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

March 27, 2026·34 min·2 clips

An 1850s cotton sack embroidered by Ruth Middleton in 1921 records the moment Rose gave her nine-year-old daughter Ashley — sold into slavery in South Carolina — a bag containing a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans, and a braid of her own hair.

1. Dressed: The History of Fashion hosts April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary continue their conversation with embroidery historian Isabella Rosner about her zine Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration. 2. Isabella Rosner is a research associate at Whitney Antiques in London and curator of the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court Palace; she also hosts the So What? podcast about historic needlework. 3. The episode's purpose is to present specific case studies from the zine showing how embroidery was used as an act of resistance, memory, coded communication, and emotional survival in spaces of confinement from slavery to WWII concentration camps. 4. Ashley's Sack is an 1850s cotton bag that Rose gave to her nine-year-old daughter Ashley at the moment Ashley was sold in South Carolina; it contained a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans, and a braid of Rose's hair. 5. Ashley's granddaughter Ruth Middleton embroidered the account of this separation onto the bag in 1921, preserving the story across roughly 70 years of family memory; Isabella calls this one of very few surviving embroidered objects directly tied to American enslavement. 6. Tia Miles's book All That She Carried is cited as the definitive account of Ashley's Sack, described as expanding a single object into a roughly 400-page biography of what it meant to be enslaved and the role of material possessions. 7. Major Alexis Castagli, a British Army officer with a pre-war background in the textile trade, was captured and placed in a German POW camp in 1941; he unraveled a Cretan general's jumper to create thread and taught himself cross-stitch on a piece of salvaged canvas. 8. Castagli's sampler appeared decorative — recording his name, prisoner number, location, and date alongside national symbols and unidentified shapes — but contained Morse code in two narrow borders spelling 'God Save the King' and 'Fuck Hitler' on repeat; German guards never deciphered it across four years and multiple camp transfers. 9. Castagli was permitted to found an embroidery club in the camp, used Red Cross-supplied materials, and embroidered throughout his captivity including a map of cell life with a hidden British flag under a flap labeled 'do not open,' and hand-stitched letters to his children. 10. After liberation in 1945 Castagli continued embroidering for the rest of his life, taught his son to embroider, and frequently stitched butterflies — a symbol of freedom he had adopted in the POW camps that persisted after his release. 11. The women of Changi Prison in Singapore — incarcerated from 1941 — created three patchwork quilts containing coded messages for husbands in adjacent camps; visual symbols such as blue bunnies indicated births, and toddler depictions updated fathers on children's development, communicated through the camp hospital. 12. Radha Nikolic, a 19-year-old Serbian anti-fascist sentenced to execution, embroidered the names and execution dates of fellow prisoners onto a handkerchief in a concentration camp, depicted herself behind prison bars, and wrote to her mother 'Don't grieve. I'm not the only one. Many innocents have perished.' 13. Radha left only her own execution date blank; her death date was January 24th; after the camp was liberated the handkerchief was given to her mother, who donated it to a museum in Serbia. 14. Isabella discovered Radha's story by chance through a black-and-white Instagram image six years before the episode, and notes that Radha's story is largely absent from Western and Anglophone conversations about radical embroidery, illustrating how her own understanding of incarceration embroidery is limited by primarily speaking English. 15. Roy Matterson, the only living embroiderer in the zine, taught himself embroidery in prison using a plastic jug lid as a hoop and unraveled socks as thread, initially making sports-team badges to trade for coffee and cigarettes before developing into miniature pictorial pieces with tens of thousands of stitches. 16. Isabella chose to end the zine with Matterson as a note of hope — he left prison and now works as a full-time embroidery artist — and notes that his prison nickname was 'Betsy Ross,' connecting his identity-making through stitch to the mythologized flag-maker. 17. Isabella's argument throughout is that embroidery's accessibility — requiring only a needle, thread, and fabric — allowed it to be used across widely different cultures, time periods, and circumstances of confinement, with almost no gatekeeping. 18. The conversation is emotionally intense throughout; hosts note visible tears during the recording, and Isabella reflects that her study of embroidery is fundamentally driven by love of people and the desire to understand the complexity of past lives through material detail. 19. Researchers, textile historians, and listeners interested in material culture as historical evidence, or in the intersections of race, gender, incarceration, and craft, will find this episode substantive and extensively documented. 20. Listeners seeking fashion-forward or trend-focused content, or those who find extended discussion of historically documented suffering difficult, should approach this episode with that expectation.

As heard by us

A moving account of embroidery as hope, memory, and family connection.

Embroidery becomes a record of confinement, hope, and connection in this second conversation with embroidery historian Isabella Rosner about her zine, Stitching Freedom.

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