A Novel by Dorothy Howard

The Invisible Stitch

A Milliner's Journey from the Cane Fields of New Orleans to Maison Marietta of Chicago

She left everything she loved for a name in gold letters.

New Orleans, 1888. Marietta Hart can coax beauty out of felt and ribbon the way her mama coaxes a lullaby out of the dark, and the card in the milliner’s window seems written just for her: Seamstress Wanted. But a girl with a gift must choose, and when a charming stranger offers her Chicago, she trades the boy she has loved all her life, her father’s blessing, and the only home she knows for one chance at a shop of her own.

Chicago gives with one hand and takes with the other. Marietta builds Maison Marietta stitch by stitch, and watches it fall. She is deceived by one man, cherished by another, and rescued, late and gently, by a third who speaks his love in two cups of tea. She survives the fire that takes six hundred souls, the panic that empties the banks, and the winter that kills in a single night. Then a jealous whisper reaches a county desk, a paper arrives with one word on it, and a mother with a cough must fight the coldest thing in Chicago: the law itself, coming for her two little boys.

All she can leave them is a silver thimble and a promise: when we are all together again.

Based on the true story of the author’s grandmother.

Some stitches never show. They hold anyway.

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Paperback and ebook · Moonlight Melody Press

The Story Behind the Book

Marietta was real. She was a milliner — a maker of hats — who began her life near the cane fields outside New Orleans and built, stitch by stitch, a name that reached the counters of Marshall Field’s in Chicago. And then her name was taken from her, and for a long time she was only a number in an institution’s ledger.

This novel began when three sisters started pulling on a thread of family history — letters, legal documents, photographs, and the stories half-remembered around kitchen tables. At least half of what you will read is documented fact. The rest is imagined honestly, in the spaces between the records, where a life actually gets lived.

She wrote this book so a woman buried under a number would have her name spoken again.

The silver thimble engraved M.R. passed down through the family is real. The shop was real. The train she boarded with everything still ahead of her was real. Her photograph appears inside the book, above her true name: Marietta.

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For Book Clubs

The paperback includes fifteen discussion questions drawn from the novel itself — its history, its choices, and the woman at its center. A printable copy of the discussion guide will be available here as a free download.

Download the Discussion Guide

Reading it with your club? Dorothy loves visiting book clubs, in person or by phone — write to her.

The Studio

Books are one room of this house. Dorothy is also a professional floral designer, with an eye now wandering toward interiors. Those rooms are being furnished.

Books

Historical fiction from Moonlight Melody Press, beginning with The Invisible Stitch.

Flowers

Floral design — arrangements with a story in them.

Coming Soon

Interiors

Rooms arranged the way a page is: nothing wasted, everything placed.

Coming Soon

About Dorothy

Dorothy Howard, in a beret, seated in a garden

Dorothy Howard is a novelist and professional floral designer. The Invisible Stitch, her debut, grew out of years of family research undertaken with her two sisters, tracing the true story of their great-grandmother from the cane fields of Louisiana to the millinery counters of Chicago.

She publishes under her own imprint, Moonlight Melody Press.

artisinbloom@gmail.com