descendants of old New England families, are the
embroidered mourning pieces. These are seldom more than a century old.
On them weeping willows and urns, tombs and mourning figures, names of
departed friends with dates of their deaths, and epitaphs were worked
with vast skill, and were so much admired and were such a delightful
home decoration, that it is no unusual thing to find these elaborate
memento moris with empty spaces for names and dates, waiting for some
one to die, and still unfilled, unfinished, blankly commemorative of no
one, while the industrious embroiderer has long since gone to the tomb
she so deftly and eagerly pictured, and her name, too, is forgotten.

Tambour work was a favorite form of embroidery. In 1788 Madam Hesselius
wrote thus in jest of her daughter, a Philadelphia miss:--

"To tambour on crape she has a great passion,
Because here of late it has been much the fashion.
The shades are dis-sorted, the spangles are scattered
And for want of due care the crape has got tattered."

Tambouring with various stitches on different kinds of net made pretty
laces; and these were apparently the laces usually worked and worn. In
the form of rich veils and collars scores of intricate and beautiful
stitches were used, and exquisite articles of wear were manufactured.

A strip of net footing pinned and sewn to paper, with reels of fine
linen thread and threaded needle attached, is shown in the accompanying
illustration just as it was left by the deft and industrious hands that
have been folded for a century in the dust. The pattern and stitches in
this design are simple; the design was first pricked in outline with a
pin, then worked in. Other stitches and patterns, none of them the most
elaborate and difficult, are shown in the infant's cap and collars, and
the strips of lace and "modesty-piece."

In the seventeenth century lace-making with bobbins was taught; it is
referred to in Judge Sewall's diary; and a friend has shown me the
cushion and bobbins used by her far-away grandmother who learned the
various stitches in London at a guinea a stitch.

The feminine love of color, the longing for decoration, as well as pride
in skill of needle-craft, found riotous expansion in quilt-piecing. A
thrifty economy, too, a desire to use up all the fragments and bits of
stuffs which were necessarily cut out in the shaping, chiefly of women's
and children's garments, helped to make the patchwork a s