Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: October 18, 2025
If she cannot make them herself, she must find a clever needle-woman who has learned her business, and knows milliner's phraseology and the meaning of terms, and how to cut out to the best advantage. She will then be able to use common material, buy smaller quantities of them, and will always look well dressed.
Miss Girzie, whom they called Lady Skimmilk, had been in a very penurious way as a seamstress, in the Gorbals of Glasgow, while her brother was making the fortune in India, and she was a clever needle-woman none better, as it was said; and she, having some things to make, took Kate Malcolm to help her in the coarse work; and Kate, being a nimble and birky thing, was so useful to the lady, and the complaining man the major, that they invited her to stay with them at the Breadland for the winter, where, although she was holden to her seam from morning to night, her food lightened the hand of her mother, who, for the first time since her coming into the parish, found the penny for the day's darg more than was needed for the meal-basin; and the tea-drinking was beginning to spread more openly, insomuch that, by the advice of the first Mrs Balwhidder, Mrs Malcolm took in tea to sell, and in this way was enabled to eke something to the small profits of her wheel.
They can, by dint of sponging and washing, and pressing, and ironing by turning, and many other ways known to them, make their ladies' cast off clothes look as good as new, and many a lady has, before now, looked with envy upon an old dress which reappears in a new character, looking quite as fresh and attractive as ever, under the magic hand of a clever and practical needle-woman.
"You know that since I am a good needle-woman and the times are so hard with us just at present, I am fortunate to be able to get work from several of the ladies around Riverview. Perhaps it will not have to be for long, Dick, dear." "I know it won't if I have any say in the matter. You're sitting up every night sewing long after I've gone to bed.
On a small sofa or lounge at the side of the room was a quantity of what ladies call “work,” thrown down in a great hurry, with the needle yet sticking in it, and the scissors, and the beeswax, and the measuring tape, and the bodkin half-concealed inside, as if the knock at the door had startled the needle-woman, and she had flown to parts unknown.
At a large meeting of these women held in a hall in Philadelphia, grand speeches were delivered, but a needle-woman took the stand, threw aside her faded shawl, and with her shriveled arm hurled a very thunder-bolt of eloquence, speaking out the horrors of her own experience. Stand at the corner of a street in New York at six or seven o'clock in the morning as the women go to work.
It is understood that we are not now talking of a comparse in a petty theatre who earns the wages of a needle-woman. That is out of the question for you." "Of course I must earn more than that," said Gwendolen, with a sense of wincing rather than of being refuted, "but I think I could soon learn to do tolerably well all those little things you have mentioned. I am not so very stupid.
I was a needle-woman, and earned from twenty to thirty sous a day. Whatever I earned I gave my mother. I had never had a lover, never thought of such a thing, and when my goodness was praised I felt inclined to laugh. I had been brought up from a child never to look at young men when I met them in the street, and never to reply to them when they addressed any impudence to me.
She had a great and glorious reward. Colonel Boucher's face grew absolutely blank in the moonlight with sheer astonishment. "Well, you surprise me," he said. "Surely a fine woman, though lame, wouldn't look at a needle-woman well, leave it at that." He stamped his feet and put his hands in his pockets. "It's growing a bit chilly," he said.
Whereupon the Sister begged as a favor, that he would stop at the door and tell Ruth to come on the next day, if possible, to look at the sewing which Sister Angela was doing for her. "Sister Angela is a wonderful needle-woman," Sister Teresa could not help adding with modest pride. "She learned to sew and to do the finest embroidery while she was studying in a convent in France.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking