Embroidery Samplers

I have been doing embroidery since I was about 9 years old.  It is always my go-to needlework when I am traveling or just want to relax.  But the one thing I have never done is an embroidery sampler.

Embroidery samplers were a type of needlework young girls did back in the 1700 and 1800s to show off the needlework skills.  Remember there were no machines back then, so girls and women had to know how to sew to provide clothes and bedding for their family.

The samplers usually had the alphabet, occasionally a bible verse, some flowers, people or animals stitched on it. Often times different stitches were used to create the design but much of the time it was just cross stitched.  If you ever find a finished sampler, you have a prize, especially if the creator put their name and date it was made on it.

Samplers seemed boring to me which is why I never did any.  But lately I have wanted to make a sampler of sorts.  Not the kind I just described but some picture to show off different stitches.  You can still find sampler designs that are printed on fabric in shops or on line (that was another thing, the designs of samplers from long ago were not printed on fabric, the young girls and women created the design from scratch).  But I wanted to create one uniquely my own.

So I started looking for ideas.  I found one sampler set up to look like a color wheel with different stitches in different colors in concentric circles.  I found another one as a quilt with 4 inch blocks each holding a different stitch.   I liked the color wheel idea but it just wasn’t what I was looking for.  And I certainly didn’t need another quilt.

So looking around the room to get some ideas, I then saw my logo at the top of this page.  I would make a sampler with the Heartfully Cheryl 3 heart logo.  I even decided to do the stitching just in the pink colors of the logo (well, except for the tiny heart which is white in the logo.  If I put this on white fabric I didn’t think I would be able to see any stitching with white thread so I am using a very light pink).

I first enlarged the logo and traced it on a piece of white cotton.

Design on cotton

And then I did the outline of each heart in a stem stitch.  That was my first challenge since the stem stitch is one stitch I always have trouble with.  It never looked very stem-y but almost like a lopsided one sided cross stitch.  But this time the embroidery fairies were with me and I think the stitch turned out pretty nice.

Embroidered outline

I decided to do just one stitch in the little heart.  Even on this enlarged version of the logo it is only 1 ¼ inches wide.  So I used a wonderful filler stitch called the seed stitch.  It is just little straight stitches randomly put all over the design in various directions.  It is easy to do and does fill up an area rather quickly and nicely.  If you haven’t tried it, do so sometime.

Small heart embroidered

I am still in the process of stitching it so I will post some more next week.  


©  2019- Cheryl E. Fillion