The Embroidered Grass and Insects

The folding screen is embroidered with grass, flowers, and insects with an eight-panel which was supposedly made by Sin Saimdang, a woman artist of the sixteenth century. It uses several kinds of exceptional embroidery techniques and multi-colored silk threads, making it lifelike and three-dimensional. The embroidery fabric is black satin and provides strong contrast with the colored thread ranging from the loosely twisted silk thread, single-colored threads, to threads with two colors combined together. Particularly, yellows and greens were heavily used, and the blues, browns, and violets are relatively well-preserved. Turning to the embroidery technique, a flat stitch was mostly used with a wide variety of colored thread. The embroidery can be done vertically or diagonally by splitting up the thread, which can provide many different textures and volume. In addition, the bodies of the insects were created by combining an edging stitch, an outline stitch, and a flat stitch.