crewel

“Showstoppers!” displays 100-odd costumes, as well as a handful of the tools used to make them, like millinery blocks and a 19th-century crewel machine from the embroiderers Penn & Fletcher.

If you don’t want to graduate to more complicated crafting like cross-stitch or crewel embroidery, there are some latch-hook kits that yield more useful items.

While I can sew a reasonable seam by hand — in fact, I was very into crewel and embroidery once upon a time — I don’t have a sewing machine.

If it is really cold, I migrate 10 feet to sit in front of the gas fire on a sofa I inherited from my stepmother, covered for 50 years in still-functional crewel fabric.

As the cannonballs fell, before us, over the grass, over uneven beds of moss and stumps where we had sawed down forests to build defenses, fled the King’s soldiers and our camp followers: Loyalists in green velvet, children half-dressed, a Negro woman in a stained crewel petticoat, once of the finest, blotched with mud, and soldiers clutching their coats.