This talk looks at how handmade artifacts enabled connections with British colonial spaces in imaginative, material, and tactile ways. It examines objects created by women that made use of a mixture of global sources for their material composition and visual inspiration. What kind of alternative stories of empire are told through intercultural crafts? And what tales might unfold around handheld objects in British novels set in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world? My talk takes up these questions by looking at the 1808 novel The Woman of Colour and its treatment of small things, such as miniature portraits, jewelry, and needlework, to study how portable goods, especially those carried by women, underwrite its representation of empire, the circulation of goods, and the narrative meanings that adhere to movement across the Atlantic. Delivered to mark the 10 year anniversary of the Georgia Colloquium in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature.