sampler

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Image features a length of wool canvas with an irregular grid of embroidered floral and geometric borders. In gray, ochre, orange and white on a dark brown ground. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Borders
In 2005, Hella Jongerius was invited to curate a Selects exhibition at Cooper Hewitt. She became fascinated by the museum’s collection of over 1,000 embroidered samplers. For the exhibition, she made her own “Sampler Blankets,” which combined motifs drawn from the historic examples with industrial techniques like machine embroidery and needle-punch felting. These explorations were...
Mary Milner’s “Integrated Text” Band Sampler
Author: Dr. Lynne Anderson In celebration of the fourth annual New York Textile Month, members of the Textile Society of America will author Object of the Day for the month of September. A non-profit professional organization of scholars, educators, and artists in the field of textiles, TSA provides an international forum for the exchange and...
Image features: a length of woven textile with an off-white ground and scattered overlapping rectangles of different color and weave combinations in pastel shades. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Darning Sampler
Maharam’s collaborations with artists and designers over the years have produced some extraordinary textiles and wallcoverings, and according to Mary Murphy, senior vice president of design at Maharam, one of their favorite partnerships has been with Scholten & Baijings. Their love of process, sophisticated color sense, and familiarity with the making of textiles creates a...
Image features: Embroidered picture, nearly square in format, depicting a mourning female figure leaning on a tomb surmounted by an urn under the shade of a weeping willow. The tomb bears the inscription: Sacred to the memory of Dr. Robt Rogerson. obt. April 1st 1806, AE 49 y's. Lucy Rogerson. obt. March 4th, 1807, AE 39. Danl. H. Rogerson. obt., March 25th, 1808, AE 14. Lucy H. Rogerson. obt. 1803, AE 11 months. Embroidered in tan silk with toned watercolor washes. Trial sketch of head on left margin and trial letters in lower right and bottom margins. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Weeping Willow
To a modern eye, mourning samplers sometimes seem insufficiently personal or idiosyncratic to represent genuine grief, relying as they do on stock motifs—the woman in classical dress leaning in a posture of grief against the tomb, under a weeping willow. In fact, mourning was perhaps more fashionable than emotional; following the death of George Washington...
Image features a rectangular sampler, in the upper half, a record of the births of members of the Sacket family: Stephen Sacket born May 23 1752. Eunice Lovering born Dec. 23 1748. Married Nov. 25 1776. Steph'n Sacket Jr. born Aug 7 1777. Eunice Sacket born April 25 1779. Hannah Sacket born Aug 7 1781. Sally Sacket born April 21 1786. Daniel Sact. born Sept 23 1790. Followed by a verse: "In prosperity friends are plenty In adversity not one in twenty." With scattered floral motifs and the initials SS in the lower half, and a floral border on three sides. The black background is embroidered on natural colored cloth. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Sacket Sampler
The unstructured nature of this family register sampler, initialed “SS” and attributed to Sally Sacket (b. 1786), is typical of eighteenth-century examples. In contrast to the more organized genealogy samplers that appear after 1800, the text here is run together in continuous lines. Sally’s sampler is one of a group of three Westfield, Massachusetts, examples...
Image feature: Embroidered sampler with bands of alphabets and numerals, floral and geometric borders, and an inscription. At the bottom are two trees, one surrounded by birds, the other with birds flying away from it; the trees are identified as 'The Good Tree' and 'The Evil Tree'. The verse reads: Let Virtue be a Guide to Me When this you see Remember Me. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Massachusetts Sampler
Sally Follansbee’s 1787 sampler is part of a group of samplers from the towns of Newbury and Newburyport, Massachusetts. These works can be identified by a number of motifs that were reused and modified from the 1750s through the early 1800s. The stylized floral band on Sally’s piece appears on samplers by several Newbury and...
Guilford Sampler
This sampler was worked by nine-year-old Elizabeth Starr Fowler (1822–1904) shortly after the death of her mother. It is unusual in that it combines elements of a traditional alphabet sampler with those of a mourning piece. At the top of the sampler are several rows of alphabets followed by a verse. The bottom section includes...
Concord Sampler
Hannah Cutter’s sampler is part of a large group of related examples worked from about 1790 until at least 1805 in Boston or nearby towns in Middlesex County. Typical characteristics of these samplers are deeply arcaded borders surrounding a central panel comprising an alphabet, verse, and pictorial elements framed by a saw-tooth border. The pictorial...
A Harrisburg Sampler
This sampler was worked in 1828 [or 1825] by Ann E. Kelly at the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, school of Leah Maguire. The central scene is either biblical or classical, and was undoubtedly inspired by a yet to be identified print source. It depicts a woman holding a long garland of flowers who appears to making a...