Gertrude Townsend surveys embroidery in England under the Tudors and Stuarts, working mainly from documentary sources such as wills, inventories, privy purse accounts, chronicles, Revels accounts and royal New Year's gift lists. She sets these records beside a few surviving pieces in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Topics include church vestments and the effect of the Reformation, gold and silver wire and purl, professional embroiderers and the Broderers Company, painters who supplied designs, and women's needlework. The surviving examples discussed are an Elizabethan doublet and coif, pillow covers, a sleeve, a cap, a sampler of 1656, needlework pictures, a casket and a crewel panel of 1686.

Article by Gertrude Townsend surveying decorative needlework made in New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It draws on probate records, newspaper advertisements of needlework teachers, and surviving pieces such as the Leverett casket, samplers, stump work, and needlepoint chimney-pieces like the Fishing Lady. It traces design sources to English and French prints (Stella, Wootton, Pater) and is illustrated with ten figures plus a frontispiece, with footnoted references.