Erica Wilson Dies at 83 Erica Wilson in her store in Manhattan in 2005. She was trained in the needle arts in London. Erica Wilson, the Julia Child of needlework, who brought the gentle art of crewel - as well as cross-stitch, needlepoint and other traditional embroidery techniques - to an international audience through her books, television shows, correspondence courses, syndicated column and retail shops, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. The cause was a stroke, her family said. British by birth, Ms. Wilson had lived in New York since arriving in the United States in 1954 for what was supposed to be a yearlong teaching assignment. Since then, without ever really intending to, she built a public career as a teacher of the domestic arts that paralleled Ms. Child's and in many respects anticipated Martha Stewart's. Ms. Wilson, who wrote more than a dozen instructional books, was the host of "Erica," a public-television program produced by WGBH in Boston in the early 1970s and broadcast nationally. Her Upper East Side flagship store, Erica Wilson Needle Works, offered classes in a range of needle arts and sold kits designed by Ms. Wilson for needlepoint pillows and the like. Her best-known kits include a series based on the Unicorn Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The store, on Madison Avenue at 63rd Street, was a neighborhood fixture for decades until it closed in 2006, a casualty of rising commercial rents and the urban knitting boom. Ms. Wilson also had shops on Nantucket; in Palm Beach; and in Southampton, on Long Island. The Nantucket shop remains in business. Trained in London at the Royal School of Needlework, Ms. Wilson arrived in the United States at a propitious moment. American women, flush with postwar prosperity but without careers of their own, had time and disposable income on their hands. Ms. Wilson put those hands to work. As a result, she was largely responsible for the midcentury American renaissance of hand embroidery, a traditional art that had waned in the 20th century amid the rise of machine sewing. Under her guidance, women (and some men) learned centuries-old needle arts like cross-stitch, a technique, often seen on American Colonial samplers, in which patterns are formed by arrangements of embroidered X's; crewel embroidery, in which floral or other motifs are filled in with wool, leaving the background bare; and needlepoint, in which stitches fill the entire canvas, giving the look of tapestry. Erica Moira Susan Wilson was born on Oct. 8, 1928, in Tidworth, England, near Stonehenge. Her father was a colonel in the British Army, and she spent her first five years in Bermuda. Returning to Britain with her mother after her parents divorced, she was reared in England and Scotland. Ms. Wilson, who had done needlework as a child, found her vocation almost by default. "She was going to make a lousy secretary, and she wasn't very keen on mathematics," her husband, the prominent furniture designer Vladimir Kagan, said in an interview on Tuesday. Her mother solved the problem, he said, by suggesting the Royal School. After graduating, Ms. Wilson taught there for several years. In 1954, she was recruited by a visiting American, a well-to-do woman who wanted to start a needlework school in Millbrook, N.Y. Ms. Wilson set out bravely for her American adventure, suitably armed. "I brought a big trunk of my own wool, thinking I was going to Indian Country, where such things wouldn't be available," she told The News and Courier of Charleston, S.C., in 1973. Before long, she had settled in Manhattan, where she taught at the Cooper Union. She also held workshops in her apartment, and the mimeographed handouts she gave her students soon blossomed into a full-fledged correspondence course. That course, which over time enrolled thousands of students, led to her books and the television show, filmed in the studio next to Ms. Child's. Ms. Wilson, who had homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach and on Nantucket, also appeared on television in Britain and Australia. Her syndicated column, "Needleplay," appeared in American newspapers in the 1980s. Her books include "Crewel Embroidery" (1962), "Erica Wilson's Embroidery Book" (1973) and "Erica Wilson's Knitting Book" (1988). Besides her husband, whom she married in 1957, she is survived by two daughters, Vanessa Diserio, who runs the Nantucket shop, and Jessica Kagan Cushman, a jewelry and accessories designer; a son, Illya, an artist; and six grandchildren. All of the above have grown skilled at holding their hands aloft for long periods, letting Ms. Wilson wind all the wool she needed in a single sitting.