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Stitchin' Times....

THE GREAT LADIES OF HISTORY MASTERED THE ART OF STITCHERY By Erica Wilson

Did you know that many of our great ladies in history were great masters of stitchery?

Mary, Queen of Scots, once remarked that she “wrought” with her needle all day until the pain made her “to give over” – no doubt while plotting to regain her rightful place on the Scottish throne!

Bess of Hardwick, England’s first interior decorator (in the 16th Century), was divorced over her love of stitchery. Her husband complained about the fortune he was spending on her extravagant needlework projects, to which she indignantly retorted that “his lordship” hadn’t spent so much as five pounds on them. Rather than employing needlewomen, Bess sent whatever idle servant she could find (men and boys included) to the large room she kept equipped with frames, to make sure that at least one pair of hands were always working away at her large canvases!

Then there was Nellie Curtis, George Washington’s stepdaughter, who worked up a most attractive needlepoint of a horseman on a fire screen – essential during Colonial times to shield a proper lady’s delicate complexion from the fire. She wrote a letter to a friend when she finished, complaining that she had to unpick the horse’s front leg at least three times to get it right – and that should strike a familiar chord of dismay in the heart of every modern embroideress!

Aside from these complaints, which are universal through the ages (although divorce over needlework may not be), our first ladies in stitchery certainly prove not only that needlework has a noble tradition, but also that some things about the craft never really change. Every “accomplished miss” of the 16th Century was expected to learn how to do “plain work”, or everyday household stitching. But the genteel ladies – the more wealthy ones, that is -had time for “fancy work,” or purely decorative stitching. They mostly turned to stitching as a delightful diversion, just as we do today, a way to express them selves creatively, and they produced some designs that are just as fashionable and daring now as they were in the 16th Century.

It’s lucky for us that we have modern invention on our side. Back in Elizabethan times, needlework patterning was a painstaking expensive proposition. To transfer a design, the needlewomen either drew it with a fine, brown sepia ink, made careful perforations through the cloth or, if she could afford it, hired an artist to paint the design for her. Or followed the design free-form as best she could, as we see in a painting by that famous portrait artist Gilbert Stuart, which shows one young embroideress working in her hoop frame as she follows the pattern held up by her cousin.

It’s also lucky for us that some of the customs of the time have been updated. For the mark of a single women’s marriageability in Colonial America was not her dowry, but her ability with the needle, to the point that her fancy work was prominently displayed in her family’s parlor as bait to catch a suitor!

For designs, the Elizabethans took their inspiration from the bestiaries and herbals at hand to work simple outlines of plants, flowers and tiny creatures that were remarkably modern and stylized for their day. A typical pattern was tracery, a stem that scrolled around and totally enclosed these flower and plant motifs. These designs eventually included the potato and tobacco plants – two recent discoveries in the New World – and adorned everything from bed valances to the cap Sir Walter Raleigh wore on his way to be executed!

Speaking of design, did you know that during the lean years of our country’s founding, the ladies were busily stitching away at the boldest and brightest of flame stitch bargellos, which they worked into envelope purses and to hold the most precious of household papers?

Martha Washington, no mean embroideress herself, worked up 12 brilliant needlepoint cushions for Windsor chairs, boldly cross-stitching in a design of stylized scallop shells. She stitched on coarse canvas in mustard yellow and burnt orange wools, highlighted with gold silk – which no doubt gave her solace, since she worked them immediately after her husband’s death.