I received a dictionary of pulled thread stitches for my birthday last year. Unfortunately for me, it's written in French. The languages I studied at school were Engish, Afrikaans and Latin. I don't speak a word of French. Or Latin.
The first thing anyone says when I mention that the book is written in French is 'Just use Google Translate.' And certainly, I found the translations useful. It's when I got to the technical terms that things became less clear. One translation amused me. After all, does one really use 'wire' for pulled thread embroidery? I did sort that puzzle out pretty quickly though.
Mary Corbett's review of a needlelace book, translated from the original French, alludes to the tricky question of translating specialized embroidery terms in a meaningful way. I can see now that not only is a bilingual person required for the translation, but preferably one who is familiar with all the very specific terms too. You can see Mary's comments in her blog post here. Anyway, overall, I think I got a fair sense of what the text in my new book is covering.
The book itself is beautifully designed and a pleasure to page through and study. The graphics are clear and self explanatory. There are also diagrams of how the back of each stitch should look which is useful for making sure that you are working the stitch in the correct direction and the right sequence of the steps. The depth of information and care with which it is presented is remarkable. I'm just sorry that my photos don't do it justice.
The book covers the basic pulled thread stitches beginning with Satin stitch, goes on to Four-sided stitch, and includes Wave stitch, Faggot stitch and a few others. There are also many variations of these basic stitches, together with a photo of the stitched example. Finally there are combination stitches also with beautifully embroidered stitch samples.
The book Jours fils à resserrés by Marie-Helene Jeanneau was published in 2019 by Neva. Sadly Marie-Helene passed away the previous year. The book is labelled Volume 1. How I would love to have seen what she had planned for Volume 2.
Although I got the gist of the book and the stitch diagrams were clear and easy to follow, I would still like to be able to accurately interpret every word. I think there is a wealth of useful information and technical know-how tucked away in those (to me) unfathomable French terms.
I contacted the publisher to enquire about an English version of the book. He did say that there was an intention to translate it at a future date, and that it may be published by another publisher. I'll keep a lookout for that.
'Till next time, happy stitching!
How sad, and tantalising for readers, to die between writing two volumes! Perhaps you can enrol in a U3A French course and convince the tutor to work with you to translate the book, or find a French teacher who wants to learn embroidery. I do find photographs the most useful aide to learning a stitch, preferable to video because they don’t change.
ReplyDeleteLooks as if this is a gift that will go on stretching you.
Hi Jillian. Lots of food for thought in your comments, thank you. I did try learning some French when my daughter studied it at high school and then at university, but I didn't get very far. I think I'll leave it at that and just follow the stitch diagrams in the new book.
Delete