About Curious Works Antiques
What I Sell
I specialize in embroidery and needlework, quilted objects, clothing, textiles, and sewing accessories made in 17th- through mid-19th-centuries. These include samplers and needlework pictures, sewing tools, historic textile study samples, doll clothing, embellished household textiles, and schoolgirl art.
History
In the 17th century, the word ‘curious’ described something
“made with care or art, skilfully, elaborately or beautifully wrought” (Oxford English Dictionary).
Since 1988, when I began selling antique embroideries, textiles, lace, and sewing accessories, I’ve thought of these little luxuries—whether
made by hand or professionally constructed—as curious works. I did business under my own name until I established Curious Works Antiques in 2022.
My customers include first-time purchasers as well as advanced collectors, those in the trade, and museums and other institutions.
Philosophy
Antiques are concrete memories. They embody the folks who made them, the folks who used them, and all the folks who enjoyed them down the generations. One of the joys of dealing in antiques is discovering the his- and her-stories of these objects and sharing them with prospective customers. These stories may illuminate less-traveled paths in the historical record, connect disparate ideas about people and cultures, and reveal social, religious, and ideological forces at work in the life of the maker and/or owners and users. Whatever their subject, these stories have the power to transform the meaning of an object and how we view history.
About Kathy Staples
For over forty years, Kathy Staples has focused on the social and cultural history of Britain and the Americas as expressed through textiles and related craft. She has written, lectured, and curated exhibitions on topics such as weaving and needlework in pre-contact Equador and colonial Mexico; production and use of embroidery in Stuart England; sampler-making in the whaling towns of Massachusetts; the use of cloth in trade with First Nation communities; the textile traditions of free and enslaved women in colonial South Carolina; and the relationship between fashion and consumption in colonial America. Among the museums Kathy has worked with are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Charleston Museum, Historic Charleston Foundation, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, The Georgia Museum of Art, and the Textile Museum at George Washington University.
Her publications include articles and essays in the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts, The Magazine Antiques, and Yale University Press. Her three books are: Curious Works: British Embroidery of the Seventeenth Century; Clothing Through American History: The British Colonial Era, with Madelyn Shaw; and Georgia’s Girlhood Embroideries: “Crowned with Glory and Immortality.” In 1992-2003, Kathy owned the publishing house Curious Works Press, specializing in the history of embroidery and museum catalogs of embroidery exhibitions.
Kathy holds an undergraduate degree in religion from Lawrence University and a graduate degree in anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin.