The design in the book was stitched with Anchor cotton floss. While it gives it a nice, smooth, shiny look, I tend to not call it crewel. The defining word for me with crewel work is wool, which is apparently whence the word crewel derives! So while the design done in floss is pretty, I don’t call it crewel – it’s what I’d call “freestyle embroidery.” It’s a nit, I know. But I live in a world where nothing has the same name between two people — both embroidery and bellydance use different terms for the same stitch or move. It drives my ordered brain nuts!

Anyway. The color scheme I ended up with was dependent on the colors I had in my box in Appleton. In this case, golds and pinks rather than golds and oranges. Luckily the pinks have a very yellow cast to them, and actually blend pretty well with the gold, which surprised me. Learn something new with every sample! The turquoise is a little bright for the rest of the colors, but it’s not TOO horrible.

The sampler was focused on the basque stitch – which makes an interesting twisted chain-like spike. The outside of the flower to the right is done in this stitch, as is the center of two of the leaves. Quite pretty. I’d never actually done this stitch before, and I found it a bit tricky, especially to make the loops all the same size and avoid tightening the stitches too much. Combined with the fuzzy Appleton wool, well, I had a few issues!

Even close up the gold and pink don’t look too bad – maybe even pretty good together!

I think it came out pretty well!

Next motif – floss silks and “Society Silk” motif – yes, I know it’s my crewel sampler. But it’s mine, and I’ll play as I like!

Have a wonderful Christmas, if you celebrate it!

I finished the bottom two motifs last weekend. The top one is all in Appleton wool, and it was a stitch exploration that turned into a color test. The pink actually turned out to go with the golds quite well! The design is the crewel work design out of the Anchor Little book of Crewel stitches that goes with the basque stitch – which is the stitch around the circles and in the center of two of the leaves.

I relearned that I really dislike working with Appleton yarn – it’s quite fuzzy, although the fuzziness does hide some of the little stitching mistakes. It also stretches out and thins faster than some of the other yarns I use.

The bottom motif is an art deco design that I tried using some of the Art needlework techniques I’ve been reading about – and all of the strands of Eterna Silk floss. I got the look that’s so prevalent in my antique Poppy Piece, but I ran out  of green silk before I could put in the stem — so today I used a green hand dyed that I won from Sharon Boggins years ago. Finally actually using the pretties! I can’t save them for the “perfect project” forever– and it WILL be forever if I try that!

I’ll go into detail about these four little motifs later.

As usual, click for the full picture and details!

Sad Sampler

I thought I’d written about this before, but I don’ t seem to have – maybe on a forum or rec.crafts.textiles.needlework usenet or somesuch.

So here goes again.

Years ago I was a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism (that’s also where I got the name Romilly, but that’s another story). I don’t fight, so I needed something to do with my hands — I started a sampler, taking historic motifs from various patterns I owned and mixing them up, adding a few of my own and such.

It was also a way to use my stash of Gentle Arts Sampler Threads and Weeks Dye Works threads.

What I learned, the hard way — they mean it when they say “don’t wash.”

How I learned it. Squirrel pee. Or bird. Whatever it was, it’s three drips on the sampler. In retrospect, these were not thread or fabric choices I should have made for a piece I was going to be carrying around in the woods with me!

I tried to wash out the stain – it’s still there, though I can’t get a good photo of it. I think it melted some of the fabric threads. And the red threads (aren’t they always the culprit?) ran. All over the old-formula lugana – the stuff with NO cotton or natural fibers in it at all (OK, so it was also a way to get rid of a fabric I hated stitching on…) so it stains easily.  It’s sad. Both the situation and the sampler.

The sampler sits in my UFO (unfinished objects) box to this day. I keep meaning to try overdying it in a tea color to antique it a bit – or just cut it up and use it in a crazy quilt as is. I never seem to get around to either of them, though. And so it sits. Waiting for me to do something – anything with it.

Details below. As usual, click to see closer.

 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!

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!)

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:

• Shakespeare’s Peddler list of motif meanings
• Linda Fontenot’s History of Decorative Motifs (includes charts)
• Simply Samplers Sampler Motifs
• Judy Of White Works has quite a  nice essay on Samplers.

And that should probably keep you busy for a while!

I’d love to hear your views on samplers and sampler motifs…