The Ladies' Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness

Embroidering on canvas, or tapestry work, opens a large field for taste and skill in execution. Beautiful articles for presents, chair covers, sofa cushions, slippers, may be worked in the otherwise idle moments spent in familiar society, and the fingers will soon acquire skill and astonishing rapidity. The German ladies have constantly on hand a piece of netting or other fancy work, which they carry from place to place, and take out when conversing; and so far from entirely engrossing their thoughts, they chat more readily and freely with their fingers thus employed. American ladies will find the custom worth imitating. Many tedious hours will be smoothly, pleasantly passed, with the mind free, but the fingers pleasantly occupied. An evening passed in sewing or knitting, with one good reader to entertain the industrious workers, will be found very pleasant. I have known a circle of young people meet every week to work in this way, the reader being changed twice or three times in the course of the evening, and these meetings have proved so pleasant, that scarcely any member failed to plead "prior engagement" if invited out upon the evening appointed to read and sew. It was formerly objected by the adversaries to mental cultivation in women, that the acquirement of book learning would make them neglect needlework; but so far from this being the case, the present, which is often called the age of learning, is preeminently a working age. Never were fingers more actively engaged than those of the rising female generation; braiding, embroidery, Berlin work, knitting, netting, and crochet, are all in full play. A long neglected work has been recently revived, called by the French "La Frivolite." It is very pretty evening work, partly because it does not impede conversation, for it may be carried on almost without looking at it, and partly because no other work shows to so much advantage the grace and delicacy of the hands. The most simple form of this work was anciently known under the name of Tatting, but that only consisted of a series of loops in a straight line, which were used for trimming linen articles, and which was not so pretty as La Frivolite, which has varieties which are a good imitation of point, and may be used for collars and sleeves.