When I did my first piece of cross stitch my mother was quick to point out that my technique was not correct. I had run my stitches in an odd direction so that they looked okay from the front but were slanted on the back. I had also run long dangling threads from one block of color to the next so that I didn't have to end the thread and start again.
"The back has to look as good as the front," she said.
I can understand not running long dark thread from place to place across light colored thread -- it actually shows through on the front like a dark stain -- but the rest of it made no sense. Who really cared what the back looked like if the front looked good?
Years later I was touring the Victoria and Albert museum in London and a tour guide mentioned that the obsession with the back of the needlepoint being meticiously neat started in Victorian times. Before Queen Victoria no one cared how the back of the material looked. The tour guide suggested some places to look at the 'backs' of needlework done in the Middle Ages and after for examples.
Sometimes I amuse myself by running a long stitch across the back of my work just to spite Queen Victoria.
