Stitchery is both artistry and therapy, say needle arts practitioners, who called themselves “needlers.”

Diane Clark says that stitching “is excellent for one’s mental health. It’s calming and relaxing.” Dennis Yeatts credits his years of stitching with helping him recover from a serious injury and his wife’s passing.

In eight rooms, Woodlawn Plantation’s mansion is displaying 600 stitched pieces from 33 states and three countries at their annual needlework show. The event, continuing until March 31, is sponsored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the show’s founders, Nelly’s Needlers, a group celebrating their 50th anniversary and named for the first owner of Woodlawn, Eleanor “Nelly” Custis Lewis, a needlecrafter herself.

600 Pieces of Art

Exquisite needlework pieces depict nature, landscapes, buildings, people, food, abstract designs and many other subjects. The judged show has embroidery, crewel, drawn thread, needlepoint, counted cross-stitch, lace, smocking, beadwork, canvaswork, quilting and more. One show-stopper is Kathy Rabun’s blue-ribbon-winner, a Quaker sampler wing chair on which she meticulously sewed messages like “Highlights of My Life” and “My Heroes.”

This year’s entries “eclipse pre-pandemic numbers,” says Heather Johnson, Woodlawn’s Interim Executive Director. Sponsors tout that the show is the largest and longest-running needlework show in the country.

Deb Kempton, an event co-chair, offered, “It’s a universal language. Every culture has some type of cross stitch,” citing Scandinavia and Ukraine as examples. One example is a counted thread Romanian national blouse by Diana Grichuk. Clark, a Clifton resident, is the other co-chair.

Entrants span all ages. A group of Bush Hill Elementary School sixth graders crafted a quilt under the supervision of their teacher, Jenny Pratt. Each student made a nine-patch square and they dedicated the quilt to Ona Judge, an enslaved woman at George and Martha Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate who escaped and was never captured. The youngsters won first place in their division.

Yeatts first entered a Woodlawn show in 1981. He echoed Clark’s view, explaining that stitching helped him recover from an injury and to rebound again after his first wife’s death. He designs his own pieces and entered a cross-stitch piece with 22 shades of black and gray, depicting Confederate Civil War Colonel John Mosby and a map of Mosby’s Virginia environs. Yeatts has already completed next year’s entry, a piece with 505 different colors to honor the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding.

The show had three needle arts judges, who rated entries by the creator’s age and type of item. All work had to be done within the last year by a living person, stitched with a hand-held, threaded needle and “appropriately finished.” The age categories were 18 years or older, 70 years or older, 17 years or younger. The youngster’s group had three subdivisions -- nine and under, 10 to 13 and 14 to 17.

In the printed program, the judges listed several features that can make a work outstanding: 

“Each stitch is well executed.” 

“Tension is consistent throughout the piece.” 

“The thread is pristine, not worn.”

Nelly’s Needlers made a needlepoint rug to raffle off in a drawing on May 12.

Paleoindian Stitchery

In a timely coincidental twist, this writer’s son, Dr. Todd A. Surovell, was an author of a recently published paper on “needling” 13,000 years ago. He and others working at the La Prele mammoth kill site in eastern Wyoming analyzed proteins in bones and for the first time identified some of the animals that Paleoindians used for bone sewing needles, including hares, foxes, bobcats and perhaps extinct cheetahs or lions. Surovell teaches archaeology at the University of Wyoming. He attended Waynewood Elementary, Carl Sandburg Middle and West Potomac High Schools. Read more at https://www.uwyo.edu/news/2024/11/uw-based-research-shows-early-north-americans-made-needles-from-fur-bearers.html .

The Woodlawn show’s business sponsors are In Stitches, Hampton Inn and Suites, Artistic Artifacts and Creative Print Group. All proceeds support preservation and education at Woodlawn and the next-door Pope-Leighey House. For more information, visit https://www.woodlawnpopeleighey.org/needleworkshow-visit-the-show-1.