<p>This article will provide a material, object-focused reading of James Thomson’s 1730 tale of Palemon and Lavinia and discuss how female needleworkers introduced the lovers in their silk-embroidered pictures. It will examine how in relation to both the individuated silkwork and objects introduced in the compositions, the narrative is framed as much by character as by the things that define and contextualize them. Needleworkers as material narrators adapted two printed visual remediations of Thomson’s characters based respectively on a book illustration by William Hamilton and a separately issued print by William Lawrenson, the former published in 1802, the latter having already been issued in 1780. The silkwork embroideries represent reimaginings of both the visual and typographical sources, but also of how (newly introduced or omitted) objects can structure and affect meaning-making visually-textually: they alter the iconic narratives of the compositions and expand them to advance rewritings of the tale and the lovers’ relationship that are especially framed by the needleworkers’ identity-formational practice of moral self-representation.</p>