sieglinde anderson: a happy migration
by diane van helden

Sieglinde Anderson was born in the Saxon part of Transylvania at the advent of World War II.

Early in her life, she and her sister and mother spent evenings knitting essential clothing and did cross-stitch patterns as gifts. Living in Transylvania, she was exposed at an early age to three distinct cultures, Romanian, Hungarian, and Saxon, each with its own language and visual arts. Summers were spent at a country farm, where she enjoyed watching the local women washing hemp plants at the river and, on occasional visits in winter, watched them spinning and weaving while sharing tales and gossip.

After the war ended, her family moved to Austria where her father managed an estate. Anderson learned to draw and paint as a part of her Austrian high school education. She also enjoyed having a garden plot where she grew flowers. At 14, after high school, she apprenticed in ceramic painting at Schleiss Keramilk, one of Austria’s oldest ceramic studios. There she painted archival patterns onto plates, vases, and other containers. Had the family stayed in Austria, Anderson would have gone to Vienna to study fine arts. However, the family emigrated to the United States when she was seventeen.

Anderson had to complete high school in the United States in order to go to college. She studied sociology and, in 1963, moved to New York City. During the day she worked as a secretary and in the evenings attended the New York School of Interior Design. She landed a job with a firm that did the rooms for hotels such as the Waldorf and the Pierre. Once married, she and her husband began a wallpaper and fabric design company. In early 1970, she and her husband moved to a country home in Hope, New Jersey.

Anderson is convinced that the decade of her fifties was the best of her life. “So far, anyway, perhaps my eighties and nineties will prove to be better”, she opines. Why has it been the best? Anderson enjoyed a thriving career as a landscape architect in an area of Northern New Jersey that provided a clientele that appreciated and could also afford her professional abilities. In her fifties, Anderson had established herself as a respected landscape architect. She had confidence in herself – professionally and personally. She was now in a position to overcome the insecurities about herself that her stern, Saxon upbringing (at the dinner table the children were not permitted to speak) and marriage to a man she cared for deeply who unfortunately “preferred his vodka to her” had instilled in her.

The sense of accomplishment and the newly-found self-confidence had not come without considerable effort on her part. At the same time that she realized that her marriage was likely not to endure, she began her studies for a degree in landscape architecture. She enrolled in Livingston College at Rutgers in New Jersey in order to be able to take courses at Cook College that housed the landscape architecture program. At Cook – the agricultural college of Rutgers - she acquired an extensive background in plant materials and environmental design. Following her divorce, Anderson was accepted by the landscape architecture program at Ohio State. The landscape architecture program was a part of the School of Architecture, the emphasis of the coursework being on graphics and design. She completed her degree in 1980, returning to New Jersey first to apprentice for a year and then to begin her practice.

The winter of 1995 in Northern New Jersey was memorable for its snow and cold. No one was interested in talking about landscaping, and Anderson began to think about stitching —a love from her childhood. In the back of her mind she had always thought, well perhaps in her 70’s, she would get to her love of the design of needlework. That winter seemed the time to do it. She researched patterns from numerous cultures-English, Celtic, Oriental, Persian, Indian-discovering a universality of design elements and symbols. What Anderson has added to these designs is the color-sense of the interior designer and the quality of the tapestry wool yarns and fabric she uses.

Anderson experimented with various fabrics searching for one that would have enough body so that it would not require a frame, one that would provide an even weave, and one that would permit large enough stitches for the work to go quickly, yet small enough for detail. She remembered a hand-woven linen fabric from her childhood in Transylvania used for sacking, finding eventually the high-quality jute fabric that is also used to back oriental carpets. Locating the wool yarn for the stitching also involved extensive searching, because the colors that Anderson incorporates in her designs are not readily available. Most importantly, Anderson had to come up with an innovative stitching technique for her designs. She has had it trade-marked as cross-point™. It is easily mastered and according to a recent convert, the technique is more satisfying as it is less tedious than other counted cross-stitch and the finished product is exquisite.

The hard winter of 1995 and her fifties-decade confidence have led to her new business, Sieglinde Anderson Designs. She markets kits for pillows, rugs, and other items – objects of beauty and of heirloom quality. She sells kits for the pillows and other items, detailing the historic source of every design used. Anderson moved to Asheville in 2002. So what brought her to Western North Carolina? Anderson has another dream. “One of the reasons I thought of doing Sieglinde Anderson Designs is that the business is not location-bound. I had started coming to Asheville in 1984, for a rock garden conference. I fell in love with the mountains and I started thinking, what could I do that would not be tied to a specific location?”.

Western North Carolina is remarkable for its tradition of craft—its hooked rugs, its quilts, its baskets, its fiber arts, and its hand- and home-made arts traditions. What Anderson would like to accomplish now is to extend her business from selling the kits to producing the pillows for retail sales. Most large-scale manufacturers would look to China or Central America for stitchers. Anderson believes that she will be able to find in Western North Carolina people who enjoy stitching and who take pride in creating things of beauty. Her dream is to create another cottage industry that will benefit the local population. Considering recent trends to move industry out of North Carolina to foreign locations, despite the purported new patriotism after the events of the last two years, Anderson’s dream is to develop a retail end of her design business by locating local stitchers and not sending the work to foreign countries. One of her first steps would be to establish a local stitching circle.

To see some of Anderson’s designs, go to cross-point.com. If you enjoy stitching and are interested in being a stitcher either for fun or for income, call Sieglinde at 232-2830.