One of my neighbours has asked me to help her with the translation of a French embroidery book that she has been given. I’m a bit stumped by the use of the word *le jour * throughout the book in contexts where it doesn’t seem very logical for it to be translated as “day” (which is the only meaning I can find for *le jour * in any of the dictionaries I have).
One example:
Important: Les points de broderie se font en général sur l’endroit du travail et les jours sur l’envers.
I can translate this (approximately) along the lines of “embroidery stitches are usually made on the outside of the work with the ??? on the reverse side”. But in this context, what is un jour? Is it some form of finishing knot?
Trying an online French dictionary (dictionnaire.com), I get the translation of “filet opening”, looking up the work “jour” with regards to “textiles”.
I don’t know embroidery at all, and the French of this dictionary is way over my head, despite having spoken French all my life, but maybe this helps a bit anyway!
Thanks Antigen. That’s very helpful. I don’t know anything about embroidery either, but my neighbour will probably understand the term “filet opening”. Certainly the embroidery book is full of pictures just like the one in your link, although none is actually labelled jour.
Cunctator, it sounds like they’re talking about the traveling threads being on the back of the piece. They’re the ones that take you from motif to motif, so if you were embroidering, say flowers, there wouldn’t be lines on the front of the work going from rosebud to rosebud. Does that makes sense in the larger context of the paragraph and chapter? What’s the chapter on, by the way?
With Antigen’s contribution, though, it sounds like chapter might be on something like (rather annoyingly named in this context) broiderie anglais, which involves embroidering and then cutting the fabric away so there’s eyelet lace. Like so.
Antigen’s French dictionary says “jour” is used in warp knitting, which I’ve never heard of before in my life. A little work with freetranslation.com seems to say that warp knitting/tricot chaîne is machine knitting, but it seems unlikely that an embroidery book would have a chapter on machine knitting.
Yes, it makes very good sense Miss Purl. The title of the book is Les Jours Brodés. I don’t have the full thing, just some photocopied pages. It looks as though the first few pages go through the preliminary stitching you need to be able to do in order to link up the various motifs and patterns i.e. the travelling *jour * threads behind the scenes. The later pages show how to embroider all of the different motifs. As an example, one of the later motifs is entitled point de bouclette sur carré which I’ve (roughly) translated as a small square buckle stitch. It looks a bit like a four-petalled rose, so I’d say it’s probably similar to your rosebuds.
It looks as though this is going to be a more difficult translation task than I first thought. Serves me right for boasting about my French proficiency.
As I understand it a jour is a pattern of holes in an embroidered piece - often found on curtains (maybe that explains the name). Unfortunately I don’t know what that would be called in English, so I may just be repeating what’s already been posted. This site doesn’t give any translations, but has a lot of illustrations which might help narrow down the meaning of various terms.
Sounds to me like it just means “Those stitches that are part of the actual picture go on the front. Anything else (threads going from a point to another, threads going backwards in a backwards stitch) goes in the back.”
In my case what’s not good is the knowledge of “embroidery related English” (I do hope backwards stitch can be understood as meaning ‘punto atras’, but defining it below), but that’s the first sentence any and all of my sewing/embroidering teachers said.
Punto atras: a kind of fixed-length stitch where you go one length “backwards” in the front of the cloth, then two lengths “ahead” in the back… so you come through to the front one length ahead of the previous stitch and then go one length “back” in the front, two “ahead” in the back.
The end result is a continuous line of uniform-length stitches in the front, and a double line of double-length stitches in the back.
This is right, I think. It means drawn thread or pulled thread work, like faggoting, or Hardanger style. This picture shows it in French - La Broderie de NetMadame : les jours
When you do drawn thread work, I believe you work on the reverse of the piece.
