10.06.08
Posted in Samplers, General at 7:00 am by deRomilly
After a summer of frustration, I finally received appropriate fabric to stitch my current three sampler patterns (Esther, her companion, Della, and the huge as yet unnamed monster.) It was actually fabric for the monster that was the hardest to find. Apparently people are having a hard time keeping a full yard of antique white cashel on their shelves.
But it’s here now, as is most of the antiquie ivory that I’ll stitch the two little ones on. Yay!
Now all Ineed to do is get that business license taken care of and I’ll be set again. Remind me not to move cross country again. It wrecks havoc on the needlework business for years! WooHoo! Here I come!
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09.05.08
Posted in Samplers, Stitching Genres, Lace at 7:30 am by deRomilly
I got a bee in my bonnet to try to learn something new wieth my stitching recently. I’ve had a shelf full of needlelace books for years now, and every once in a while have pulled them out, failed miserably, and put them away again. I’ve been the same way with actual band samplers. I’m afraid I’m not really cut out for working my samples in a sane manner where they’re easy to retrieve. They always seem to work better when done on any old scrap of fabric I happen to have to hand at the moment.
Currently my band sampler is only about a foot and a half long. It looks like this, having some herringbone where I started doing TAST last year before I dropped out awfully quickly, and some buttonhole stitch…
This time I decided that since I’ve been doing stumpwork successfully for some time now, I should be able to do needlelace, too. I started a wired flower in cloth stitch (corded buttonhole) a month ago and had a bit of success - I still need to get green silk so I can do leaves, but it’s destined to be a brooch, and I’m really proud of the stitching. 
Photos soon, I hope.
So I pulled out my band sampler, and I’ve been doing all the boring gruntwork of learning many variations of needleace stitches - ripping out and restarting over and over until I get the hang of them. I’ve got several sizes of thread going here, and that is teaching me a lot about how sizes work as well. I think most of my problems in the past have been related to using too large a stitch for the size thread I was using.
This is fun! I’m liking the lace patterns that are emerging, and I finally think I’ve gotten a handle on tension. And I’ve got ideas out of my ears for designs and steps to go with this. Of course, that’s always part of my problem — too many ideas to actually manufacture the art! (and several of them integrate that wonderful bead stash from my last post!)
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08.04.08
Posted in Samplers, Historical at 3:02 pm by deRomilly
Now I am not a sampler historian. Until I discovered 17th and 18th century samplers I didnt’ care for them much at all, actually. I hate stitching words in cross stitch or backstitch, and just can’t wrap my head around the little pastoral houses with oversized dogs and cats in the yard. I dislike the “primitive” style intensely on a personal level. I loved Thea Dueck and Just Nan’s samplers, but couldn’t see myself hanging them on the wall once I’d finished stitching them. What to do, what to do?
Then I discovered the historic band sampler and the spot motif sampler, and all the ones in between that combine the best of both worlds and kajillions of different stitches. I was hooked. Basically what this, combined with osme of my other tendencies underscores, is that if it happened before 1800 I’m much more likely to be interested in it. <grin>
Samplers and the motifs you find on them have a bit ofa torrid affair with historians. Just about everyone who gets involved with studying them wants to know the history and meaning of each individual motif.
I fear this has become a bit of a game. You find cats defined as quick-witted, but also as lazy. When I put a cat into my work, I’m much more likely to be thinking of my furry baby at home than about some deep symbolic meaning of the motif. (English majors do the symbology thing too… even though Poe has written countless letters stating that “The Bells” was nothing more than an excercise in rhythm and rhyme, the English departments all insist we dig out whatever meaning we can from it.) As my heart-sister says, “Sometimes a cat in a flowerpot is just a cat in a flowerpot.”
That said, there ARE some overarching archetypes. However, these are often nationality, or even region-specific. We see crowns in the samplers of monarchists families under Cromwell. Some German samplers have coats of arms or crests related to their region of origin that crop up. Dutch samplers often have stylized tulips.
I think rather than symbolic, most sampler motifs are either regional or just something the stitcher liked. The historical pattern books like Scholyker’s Scholehouse for the Needle don’t assign meanings to each little design. Many of the symbols developed out of older symbology, especially in Eastern Europe.
But although people have loved including secret messages in their lives (language of flowers, language of fans, symbols in samplers), even if a meaning was intended we would need to be using the same dictionary as the maker to interpret it correctly. There are as many Victorian dictionaries of flower meanings as there are flowers, all different. And, as different meanings for motifs crop up almost daily — finding the one true dictionary seems to me to be so close to impossible that it becomes irrelevant.
So I’ll continue to stitch historic samplers, but I’ll also continue to design my own. Find what symbology in them as you will: I’m not putting it there intentionally!
Other links of interest:
And that should probably keep you busy for a while!
I’d love to hear your views on samplers and sampler motifs…
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