Suzy Goodwille Stedman Gallery

Why I do Needlepoint .


My grandmother and mother both could do amazing things with their hands. Beautiful gardens, arranged bouquets, tailored clothes, baked confections, and packages elegantly wrapped with handmade cards and poetry to accompany them were traditions in our household. Even as a little girl, I was invited to join them in their handiwork. When mother took up crewel, I was in my twenties and happy to try it, too. On one hot July day in 1969, I began—and completed—an entire crewel pillow cover as we sat transfixed for hours watching Armstrong and Aldrin land on the moon.

Years later, when I left my urban working life to settle on an island in Maine, I got seriously into gardening, but it soon became clear that my desire to transform the wild bit of land we had chosen would be the work of the rest of my life. I tried watercolors, but was never fast enough to tame the rivers of color that flowed errantly across the paper. After a while, I gave up on this lovely medium as my vehicle for creative expression.

One day, on a random visit to a stitchery shop, I found pre-designed needlepoint kits in the form of eyeglass cases or small purses. Well, I thought, I could do THAT…no muss, no fuss, it’s all there, just in and out with the needle and you’ve got something! I tried one and found it just the antidote for restless hands on long car trips, in meetings, or after dinner while watching old movies. Here’s one of the first ones I did:


After knocking off half a dozen of these, the fascination paled…I wanted to try my own designs. My first effort to depict our backyard was quite primitive…but stitcher’s license allowed me to speed up the garden, at least.


This is a scene along a road that I liked.


Using photographs, I trace the broad outlines of the picture onto tracing paper, and then onto a blank canvas. The best part is taking the photograph to the thread store to choose my palette of colors. With the threads and photograph at hand, I “draw” the image onto the canvas with my needle, constantly referring to the photograph for color and shape. To add texture, I’ve “invented” some new stitches (which probably aren’t new at all).

As I got a little more practiced, I began stitching the gardens of friends and giving them my work as presents. This is my friend Lael’s garden on Deer Isle.


My friend Dorothy, in Sheepscot Village, framed this rendering of her back yard.


This is Lisa’s farm in Pittston.


Here’s Patti’s guest house and barn, down the road from us on Westport Island.


The only interior scene I’ve ever done is in the Santa Fe adobe home of my friend Phyllis, with whom I stayed during our Andover mini-reunion in March 2007. Here’s her case, leaning against the outside of the window in the scene.


Our neighbor Lee and her architect husband Tony added a barn to the back of their Maine Cape. That’s a clothes line (in use) on the left and a lovely pink Weigela in the foreground.


Our friends Charlotte and George years ago built a house on the Edgartown Great Pond on Martha’s Vineyard. This is their “front yard.”


Time for a return to our own backyard…and some more garden enhancement. I love this work, especially the pace of it—it’s slower than watercolors, but way faster than gardening.