foundation can you begin to use different techniques with ease and reach certain height through practicing. When you first take the needle in hand, you might think it is easy: a simple act of thread and needle. However, when you actually work with it, you will find it is not that easy to control the needle, in particular the French needle with a hook that catches easily on the fabric. Feeling downcast is not going to help. What you need is take your time and be extremely focused on your work. You should also have proper respect for beauty. All beginners should start with stitches using hand sewing needles. You must practice until you are at ease with controlling the space between beads or sequins before selecting a simple decorative item in the elementary coursework to embroider. When you finish your first piece of embroidery with your own hand, your confidence and interest will grow. Having mastered a variety of techniques, you will be able to create bead embroidery works of your own, from simple to more complicated ones.

Humility is the second quality that a good embroidery learner must have. Humility here means more than simply learning from your teachers and others about their skills, experiences and ways of thinking. It also means that you will learn from life and the natural world. If you want to embroider a landscape painting, for instance, your work will have to reflect the fluidity and lightness of water, and the mountain, by contrast, has to be solid and heavy. If you want to embroider a bird, you shall have a clear picture of its posture and which part you want to accentuate. It won’t work if you make its wings the way as it is flying while making its body bulge as when it is sitting still. Such knowledge comes from your observation of everyday life. Mountains and waters, grass and flowers and birds, they all follow their natural paths of life so they exist harmoniously in this world. Try to feel with your heart the beauty of these things: their color, structure, proportion, and then ask yourself: what make them beautiful? You will also look at things that are not so beautiful, and ask yourself: why are they unpleasant to the eye? Is it a problem of proportion? Or is it because of a lack of focus? By so doing, you will learn to draw your own conclusions about the laws of harmony and beauty.

Fig. 9 Spools of threads.

Observation of daily life and the natural world is also an important way to elevate your aesthetic taste. Nature is generous in its offerings: the vibrant colors in summer, the lush green on the verge of bursting in spring, the orange, yellow and red—colors of harvest in the fall, and the silver-colored winter. You won’t see anything if you are oblivious to your surroundings. Try to enjoy your life with your heart and soul; to feel the changing colors and shifting lights in nature. Besides, learning from the essence of both Eastern and Western cultures is also an effective way of elevating your aesthetics. To me, the Chinese culture is a treasury where I can draw inexhaustible resources, ranging from ancient legends and mythologies to the four arts of Chinese scholars (i.e., lute-playing, chess, calligraphy and painting); from historical tales to folk arts, from the poetic imagery of poetry and prose to the artistic conception of ink and wash paintings. All this that constitutes the extensive and profound, ancient and mystic nature of oriental culture came from things in the natural world and survived the turmoil of history and the test of time. Such colors, landscape and stories are ultimately melt into the work of an artist’s needles and threads. Vibrant and colorful threads and beads come alive on the fabric, recording the embroiderer’s reflection of the world and life. Works of art as such require both the work of the brain and the hands, but it is more demanding on the brain. Good aesthetic taste will help the designer truthfully transfer his or her conception to the embroidery. If you are like a sponge, willing to absorb beauty from all spheres of life, needles and threads will become your friend and your paint brush. With the assistance of your fingers, these tools will capture the inspirations that come to you and help you materialize the colorful dream of yours into a three-dimensional work of art on a tiny piece of fabric.

A good learner of embroidery shall go beyond simply imitating others or following a fixed pattern of certain element. He or she shall be imaginative and able to use different materials and techniques for expression. Thinking out of the box will help you create works and expressions of your own. Representations demonstrating flexibility and change and richness in colors and materials, as well as a strong narrative appeal, have always been the criteria for judging a piece of bead embroidery work and a designer. When creating a bead embroidery work, you have to adopt a divergent style of thinking and decide what materials and what stitches to use and how they match in the representation. You have to be aware of the narrative line and point of view you want to convey. Try to take the first step by observing life around you and accumulating source materials, and you will experience the joy and freedom of creation.

The road to embroidery has both pleasures and challenges. It cultivates your patience, tests your observation, refines your taste and stimulates your desire for improvement. The reward for such effort is generous. Through tireless practice you will learn to convey your ideas more accurately and develop a more rigorous control over what to use and how to use the tools and materials till you reach the height you desire.

This illustrated book includes projects that are based on European style of embroidery but imbued with Chinese elements. As a result, each piece of work exudes a unique combination of Western and Chinese elements. To help students working at different stages of bead embroidery learning, we divide the content of this book into elementary and advanced work. Beginners will start with simple but beautiful small items such as a broach and a coaster. They will hone their skills and improve their tastes as they work along. For those who are more advanced, they will find inspiration from the rich assembly of multilayered flowers in the decorative embroidery painting and thus turn the process of imitation into an artistic work of their own.

Regardless of whether you want to kill time with needles and threads, or to embroider a beautiful garment or a piece of decoration for your friend, or you simply love embroidery, you will be able to turn out, using your dexterous fingers, a splendid piece of work and retain the beautiful memory of creating it. This book is meant for everyone who loves the art of embroidery and I hope that they will benefit from this silent communication with me.

