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A Life Pattern in Cross-Stitches

December 7, 2009

Susan Kilborn's love for needlecraft arts started from a young age and developed over many decades of knitting, crocheting, and cross-stitching. Today her designs are prized possessions and hang in homes around the world.

When Susan E. Kilborn was about five years old, she would stand on one side of an old Singer sewing machine and quietly watch her mother hard at work on the other side.

"I spent hours just standing there watching her sew," Susan said.

From this, Susan absorbed her mother's great love of sewing and needlecrafts - a love she shared with not only her mother, but with her grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great- grandmother.

Indeed, this act of mother-teaching-daughter how to run a needle and thread through fabric to create a piece of art, is itself a story, forming a rich tapestry of family history, as the thread of love for needlecrafts is woven down through the centuries, from one generation of women to the next.

"I have a cross-stitch sampler that my great-great-grandmother did in 1829 when she was 12," Susan says. Susan's female cousins and sister all wanted it but felt Susan should be the one to have it.  In fact, it was when she recreated exact copies to give to them that a renewed interest in creating her own cross-stitch designs was sparked.

Examine Susan's life in stitches and it becomes clear why her family decided she should have the sampler. Making doll clothes at four years old and her first pair of mittens at five, Susan's love of needlework is evidenced in a photo showing herself and a friend (see photo) knitting. Her five-year-old face shows total focus.

"I am concentrating so much on doing this," Susan said, "you can see my elbows are up in the air."

From these early years, Susan went on to earn a Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University, focusing on the elements and principles of design and the development of perceptual and creative skills, applicable to all aspects of the visual arts.  She has taught at the University of Nebraska, Utah State, and Michigan State University.

Today, especially for Longyear Museum, Susan's focus is on cross-stitching - a technique that involves sewing a series of X's in stitches.  She says she likes the balance of a creative challenge with the relaxing and methodical process of stitching.  Also, she can do needlework almost anywhere - on planes, while visiting friends, talking on the phone, or watching television.  She says she has even "done a stitch or two" while waiting or stopped in busy traffic (she makes clear that she does NOT stitch while driving!) but laughs when she relates a cartoon of a woman pulled over by police:  "Lady, did you know you were weaving in traffic?" The woman replied: "This is not weaving, it is needlepoint."

About ten years ago, Susan switched from creating her designs on graph paper to computer. Once she works the design onto the computer program's grid, she can translate that to her fabric.

The results of her needlework are displayed today in homes around the world, and she has designed a special line of individually crafted products that are sold through the Longyear Museum Store. In fact, the computer program Susan uses registered that she had reached a milestone - last month she had worked her "quarter-of-a-millionth" stitch on Longyear products. Given that she stitches somewhere between 150 and 200 stitches an hour, that represents about 1,250 stitching hours. Asked to estimate her total number of stitches, Susan says the number would run into the millions.

Those quarter-of-a-million Longyear stitches can be found in a variety of products offered in the Museum's store, such as "God is Love," straight stitched on perforated paper in either red and green or blue and green (7.5" x 16").   The "God is Love" design was inspired by an original early American framed piece, "He shall give His Angels Charge over Thee," which hangs in Longyear's historic house located in Amesbury, Massachusetts, and was charted and stitched by Susan. Also framed are original designs, individually cross-stitched, of "The Lord is my Shepherd" (9 1/4" x 21 1/4") and the "Daily Prayer" by Mary Baker Eddy (18.5" x 12.5"), both inspired by traditional early American samplers. 

Susan works with embroidery floss in traditional colors on various shades of Aida cloth, a linen-like fabric used for cross-stitching. As an example of the amount of stitching involved, each "Daily Prayer" contains about 5,700 stitches.

Susan's favorite piece is a bellpull she created, depicting all eight of the Mary Baker Eddy Historic Houses owned by Longyear. She meticulously worked out each one in six-by-six-inch designs taken from front-view photographs of the houses. They appear in chronological order as you travel vertically down the bell pull.  It was created as a gift to Longyear, commemorating the purchase of the Lynn and Chestnut Hill houses in 2006. 

"I liked the idea of a bellpull," she said, "because it is a piece you would find in a 19th-century home. It took about six months to get it designed and executed."  While the bellpull is not for sale, photo reproductions of each of her eight home designs were transferred onto greeting cards, which are sold in the Longyear Museum Store.

In addition to producing these unique handmade tapestries for the Longyear Museum Store, Susan also serves as an administrative assistant at Longyear and works in the Museum's Curatorial Department. When she is not cross-stitching, this native New Englander with an ancestry that can be traced back to the Mayflower, creates heritage and travel scrapbook albums.  She and her husband have two grown children and have lived in the historic town of Hingham, Massachusetts, for over 30 years.

 

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