This is an I-Heart podcast.

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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

This is the second part of our episode about embroidery history, which I mentioned in part one is really a sampler because there is just so much history.

Part one took us up through the creation of one of the most famous pieces of embroidery in the world, that being the Bayou Tapestry.

And today we're going to pick right back up from there.

This isn't, because of its nature, necessarily one big connected narrative.

So you could probably listen to this one without hearing part one first.

You'll just miss the earlier instances of embroidery and history.

But we are going to jump right back into it,

and as promised, we will talk quite a bit about embroidery samplers today.

But first, we're going to talk about our literary reference to embroidery.

If you have read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, you might have noticed a mention of embroidery

in the passage about the Miller's wife, which describes her clothing.

Quote, of white, too, was the dainty smock she wore embroidered at the color all about with coal black silk, alike, within, and out.

This is a reference to a style of embroidery known as blackwork, which originally used black silk on white or off-white linen or cotton to create a dramatic contrast.

Over time, other colors have been used for black work, but it's often still in the darker color range to maintain that really sharp difference.

The reference to the collar's embellishment

being alike within and out has led to the belief that Chaucer was probably describing a style

of embroidery known as Holbein stitch. That's a double running stitch where you lay out your

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