The Art of Chainstitching
The Art of Chainstitching
One thread, one needle, and one hand turning a crank under the table.
There is a kind of embroidery that no computer has ever managed to match, and the reason is simple. A person is drawing it, live, one line at a time, and you can see that in the finished thing from across a room.
What a Chain Stitch Is
A chain stitch is one continuous thread looping through itself. Each loop catches the next one, and the line it leaves has a raised, ropey texture that sits up off the cloth and catches light.
It is one of the oldest stitches there is. Archaeologists have found chain stitch embroidery in China dating back to the fifth to third century BC, and it turns up across the world, from Iranian suzani to Hungarian folk embroidery, because it handles curves beautifully.
The Machine From 1865
The machine everybody still uses was developed in France by an engineer named Antoine Bonnaz in 1865. Ercole Cornely refined it in Paris and produced it at his own factory, and the machines took his name.
Here is the part that matters. The cloth does not move. The needle does. Under the table there is a hand crank, and the operator turns it to rotate the needle in any direction they want while feeding the fabric with the other hand.
So the machine does not execute a design. A person draws the design with thread, freehand, in real time, and the line goes exactly where their hands take it.
Cornely machines won prizes at the Paris Expositions Universelles in 1889 and 1900. They were exported everywhere, even to Switzerland, which was already famous for embroidery. They ran as the industry standard through the Victorian era and well into the 1970s.
Moss Stitch
The same machine makes a second stitch called moss stitch, which is an unsecured chain stitch produced by reversing the looper and the needle hook. It piles up rather than laying flat, which is where the plush chenille texture on a varsity letter comes from.
Most great patch work uses both. The moss stitch fills the shape and the chain stitch outlines it and locks it down.
Why It Never Got Automated Away
Computerised embroidery arrived and took nearly everything else. It did not take this, because the value was never the stitch. It was the hand.
A chain stitch artisan is drawing. The weight of a line changes because their wrist changed. A curve is smooth because they turned the crank smoothly. Two of the same patch made by the same person are close but never identical, and that is the point of the technique rather than a limitation of it.
It takes years to get good. Most people who try it never get past lettering.
Where We Use It
Our ART Edition varsity jacket is stitched entirely this way. Every patch on it is drawn first and then chain stitched by an artisan in Japan who has spent twenty five years at this one craft.
The chain stitching alone takes four days. The back patch takes four hours on its own. The ship that carries USA and Japan takes another four hours by itself.
Over twenty hours of needle and thread, on one jacket, by one pair of hands. There is a full post on the journal about that jacket and what goes into it.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
the ART Edition Chain Stitched Varsity Jacket
Related Reading
What Fashion Design Really Is When You Do It Right