Shanghai Velvet Embroidery

Velvet embroidery, also known as "floss embroidery" or "plush embroidery", is a kind of embroidery process that uses colored woolen threads to embroider various pictures and patterns on special mesh linen fabrics.

As an imported process technique, velvet embroidery has a history of over a hundred years in China, velvet embroidery has been in China for more than 100 years. At the beginning of its introduction, its products, like those in Europe, were mainly used as decorative fabrics for daily necessities, such as handbags, slippers and cushions. The patterns were primarily floral, and the color collocation was relatively simple. At the end of the 1930s, five sisters of the Liu family in Shanghai, led by Liu Peizhen, succeeded in making portraits using the improved velvet embroidery process technique. In the early 1950s, velvet embroidery artist Gao Wanyu from Shanghai and others again reformed the technique. Through researching color collocation schemes and dyeing by themselves, they increased the number of colors from fixed dozens to thousands. Meanwhile, they completely solved the problem of embroidery objects' color transition and massively enriched the performance ability of the embroidery process by drawing on stitches of other embroidery process techniques as well as using skills like splitting threads, mixing colors and adding color. Embroidery objects have also been expanded from original floral patterns to figures, sceneries and copies of oil painting masterpieces and color photographs.

Although velvet embroidery is one of the embroidery processes, the texture of its floss material is thicker than the silk thread compared with the traditional silk embroidery process technique, and the stitches used aren't as complicated as well, which mainly include oblique-point-like embroidery, cross stitch, "Bazhen", elaborate stitch, surface galling, crewel stitch, etc.. Depending on the picture and the object, they can be chosen for reinvention flexibly. Over the past hundred years, since the velvet embroidery process technique from Europe entered China, it has become one of the Chinese traditional art forms after being improved, enriched and developed by Chinese artists. Velvet embroidery artworks in the past 50 years have also become classics of Chinese arts and crafts, either presented to friendly countries as official gifts, displayed in the chamber or collected by public and private collectors from home and abroad.

Shanghai's velvet embroidery has characteristics of fine craftsmanship, various stitching, thick and meticulous, structured layers, rich colors and realistic images. Due to various reasons, the current survival of the Shanghai velvet embroidery process has encountered great difficulties.