In the early days of spring, workers at Mordecai Historic Park in Raleigh were removing paint from the main house with wood scrapers using a slow-acting but preservation-friendly soy-gel medium. Restorers had been working around the clock since the first day of winter. Change comes slowly and carefully at Mordecai.

Thus it is that a needlework project begun in 1984 is almost done.

In the waning of the last millennium, Janet Taylor, then president of Mordecai, had the idea that the 1847 St. Mark's Chapel would benefit from cushions for the pews. Inspired by the ecclesiastical needlework she saw on a trip to England, Taylor thought something like that had to be done for St. Mark's.

"And there were so many of us at that time doing needlepoint," Taylor recalled.

The chapel was built in rural Chatham County, then was moved to Siler City before finding a resting place in Raleigh in 1979. It had come a long way and deserved to be beautiful.

So this project was conceived: Each of the 11 pews would have three cushions. Each set of cushions depicts a panoramic scene with 26 motifs including native flora and fauna that would have been on a mid-Atlantic estate in the 19th century, with at least one small mammal, one songbird, one reptile, one bug.

For instance, one of the four triptychs includes a skunk, an Eastern box turtle, an Eastern chipmunk and a robin, along with a honeybee, a carpenter ant and a praying mantis.

The plants, some of which flow from one cushion to the next, include phlox, marjoram and yellow jessamine.

In addition, each chair on the altar has a cushion and there is a wedding kneeler.

Motif matters

Since the chapel was deconsecrated when it was moved to Raleigh, the designers elected to have secular motifs. The exception is the wedding kneeler, which has motifs from nature that have a double religious meaning, according to Marilyn Gordon, a stitcher who has been with the project since the beginning.

Because the pews are hand-hewn, explains Kate Green, another stitcher, each is slightly different in size. So each pew was measured and the cushions tailor-sized. The pew number and cushion number are stitched into the band on the side. Across the back of each cushion is the name of the family that sponsored each cushion.

(Susan Stallings, who joined the stitchers in 1992, bought one of the cushions in honor of her parents, as the chapel came from a community not three miles from where she grew up in Chatham County, she said.)

The canvases were designed and hand-painted by Ann Fitz-Simons. Eight bags of wool floss of many colors were procured and each cushion was put into a kit with yarn, canvas and all.

Eager stitchers began work. The needlepoint is done all in basket weave, a stitch sturdy and simple, like the chapel itself.

The fancier, raised stitches wear down over time, Green points out, and the stitchers intend for these cushions to last a century or more. Each square inch takes about an hour, what with all the color changes from bugs to flower to background. And each cushion has about 79,000 stitches.

Gorgeous -- and ambitious.

Time to organize

After a few years, with a few stitchers getting some of the work done, Stitchers in Time was formed in 1990 to give some organization to the effort.

Fifty-six stitchers from seven counties worked on the cushions. Green empowered 35 people to help, teaching them to needlepoint.

"A friend claimed that it was a condition of friendship with me that you had to at least try to learn," Green says.

Stallings may speak for many when she observes, "I stitch really well, but not really fast."

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