Table of contents for Spring 2026 in PieceWork

When I became an adult, my mother gave me a family relic. I had never seen it before. She knew her grandmother stuffed the tiny pouch with herbs and wore it to protect her health. The pouch was pink and white and suspended from the painted breastbone of a small bird. A frayed pink silk ribbon was attached to the bird bone to hang it around her neck. It remains a tantalizing mystery to me as I continue to ponder its origins and wonder whether it is a remnant of our Indigenous ancestry. In an old photograph also handed down to me, my maternal grandmother sits with three friends on brick steps. The other girls’ hair is styled in a 1920s-style bob or pulled away from their faces. Grandma’s hair…

This girl’s skirt pattern is based on an original piece preserved in the Ohio History Connection’s collection from the historic Zoar Separatist community. The original white wool skirt—likely an underskirt—was handknitted sometime between 1804 and 1859. In re-creating it, I chose to knit the front and back separately and then seam them together since circular needles were not yet in use when the original was made. The pattern, however, can easily be adapted for circular knitting. It took some experimentation to replicate the chevron welt pattern accurately. While the original skirt is finished with a linen waistband, I opted for a simple knitted rib that can be worn either straight or folded over. MATERIALS Cascade Yarns 220 Sport (100% Peruvian Highland wool), 164 yd (150 m)/50 g: 5 skeins of…

A pin pillow or pincushion is the ideal way to create a charming remembrance for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This pin pillow includes many of the motifs and stitches that are found on needlework pieces made in the 1700s. Decorative borders of vines and flowers, often surrounding a central house motif, were commonplace. A verse, quote, moral, or sentiment was also usually included. I have incorporated the phrase that both John and Abigail often wrote in their correspondence, “To be good, and to do good, is the whole duty of man.” This pillow features my rendition of Abigail’s birthplace home, which is where her life and independent spirit began. MATERIALS Zweigart Newcastle linen, 40-count: Sand, 13” × 8” (33 × 20.5 cm) The…

During the pandemic, my wife, Lori, and I found ourselves spending more time online, diving into the things we love. Lori is an accomplished needleworker with a small but thoughtfully curated collection of, primarily, European samplers. I wanted to surprise her with an American piece—something with charm, history, and a story. I spotted a lot of six samplers listed at a local California auction. The featured sampler was from Philadelphia, the early nineteenth century, which immediately caught our eye. We made an appointment to visit and found the samplers folded and stored—somewhat improbably—in a single gallon-sized ziplock bag. On the Philadelphia sampler, Lori was drawn to the Quaker motifs and the central medallion reminiscent of those stitched at Westtown and other Quaker schools. I was intrigued by the repeated surnames…

The early Separatists of Zoar faced tremendous hardship when they settled on the frontier wilderness known today as Tuscarawas County in south central Ohio. The first 125 Separatists arrived from Württemberg, Germany, in October 1817, followed by another 175 the next spring. The Separatists had to fell trees and build log shelters, forage and hunt for food, survive illness and harsh winters, and fend off hordes of forest wolves. Fortunately, neighboring settlers of German American heritage helped the Separatists through the first difficult years. EARLY HISTORY OF SEPARATISM However difficult the hardships in their new land, life in Germany had been far worse. They called themselves Separatists because they had broken away from the dominant, state-run Lutheran Church in Württemberg. As had been the custom, regional rulers required inhabitants to…

Karen Clancy is the Manager of Apparel Trades and the Master Weaver at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and specializes in textile history. Tell us about your duties and work at Colonial Williamsburg. I manage the Apparel Trades at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which includes the Milliner & Mantua-Maker, Leather Breeches Maker & Shoemaker, Wigmaker, Tailor, and Weaver Shops, and for the past 17 years, I have been Colonial Williamsburg’s Master Weaver. In this position, I mentor apprentice weavers through a five-level curriculum of best practices for weaving, spinning, and natural dyeing. I also organize, plan, and execute public programming and demonstrate eighteenth-century technology using research and period-appropriate equipment. What other types of needlework or handcraft do you enjoy doing? Many of us growing up in the 1970s made clothes and…

American women have long used their needlework to help support soldiers during wartime. It’s a tradition that began during the darkest days of the American Revolution when a group of “Patriotic Sisters” from Philadelphia came together under an unlikely leader to create a movement that inspired the entire country. Esther de Berdt was born into an affluent English merchant family in 1746. Well-educated, religious, and politically aware, her delicate beauty and constitution were matched with a fierce resolve to do what was right. She was only 17 when she fell deeply in love with 22-year-old American law student Joseph Reed, and although her father rejected the match, she remained true to Joseph for the next five years, marrying him in 1770 after her father’s death. Together they sailed to Philadelphia…

In 1749, an ambitious young dry goods vendor named Elizabeth Murray set up shop in Boston. One of the “She Merchants” navigating the economy of colonial America, her advertisement listed desirable textile goods, including “black Fringes, Bone Lace … a variety of Gauze and Paris-Nets, Trimmings of all Sorts … Macklin, Brussels, Flanders, Millenet, Dott, Tralley and English Cap Lace, Lappets and Lappet Heads.”1 The fact that Murray offered a variety of fashionable lace and lace products indicates that New England society had sophisticated consumers fluent in lace and who desired many international fashion choices. By the dawn of the American Revolution, however, imports such as these laces had become politically and socially disfavored or unavailable due to trade embargoes. The production of bobbin lace in the colonies had been…

Nothing says Americana more than a cross-stitch sampler, except perhaps a box of chocolates in the style of a sampler. Whitman’s Sampler is the trade name for a box of fancy assorted chocolates— the signature and most successful product line of the American confectioner Stephen F. Whitman & Son, Inc. “The Sampler” was conceived by Whitman’s third president, Walter Sharp, as an invitation for customers to “sample” some of the most popular offerings from Whitman’s confectionery shops. But what does sewing have to do with candy? Originating at the height of the Colonial Revival movement, the Sampler’s packaging was meant to be evocative of another era, to convey simple, homespun charm in a way that is uniquely Americana. According to company lore, the original 1912 design was inspired by a…

By the time Cynthia Harjo Yerby of Wolf, Oklahoma, took up the craft of Seminole patchwork in her teens, her tribe had been separated from their original home in Florida for more than a hundred years. A brutal forced march settled at least 3,000 members of the Seminole Tribe in an area of what is now south-central Oklahoma, beginning in the 1830s, leaving a few hundred holdouts avoiding capture and relocating in the Florida Everglades. The two entities managed to persist, and even thrive, each in its own way. The Florida Seminoles clung to a traditional way of life in the subtropics; the Seminoles of Oklahoma worked hard to adjust to harsh climates and few resources by farming and raising livestock, adapting to pressures from the federal government while retaining…