ewing nitting  mbroidery

My mother used to make reproductions of samplers from the colonial period. The goal of the samplers was to allow young women to practice and display their embroidery skills; they were done more or less freehand, without the detailed patterns that embroiderers use today. The reproduction kits, of course, included fabric, thread, and charts; they even reproduced the mistakes in the original embroidery.

I used to practice embroidering on scraps of leftover fabric, and one day I got it into my head to make a sampler of my own. I did it with no chart whatsoever, making up designs to include as I went along. The piece may be modern, but the method was period!

The embroidery consisted of two pieces--the lettering section and another section that contained various small pictures and emblems. The size of each section was constrained by the fabric itself, because it had a decorative border. When I eventually framed the piece, I only included the top section, because the bottom section looks (and is) unfinished.

Materials and Supplies

Construction

I don't have a particularly strong recollection of how I made this piece. I know I looked at the charted alphabets my mother had to get an idea of how to lay out the letters--the ascenders and descenders always present problems--but I didn't draw my own chart of how I intended to lay out the letters. You can see that this led to problems straight off--I made lower-case "a" the full height of the line, and then didn't have enough room for "b" or "d."

Results

This project is hardly one of my more impressive efforts, but it's the first thing that I made that I still have, so I'll always have a soft spot for it.

I think I gave up on the second section in the end, first because I wasn't sure how to fill the space in a way that made sense, and second because by that point I was using cotton floss with a very matte finish, and it just didn't look right. Older needlework was doing using silk or cotton thread with more of a sheen to it.