Turning back the clock

I'm returning once again to the subject of clocks, this time adapting to needlepoint a Shaker wall clock dating to 1840.

The Shaker religious movement was founded by Mother Ann Lee, an illiterate factory worker, who fled religious persecution in England in 1774 with eight believers and settled outside of Albany, New York. Officially organized as the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing in 1787, the group was more commonly referred to as "shaking Quakers" or Shakers because of the vigorous and ecstatic dancing in their religious observances. They established communities in which men and women lived as brothers and sisters, where all property was held in common, and each was assigned a task to help transform earth into heaven. At the time the clock I've modeled was originally produced, there were more than 6,000 Shaker believers living in 19 communal villages in New England, Ohio and Kentucky.

The Shakers were well ahead of their time in their belief in social and economic equality: in the year they officially organized as a religion, equal rights were granted to women believers, and Southern Shaker communities began freeing slaves and buying back the freedom of enslaved believers in 1817. Inventors of hundreds of labor-saving devices, including clothespins and circular saws, which they freely shared without patents, the Shakers strove for perfection in everything they did, raising the benchmark for American crafts and architecture.

The Shakers brought new meaning to the saying "A place for everything, and everything in its place." On the walls of their communal dormitories were wooden peg rails, upon which everything used in daily life--from coats, shawls, baskets, fruit carriers, clocks and chairs--was neatly stored. My vignette attempts to capture this "moment in time" in Shaker life, and I'll be working this canvas with some simple threads and stitches in keeping with the Shaker spirit.