Dorothy Howard

From the cane fields of New Orleans to the glittering streets of Chicago, one woman dares to stitch a new life from hardship, love, and loss.

New Orleans, 1888. Marietta is a farm girl with a needle, an eye for a hat, and more hunger for life than her father’s cane fields can hold. When a charming Italian offers her a future in Chicago, she takes it, and opens a shop with her own name above the door.

In the city’s bustling millinery trade, Marietta finds work, romance, marriage, and motherhood, but also betrayal, hardship, illness, and a society with little room for an independent woman. A silver thimble inherited from her mother and a half-remembered lullaby carry her through the years, even as a hidden injustice threatens to take her name, and her children, away from her.

Spanning New Orleans and Chicago from 1888 into the early 1910s, through the World’s Fair, the Iroquois Theatre fire, and the storms of a new century, The Invisible Stitch is a story of women’s work, family, and the quiet resilience it takes to build a life stitch by stitch.