Threads Draw Us Together.

I'm doing a few stitches on my fish today. It is World Embroidery Day which falls each year on 30 July.

The Embroiderers' Guild Queensland invited two speakers to a get-together at a special Guild meeting on Sunday in anticipation of celebrating World Embroidery Day. 

First we heard about a small irregularly shaped piece of embroidery that was spotted in the Guild's collection. It turned out to be part of a stomacher worked in fourteen different types of gold thread! And the thread still gleams beautifully too. It has been dated to the mid 18th Century and must have been much treasured and kept in ideal conditions of humidity and temperature. 

The subject of the other talk was a quilt that made its way to Brisbane with an early settler. The various owners of the quilt can be traced back to the original maker who made it for her wedding trousseau. The quilt, having been well used but lovingly kept for over a hundred years, is now being carefully preserved by a team of dedicated stitchers.

The threads of those old embroideries tied us together in so many ways as we marveled at the techniques, explored their history, and thought about the makers and the people who preserved them.

I hope you find time to stitch today and celebrate being part of the worldwide community of embroiderers.

Happy Embroidery Day!

Samplers with Australian Links

In learning to embroider, young girls learnt to stitch decorative motifs of trees, flowers, images of places and maps as well as numbers and the letters of the alphabet. These elements on their embroidered samplers may not only pique our curiosity, but also supply us with historical information.

Margret Begbie Sampler, Courtesy National Museum of Australia

Mary McGillivray, in this ABC News article, discusses a couple of samplers held in Australian museums. She raises the question, Why would a ten year old Scottish girl, Margret Begbie, embroider a sampler of Botany Bay, Australia? The possible answers are fascinating.