Fig. 10 Hibiscus Flower

Outlining the petals of hibiscus flowers and the leaves using threads and beads while leaving some blank space in the picture renders the embroidery in good taste and a sense of purity and affection.

CHAPTER ONE

The Charm of Chinese-Style Bead Embroidery

Fig. 11 The Paradise Flycatcher

In Chinese culture, the paradise flycatcher is a bird that has a long life. This embroidery depicts a paradise flycatcher resting on the branch of a tree. It is both active and restful, full of vitality.

Bead embroidery is handcrafted using needles and threads to sew materials such as sequins, pearls, glass beads and seed beads on top of embroidery fabrics with pictures or designs either painted or drawn on them. The themes of such pictures or designs can be realistic or abstract but the completed bead embroidery is a three-dimensional work of art. Compared with traditional embroidery, bead embroidery features an artistic expression with dazzling beads, layered textures and an additional dimension. It outshines traditional embroidery because of the magnificent glamor it exudes and is capable of expressing both trendy European styles and the classic elegance and profound underpinnings of an Eastern nation and its culture.

The European style of embroidery is characterized by French bead embroidery. Unlike traditional Chinese bead embroidery, which works mainly with both hands on the front side of the fabric incorporating threads and beads, French bead embroidery is usually done with the front side of the fabric facing down, with a hooked needle working on the back side of the fabric while one hand pushes up the bead or sequin from the other side. This type of hooked needle first originated with a technique used in India: it had a small, bent tip at one end and was wrapped with strips of cloth at the other end. The cloth wrap was later replaced by plastic and wooden handles. The hook was used to create chain-like patterns. This type of Indian embroidery was later exported to the Persian Gulf in the Middle East and eventually arrived in Europe in the 18th century. This method is known as Tambour in Europe and the technique was used for a great deal of chain stitches in embroidery. Tambour, which is a French word, means a technique that requires the fabric to be stretched tightly in a frame so as to generate the tension needed to embroider chain stitches. The frame could be round or rectangular. By 1865, a local embroidery shop in France named Louis-Bonnechaux Ferry began to add beads and sequins to his embroidery. This innovation sparked a boom in the development of French embroidery, which later spread quickly to other regions in Europe. With new opportunities brought about by economic development, a change in fashion consumption and the re-surging popularity of beads, embroiderers worked day and night to meet the demand of the fashion world where high-end beaded haute couture became the new norm. As a result, people started to produce large amounts of such embroideries, from mills and workshops in urban areas to almost every household in rural areas.

French embroidery stresses the study of embroidery materials such as pearls, refined shells, diamond and even gold chains. The threads it employs go beyond the traditionally-used silk. Threads of linen, cotton and wool are frequently applied. What is unique about French embroidery is that even when the same materials are used, a series of different effects can be generated such as individual lines, filling patches and adding a new dimension. Therefore, styles in stark contrast could be created by applying the same materials.

Chinese bead embroidery is derived from Chinese embroidery. China has a long history of embroidery that dates back to the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). As the craft of embroidery developed and progressed, more complicated techniques and crafts evolved and beads were incorporated into embroidery. In the Han Dynasty (202 BC–AD 220) beads were found to have appeared in embroidery; by the Tang Dynasty (618–907) ways of embroidery expression became very sophisticated. Works of embroidery at that time already looked majestic and dazzling. Records in Tongdian (Comprehensive Statues), China’s first encyclopedia, show that artists and entertainers in Beijing’s entertainment venues wore elaborate costumes, all embellished with beads and jades. According to a Tang Dynasty novel named Duyang Zabian (A Miscellaneous Collection from Duyang), bead-embroidered quilt covers were found in the imperial palace. On those covers pearls as small as millets were used to embroider mandarin ducks and floral patterns that were so colorful and brilliant. Bead embroidery never failed to make its appearance during successive dynasties in Chinese history. It became an indispensable element in the imperial courts and on the garments and ornaments of aristocrats as well as in rituals and ceremonies. Today, designated as a Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage by the government, traditional Chinese embroidery is forging ahead to keep abreast of the times. Traditional art of bead embroidery is also being applied in high-end haute couture as well as theatre, film and TV costumes and props. Gaining momentum now is the marriage of bead embroidery and the fashion industry, which integrates embroidery art into practical uses for daily life. Such a trend testifies to people’s respect for traditional culture and their wishes to carry it forward, as well as to the spirit of contemporary artisans who are striving to carry forward this time-honored profession.

Traditional Chinese embroidery boasts refinement of craftsmanship, smoothness of embroidery, as well as ingenious skills in bringing to life the birds, flowers and landscapes depicted. French bead embroidery, however, takes advantage of a variety of materials to achieve the texture and dimension, giving it versatile forms and powerful expressions as well as the tension from combining these materials. Embroideries that combine the delicate refinement of Chinese bead embroidery with the glamor of French embroidery will certainly take on unrivalled charm. Chinese embroidery also tries to innovate and make breakthroughs by absorbing techniques from French and Indian embroideries to create new styles. These efforts not only show to the world the beauty of the Chinese innovation but also pay tribute to the ancient craft of a few thousand years and aim to protect and carry forward the techniques nearing the brink of extinction. Projects in this book, featuring themes of traditional Chinese cultural