Dressed: The History of Fashion · Dressed Media

Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration with Isabella Rosner, Part I (Dressed Classic)

March 25, 2026·55 min·4 clips

Lorena Bulwer spent years quilting 12-to-16-foot scrolls covered in all-caps text, screaming her innocence to Victorian Norfolk.

1. Dressed: The History of Fashion hosts April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary interview embroidery historian Isabella Rosner about her zine 'Stitching Freedom, Embroidery, and Incarceration,' which examines 12 embroiderers who created work while held in various forms of incarceration. 2. Isabella Rosner is curator of the Royal School of Needlework and a research associate at Whitney Antiques in London, where she cares for nearly 500 years of needlework, and also hosts the podcast 'So What?' (S-E-W What), focused on historical embroidery between 1500 and 1900. 3. The episode's core thesis is that embroidery extends far beyond its stereotype of leisured, affluent women stitching decoratively — it has served as protest, communication, documentation, and emotional survival for people with no other outlet. 4. Isabella explains she conceived the project during COVID, when enforced isolation prompted her to explore embroidery under conditions of constrained freedom, building on earlier encounters with makers Agnes Richter and Arthur Bisbo de Rosario in a university course. 5. The zine is 72 pages, published by Common Threads Press, illustrated by Takako Copeland, and is designed as an accessible introduction — each of the 12 profiles runs 500 to 1,000 words — rather than a comprehensive academic text. 6. Recurring material themes across the 12 profiles include unraveling and remaking (socks, uniforms, bedding), outerwear as protection and armor (Agnes Richter's jacket, Merlin's coat, Arthur Bisbo de Rosario's Annunciation mantle), and the use of found or donated scraps. 7. Mary Queen of Scots is the book's first subject and earliest known example, in Europe, of embroidery tied to incarceration: held under house arrest for 15 years by the Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife Bess of Hardwick, she used embroidery to send coded political messages her monitored letters could not carry. 8. One surviving Mary panel — labeled simply 'a cat' — shows a ginger crowned cat beside a gray mouse, adapted from Conrad Gessner's emblem book but recolored and personalized to represent Elizabeth I as the powerful predator and Mary as the trapped prey. 9. Isabella notes that Mary's cross stitches go in multiple directions and skip warps and wefts, leading her to ask whether 16th-century embroiderers prioritized visual impact over stitch perfection, or whether the irregular stitches reflect emotional urgency. 10. Annie Parker, described as a 'South East London legend,' died at 38 of consumption, was arrested over 400 times for drunkenness, and at one point spent 300 of 365 days in a year incarcerated, yet produced embroidered samplers — nine known objects survive — using her own plucked hair as thread. 11. A hair-work sampler inscribed 'In Lonely Grief I Sigh,' dated to Annie age 31 in 1879, incorporates a hymn she used across multiple objects; the line 'friends beloved no longer nigh' is interpreted by Isabella as a reference to companions who fed Annie's addiction upon her release. 12. Isabella discovered after completing the zine that Annie's earliest dated sampler reads 'in memory of Thomas Parker,' identified through research as Annie's abusive, drunk husband, whose four children she bore — all in prison, all of whom died. 13. Lorena Bulwer was a middle-class woman from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, sent to the Great Yarmouth Workhouse in the 1890s by family after her parents died; her embroidered scrolls, researched primarily by Ruth Battersby at Norfolk County Museums, run 12 to 16 feet long and name over 70 people. 14. The scrolls are quilted throughout before the stitching is applied, requiring significant mathematical calculation of text sizing and line spacing — a level of craft skill Isabella emphasizes is invisible to most viewers who see only the emotional outpouring. 15. Isabella reads one Bulwer line directly: 'I have wasted 10 years in this damnation hell trap den of old women, old bags' — the all-caps, unpunctuated text functions as embroidered letters addressed to specific named individuals across Norfolk. 16. A Victorian charitable scheme at the Great Yarmouth Workhouse involved donated fabric, theorized by Ruth Battersby as Lorena's likely material source, though exactly how or why the workhouse permitted the creation of these accusatory scrolls remains unclear. 17. The interview is conversational and warmly enthusiastic, with Isabella and hosts sharing genuine affection for their subjects; Isabella occasionally pauses to physically hold up the zine on camera and acknowledge the limits of her own knowledge on adjacent historical questions. 18. The hosts and Isabella move fluidly between close object analysis and broader social history, regularly noting the gendered dynamics — brothers committing sisters to workhouses, male doctors writing women's mental health records — that frame many of the 12 stories. 19. The episode will most appeal to listeners interested in craft history, feminist history, Victorian social history, or the intersection of material culture and incarceration. 20. Listeners seeking upbeat or celebratory fashion history, or those uncomfortable with detailed discussions of suicide, abuse, and death, are advised to skip this episode.

As heard by us

Embroidery is framed as a medium for intimate detail and political meaning.

Embroidery becomes a way to think about incarceration, personal detail, and political meaning in the conversation with historian Isabella Rosner.

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Why you'd press play

If you want embroidery to feel like evidence, this one presses all the right nerves.

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