(pensive orchestra music) - I am a historian, librarian, singer, embroidery artist.

I work for a local public library.

I was a public historian for the town of Greenwich for almost 17 years, and I embroider as much as I possibly can.

(laughs) My first job after I graduated from college was at Saratoga Battlefield in Stillwater, New York, and I was a seasonal interpretive ranger and I needed an 18th century craft that I could do.

I decided that I would teach myself how to embroider.

It actually helped because the women who got dragged there by their husbands who wanted to talk about war would always be like, "Oh, my mother quilts," or, you know, some things along those lines.

So it was a nice way for me to interact with people.

My interest in history probably goes back to my eighth grade history teacher.

I did basically a book report for her on Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.

And I was just kind of fascinated by the women who aren't really mentioned in the history books after that, which is pretty much all the women, but... (laughs) My embroidery is very portrait based.

The type of embroidery I do is redwork embroidery.

It's a fairly simple style of embroidery, it uses only three stitches.

It doesn't have to be done in red, but red was the traditional color.

The Yellow Wallpaper pieces are done in kind of like a charcoal color.

I read a book by Charlotte Perkins Gilman called The Yellow Wallpaper, which is a short story.

It's about women's mental health and postpartum depression.

So I'm kind of exploring that with a lot of those portraits.

A lot of the paper is ripped, the raw edge of fabric starts to unravel a little bit so I've left some of the raw edges there so that over time they'll unravel more.

And then I started slicing into the portraits and... (laughs) People who were kind of used to embroidery as like, you know, this pretty little decorative thing that's, you know, on your grandmother's dresser are like, (gasps) "You just destroyed your beautiful embroidery!"

I'm like, "Well, it's the point of the art."

Like... (laughs) I'm trying to, you know, to show that, you know, you're becoming unraveled, you're frayed, you're in pieces, you know, trying to play with that idea.

But then I also do a lot of historic figures, mostly suffragists.

(pensive orchestra music) In US history it's typically called the suffrage movement.

It's the Women's suffrage movement.

So it's a social movement in which women are trying to gain the right to vote in all elections.

So I decided that I would do a series of suffragists and then have them be tea cozies.

- [Interviewer] What's a tea cozy?

- I don't- (laughs) - [Offscreen Speaker] Trying to figure that out myself.

- So a tea cozy is two pieces of fabric, usually with some sort of like batting in between, but you put them over your teapot to keep your tea warm and they work really well.

(laughs) And the reason I was doing suffragists on tea cozies was because there were a few ties with tea in the suffrage movement.

One, they kind of akin themselves to the Boston Tea Party, taxation without representation.

There was the connection that the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention was planned over tea.

Then later on, ladies would create different blends and then sell those teas as fundraisers.

There's a surviving example of a club in California and their tea was called Equality Tea.

And that's how I get the name of my eventual exhibit.

The suffrage movement is important to me because one, it doesn't get talked about.

Social movements in general tend to get played down in history textbooks, in the general public.

Instead they talk about, you know, economic history, political history, the history of war.

And I'm not saying those aren't important, but the social movements are just as important.

Social movements are what forces change.

And once women got the right to vote, then the push comes for the other minorities that are getting left out.

The black men and women who were trying to fight poll taxes and literacy tests that most white people didn't have to pass in order to vote.

The restrictions on indigenous people in which in order for them to vote, they had to give up their tribal representation and declare themselves US citizens.

So there was a big push for that.

So all of these things, you know, and I mean, we're still fighting voter suppression to this day.

So voting rights is still something that always needs to be regarded and looked after and nurtured and fought for.