, Puritan women gladly reverted to the
accomplishments of pre-American conditions. The familiar crewelwork of
England was the form of needlework which became popular.

In looking for materials with which to recreate this art, they had not
at that time far to seek. Wool and flax were farm products, necessities
of pioneer life, and their manufacture into cloth was a well-understood
domestic art.

Domestic animals had shared the tremendous experiment of transplantation
of a fragment of the English race, and had suffered, no doubt, with
their masters and owners, the struggles with savages and unaccustomed
circumstances, but they had survived and increased "after their kind."
Even through the strenuous wars against their very existence by
uncivilized man, they lived and increased. Cows "calved," and sheep
"lambed," and wool in abundance was to be had.

The enterprising Puritan woman pulled the long-fibered straggling lock
of wool, sorted out and rejected from the uniform fleeces, carded it
with her little hand cards into yard-long finger-sized rolls, and
twisted it upon her large wheel spindle, producing much such thread as
an Italian peasant woman spins upon her distaff to-day as she walks upon
the shore at Baiae.

If the pioneer was a natural copyist, she doubled and twisted it, to
make it in the exact fashion of the English crewel; if adventurous and
independent, she worked it single threaded. This yarn had all the pliant
qualities necessary for embroidery, and was in fact uncolored crewel.

[Illustration: TESTER embroidered in crewels in shades of blue on white
homespun linen. Said to have been brought to Essex, Mass., in 1640, by
Madam Susanna, wife of Sylvester Eveleth.

_Courtesy of Essex Institute, Salem, Mass._

To the right, raised embroidery on black velvet. Nineteenth century
American.]

So, also, the production of flax thread, when the crop of flax was
grown, and the long stems had struggled upward to their greatest
heights, and finished themselves in a cloud of multitudinous blue
flax flowers, beautiful enough to be grown for beauty alone, they pulled
and made into slender bundles, and laid under the current of the brook
which neighbored most pioneer houses, until the thready fibers could be
washed and scraped from the vegetable outer coat, the perishable parts
of their composition, and combed into separateness. Then it was ready
for the small flax wheel of the housewife. Every woman had both wool
whe