.

The first deviation from the habitual crewelwork is to be found in the
"blue-and-white," for although the same stitch was employed, it was
more often in outline than solid. The designs were sketches instead of
"patterns" as had formerly been the case. Although this variety of work
comes under the head of colonial crewelwork, there was in it the
beginning of the changes and variety effected by differing circumstances
and influences--those vital circumstances which leave their traces
constantly along the history of needlework. It was owing to various
reasons that outline embroidery largely took the place of solid
crewelwork.

The question of design must have been a rather difficult one, as there
were no designs, and almost no sources of design for needlework, and at
this stage of the art in New England original design seems not to have
suggested itself. It would certainly have been quite natural to have
copied pine trees and broken outlines of hills, but as this class of
embroidery was almost entirely used for hangings and decorative
furnishings, the Pilgrim mothers seem to have had an instinctive sense
that such design was incongruous. Consequently they copied English
models. We find designs of crewelwork of the period in English museums
identically the same as in the New England work, thorned roses and
voluminously doubled pinks, held together in borders of long curved
lines or scattered at regular intervals in groups and bunches.

My grandmother explained to me in that long-ago period, where her great
age and my inquisitive youth met and exchanged our several and
individual surplus of thought and talk, that to a certain extent ladies
of colonial days copied many of their designs from what were called
India chintzes. These chintzes seem to have been the intermediate wear
between homespun of either flax or wool and the creamy satins or the
thick "paduasoy," the more flexible "lutestring" silks, worn by great
ladies of the period, and the wrought India muslins for less
conventional occasions. India chintzes were printed upon white or tinted
grounds of hand-spun cotton, in colors so generously full of substance
as to have almost the effect of brocaded stuffs, and adaptations from
their designs were suitable for embroidery. I remember the
three-cornered and square bits of India chintz which my grandmother
showed me in long-preserved "housewives," or "huz-ifs," as she called
them. They were lengths of domestic linen on