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"The needle belongs to all of women, both high and low," writes Federico Luigini in his libro della bella donna of 1544. "But where the poor find utility in these arts, the rich, noble, and beautiful lady wins honor." "Brush, Needle, Knife: Women's Creative Labor in Northern Italy, 1525-1650" is rooted in social histories, material studies, and theoretical potentialities. Through encounters with silks, embroideries, and lacework, this dissertation introduces a new approach to art history by centering anonymous collectives of women workers. It explores how silk conservatories in Bologna tied dowry-earning to chaste enclosure. It introduces Caterina Cantoni, a needle artist renowned in her time, only to be erased by discourses marginalizing women's threadwork. Throughout the sixteenth century, the figure of Arachne is weaponized to moralize female threadwork, while the "natural order" of insects as mini multiplicities of quiet industry is celebrated. The dissertation's insistence on forgotten or ignored embroideries and their makers relies on an inherently interdisciplinary approach, suturing together sources and methodologies to bring to light allegories of labor, nature, and gender. While ecofeminism mostly considers contemporary entanglements, this dissertation contributes to this developing field with an engaging instance from the early modern period emphasizing continuities and lineages between "women's work" and a range of nonhuman subjectivities in the worlds of entomology and botany. In these interventions, needlework is recovered as a complex site to advance politically urgent critiques of women's labor, textile economies, and feminist phenomenology.