Updates: The Jane Austen Stitching Society

I have been busy lately updating Queendom Website and most of my updates are about The Jane Austen Stitching Society. Essentially I will spend a part of the next year working on needlepoint to commemorate Jane Austen and the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice.

If you would like to join The Jane Austen Stitching Society, please write to Kate Gaunt  (KateGaunt@aol.com). Our meeting room is at Shining Needle Society; membership is free.

Our first project is to find a basket about 9" x 12" x 3", decorate it and line it with whitework handkerchiefs. With this in mind I have posted photos of the two baskets I chose and I have just started posting the handkerchiefs I decided to use. To see them and read about them, travel to Queendom Website:

for quick reference: www.GayAnnRogers. com

You will see my first hankie and both of my baskets on the home page. In the next few days I will show the other hankies and also how I folded the hankies in the baskets. There are ever so much more clever people at this and I am hoping that members of The Jane Austen Stitching Society will come up with different ways of lining and decorating their baskets and share their ideas with us.

In addition to my baskets and their hankies, I have begun to update my 'Collections' page with fairly modern handkerchiefs of my own. Travel there and you will find the first of my collector hankies and a little quiz about where it was made. I would like to use my own hankies to teach people in the Jane Austen society about distinguishing style and whether whitework from our immediate past is made by machine or by hand and how to tell the difference.

I also hope to spend some time on the whitework heritage from the time of Jane Austen. If you scroll down on my Collections page, you will see the corner of a beautiful Georgian/Regency hankie. The embroidery is of pansies and is so very fine. I photographed the corner with a dime so that you can tell the scale.

In addition to the whitework,  there's the beautiful French lace of Jane Austen's era. And of course the wonderful needlework tools of the Regency era . I can tell we will be very busy in the next months!

Busy as we will be with studying the  embroidery and needlework tools of the past also, a big part of The Jane Austen Stitching Society will be about our own stitching. I am happy to report here that I have completed four little hearts, a needle book commemorating Pride and Prejudice (this needle book is my current pride and joy), a bookmark and a name tag, all to go in my Jane Austen basket.

I have finished writing the instructions for the hearts and Kate has proof-stitched them for me. In the next weeks I hope to finish the instructions for the needle book, the bookmark and the name tag, then we will start stitching in earnest.

It will be a great winter and spring and I am excited that we are starting.
Gay Ann