Crewel embroidered greeting card

I recently discovered crewel embroidery, which has a lovely, thick texture because you use wool yarn instead of regular embroidery floss. Crewel is also typically done on linen.

I used a design from the book “The New Crewel” by Katherine Shaughnessy, which offers a fresh and modern take on a very old needle art form.

Please see this week’s related post on crewel embroidery wall hangings here.

Crewel embroidery wool can be a little hard to find. This seems to have been a dying pastime, only recently resurrected for a new and more modern life. Try Wool and Hoop online. I live in the biggest city in New Mexico and couldn’t find any at any of the needlework shops in town. I did find some in a small yarn shop in Santa Fe, about an hour away. It came in small skeins that ran about $1 each. Each skein would really last quite some time. The yarn is 3-ply, and you strip it down to 1-ply at a time.

Shortly thereafter, I just happened across a HUGE bag of crewel yarn at a thrift store in town! What a find. It was only a couple of dollars for the whole bag. I was disappointed later to find that about half of it was synthetic “crewel” yarn and not the genuine wool. I’m a bit of a snob, whether I’m knitting or doing crewel, but I still got lots and lots of wool yarn for next to nothing!

The book gives basic crewel stitch techniques, which are more or less like typical embroidery stitches. The texture of crewel work is lovely and rich.