It is difficult to read accounts of many who never saw their families again. We know that very few women who arrived on the Mayflower knew how to write ~ and in the 17th century a young girl would have to be born into a fairly well-off family to have an opportunity to learn to read and write. However fortunately for us, during the latter part of the 17th century into the 18th century we find that many women were prolific letter writers. It is fascinating that America’s first poet was a woman ~ Anne Dudley Bradstreet. She was born in 1612 in Northampton, England to an affluent and wealthy family. When she was 16 years old she married Simon Bradstreet and accompanied him and her parents to America in 1630. They were members of John Winthrop’s party, sailing on the flagship Arbella, who were the first settlers on Massachusetts Bay. I feel that early needlework samplers were methods of documenting not only patterns & stitches for use in sewing clothing and household articles, but also means of recording memories of family and heritage. Surely, as these early needlewomen spent numerous and tedious hours stitching they would lovingly think of a particular color or motif which decorated a mother’s dress or a friend’s apron.
The 3-ring instruction book contains complete & concise instructions and diagrams. Several “surprises” (some from Colonial Williamsburg!) are included with this class kit! The sampler is stitched on 32ct hand-dyed linen with a combination of Vikki Clayton & Gloriana hand-dyed silk thread in sixteen glorious colors such as Pomegranate, Allspice, Holiday Green, Cottage Woods, Slate Blue, Ceibo, Garnet, Citrine, Gold, Sea Cabbage, Rose, Barely There, Malt and Oat Grass. Most of the colors used in the 17th century were those which could be made from the use of vegetable dyes from local plants, leaves, berries, barks and nutshells. I have endeavored to use colors which could symbolize their surroundings!
The sampler incorporates the following stitches: The Scroll Stitch, The Williamsburg Stitch, Rice Stitch, Smyrna Cross Stitch, Marking Cross Stitch, Side-by-Side Cross Stitch, Buttonholed Eyelets, Satin Stitch, Reversible Eyelet, The Holbein Stitch, and the Underhand Hemstitch. There is an exclusive scrimshaw button made especially for this sampler by Marcy Pumphret of Scrimshaw by Marcy attached to the sampler with an image of a “quill” pen!
This sampler design is an effort to combine the love of needlework history with the verse by John Donne to create a “sampler letter”. Most certainly this verse “verbalizes” in an eloquent way how the early pilgrim women must have felt ~ yearning for their past familiarities ~ but longing for a new, free and meaningful life in a New World. Surely their “writings” were our beginnings. Lucy Lyons Willis
