
What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries - Petiver
https://hyperallergic.com/389844/sampled-lives-fitzwilliam-museum-cambridge/
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mmjaa
As a huge fan of 8-bit titles from the golden age of the 80's, I can't help
but feeling like these pieces are a kind of pixel art. The intricate detail
and consideration for colour placement, while also reducing the load to a
minimum (those amazing glyph bitmaps!) is very much aligned between these
works, worlds apart..

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KGIII
Well, they are both done in a grid, using squares that are (ideally) uniform
in size and shape. The same limitations apply to both.

A quick check says it doesn't meet the definition, but they seem pretty
similar to me. They are conceptually similar and I think the automated
embroidering machines, those that turn pictures into patterns and then stitch
them, work on that principle.

I think...

I could maybe ask the lady at the Grange Hall. She has one of those machines.
Err... Don't tell her, but the output is uninspiring.

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KittiHawk
My favorite things to embroider are fractals and flowers, fractals because you
can keep your place without a pattern handy and flowers because you can
freehand them easily. It's a therapeutic, contemplative activity when done for
leisure.

I can't imagine having your personal worth judged by your stitching though.
It's such a frivolous thing.

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KGIII
The missus made me a quite large star map, complete with constellations marked
and labeled. It took her forever. So, it may not be good to judge her worth -
it might be good for judging her dedication to complete a task. It took her
the better part of a year and a half.

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roguecoder
I love finding historical artifacts that reveal some of what has been excluded
from our stories. We can forget how much the internet has removed gatekeeping
and resource constraints on who's writings are considered valuable enough to
devote paper and archive space too.

Now instead we have the question of search ranking algorithms. I wonder if
some day researchers will be trawling through the internet archives looking
for old Geocities pages overlooked by the then-traditional scholarship.

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jimduk
On the sadder side, this [http://www.dewsburyreporter.co.uk/news/tragic-story-
behind-r...](http://www.dewsburyreporter.co.uk/news/tragic-story-behind-
restored-dewsbury-tapestry-1-7264890) is a tapestry which records a ladies
nine children who died in infancy between 1855 and 1871. Seen it and it is
affecting.

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johndotsun
In the "M C" sampler near the top next to the pumpkin thing there are two of
those "cool s" that were the subject of an article I remember being posted
here discussing their origin. Proof that the "cool s" is at least several
hundred years old rather than just a few decades that I've been seeing on
articles discussing it.

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hilbert42
Truly wonderful handicraft and workmanship, these women really do deserve to
be remembered.

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lithos
It's interesting how close some of these get to being fractals. Some probably
are based on counting spaces and threads.

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BuuQu9hu
The cross-stitch/counted-thread samplers look exactly like old-style pixel
art, aside from the "fonts" and the subject matter. Plus ça change.

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meebob
It's kind of fun, speculating about the interaction between medium and style.
Like, that there's something about human minds and a grid of squares that
leads to certain things that ~work~ and feel good, regardless of whether that
grid was created by the warp and weft of woven cloth or an electronic bitmap.

