‘Crewelwork’ is a fairly general term in the world of hand embroidery. It is used to describe any number of pieces. Sometimes it’s the style, sometimes it’s the fabrics.

I will use a more ‘traditional’ view on ‘what is crewelwork?’. For me, ‘crewelwork’ is the embroidery of a design onto a linen twill fabric using woollen threads (traditionally Appeltons, but there are plenty of brands out there offering ‘crewel wool’).

You can further delve into this technique, and classify projects as ‘Jacobean’, or ‘modern’ (which seems to be anything not in the Jacobean style!). These two (and any other) classifications of crewelwork, are just further refinement on the definition of crewelwork.