The Most Famous Stitch Club on Television Was an Entire Sitcom Cast
Off camera, the fastest way to spot Ann B. Davis was not the face you knew as Alice, or as Schultzy before her. It was the needlepoint in her hands. She carried a canvas everywhere, she said, "like my purse," and refused to leave the house without one. If she got kept waiting even five minutes, that was five minutes of stitching she was not about to waste.
She came to it the way a lot of working actors do, by sitting still. Television means hours of waiting between setups, one ear always listening for your name, too distracted to read. A canvas turned out to be the perfect companion for that restless, ready kind of quiet.
Her first project told you everything about her
Ann's first project was a director's chair, and it stayed her favorite. She found a paisley kit meant to be a wall hanging that happened to be exactly the right size for the seat, then ignored the colors it came with and reached for hot pinks and purples instead. She made mistakes. She asked questions. When someone mentioned she really ought to be working in basketweave instead of continental, she switched stitches in the middle of a row and kept right on going. By the time she finished, she admitted, she was starting to get a little good at it.
The chair became a small masterpiece. Her signature went on the front in needlepoint, a tidy replica of her own handwriting. On the back, Alice stood in her white apron flanked by stick figures of the whole Brady family, the figures worked in petit point on Penelope canvas (which is what Natasha’s lookalike Fendi bag is) she split herself to get the detail. And then the chair went where she went, onto the set, where she would settle in between takes and stitch some more. In 1972, her work landed her a place in the book Celebrity Needlepoint, alongside the other famous stitchers of the day.
Here is the part we love most. It did not stop with Ann.
She taught Florence Henderson. Florence took to it completely, then turned around and taught the kids, so the younger cast would have a calm, quiet thing to reach for during the long stretches of downtime. "You could do it all day long and still be quiet while they were filming," Eve Plumb later remembered. Between the two of them, Ann and Florence even stitched personalized pillows as gifts for the cast and crew, the sort of thing you only do once a hobby has quietly become a language everyone on set speaks.
Eve Plumb, Jan on the show, took to it most seriously of all the kids. She stitched her own original pieces right there on set, a butterfly, a cat, a sun, signed and dated in her own hand. One of her butterflies still carries her initials and the date, August 5, 1971, with her own notes on technique penciled around the edges. Years later, those on-set pieces turned up at a celebrity auction, which is a remarkable second life for something a teenager stitched to pass the time between scenes.
It made its way on screen, too
Florence loved needlepoint so much in real life that it followed her into the script. Carol Brady is seen stitching across episode after episode, a canvas in her lap in the living room, a quiet pastime written in to give the character something real to do. There is a wink buried in that. The producers would not let Carol have a job, so needlepoint became more or less the only work she was allowed to be seen doing. A whole generation watched her stitch and decided to try it themselves, which is no small part of how the craft caught fire in the 1970s in the first place.
Why it still lands
That is the thing about a needle. You pick it up to fill five empty minutes, and somehow it fills the whole room. One person teaches the next, a chair becomes a keepsake, a butterfly becomes an auction lot, a quiet little habit becomes the warm center of a very loud workday.
Ann put it the plainest way possible. You don’t have to be artistic. Put the needle in the right hole and you have made a stitch. "I couldn't do it wrong," she marveled, and you can hear the relief in it. The canvas does not ask you to be talented. It asks you to sit down, slow down, and put your hands to work. The rest, as a whole soundstage of Bradys discovered, tends to take care of itself.
Alice. Carol. The whole bunch. All of them, one of us.
Sources: Celebrity NeedlepointbyJoan Scobey and Lee Parr McGrath; TelevisionAcademy.com; Entertainment Weekly; Parade.com