title: Jacobean embroidery
text: # 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.
  
  ## Origins
  
  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.
  
  ## Designs
  
  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).
  
  ## Legacy
  
  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.
  
  ### Gallery
  
  * Pattern of a slip with flowers taken from a 17th-century embroidered curtain
  * Design of a leaf from a bed curtain dated 1659, worked in blue, green, and yellow worsted wool yarn on linen.
  * Sketch of a leaf worked in indigo, brown, and light green
  * Portion of a 17th-century hanging "with a conventional representation
  * Embroidered wool-work curtain of the 17th or 18th century
  