With a history exceeding 2,000 years, Suzhou embroidery is considered the "pearl of oriental art" for its beautiful designs, varied stitches, superb workmanship and elegant colors. There's a sort of embroidery art that deserves the excellence of handicraft —— it's the famous “Double Sides Embroidery” (DSE).As we may understand from its name, DSE is embroidery that we can see and enjoy from both sides. It uses a unique needling technique different from the ordinary embroidery:
The needle in the embroidery girl's hands flies up and down through the background silk. As the needle moves, more and more floss silk is laid out vertically and horizontally, gradually giving the shape to a cat on the obverse side. Meanwhile, (note: it's simultaneous) a cat is appearing on the counter side, and the two cats are completely identical.
The even more sophisticated technique is that while a cat is embroidered on one side a dog can be given shape simultaneously on the reverse side. It really makes many people feel inconceivable. This unique embroidery handicraft is the very pride of Chinese Embroidery. It comes out of hands of embroidery girls from Suzhou, giving expression to Water Towns' female's aesthetics feelings and their yearnings for an exquisite, graceful and harmonious and beautiful life.
Embroidery, as a handcraft, has a history of more than two thousand years in China. The ancient Chinese royal families demanded lots of silk embroidery apparels and decorative articles which stimulating the embroidery art to evolve toward excellence. More than 100 years ago, DSE needling was invented by several Suzhou masters of embroidery handicraft, and now DSE has become a symbol of Chinese folk handicraft and are presented to VIPs visiting China as the gifts of our republic.
Traditional DSE is especially good at displaying animals and its representative work is cat. Embroidery girls make a very thin colorful floss silk into even thinner threads. At most, a thread of floss silk can be divided into 16 sub-threads so that the material disposition of animals' downy hair and the liveliness of expression in their eyes can be incarnated with intensive and various needling techniques.
Along with the continuous development and enrichment of DSE needling techniques, especially after the invention of “random needling”, the content that DSE can display has been greatly broadened. Persons, animals, scenery, flowers, birds and architectures have all become the subjects of DSE, and photos and paintings can be duplicated into embroidery works.
