ABSTRACT
As a Puritan minister, Edward Taylor would have heartily approved of the sentiments Loara Standish worked into her sampler design. He may also have fully understood the multiple layers of meaning her spiritual plea contained. On the one hand, Standish’s conventional piety can be read as a prayer meant to protect her from idle, perhaps sinful, foolishness. However, just as Taylor connected the mundane duties of a housewife to the loftier spiritual quest of a Puritan minister, the Standish sampler can also be read as an unaffected plea for more earthly skills. Indeed, as she would know from simple observation, a woman’s sewing, knitting, embroidery and spinning skills, were crucial to her future family’s success and comfort. Consequently, on both sides of the Atlantic, every seventeenth-century Englishwoman’s domestic repertoire included some textile expertise, especially spinning. In the raw, often cold, settlements of New England good cloth was especially important.
