This post was originally in XStitch Magazine Issue 26: Mixtape 6, and has been adapted.
The famous words of “We pillage plunder, we rifle and loot” may soon have to add cross stitch to that list too!
Just over half a decade ago I moved across the country. This was no normal move though, as unlike most, I hadn’t even visited the town, let alone house I was moving to. I simply didn’t know anything about the area at all.
So on the first weekend, I ventured out. Whilst it was nice to see and get used to the area, I drove past an interesting antiques shop. On the way back we stopped and had a look around.
This is where I saw a cross stitch, that even now, I think about.
It was unremarkable as cross stitch samplers go. It was over 100 years old, but had suffered over that period. It was dated, and named by a 14 year old. The stitching was OK, nothing to write home about, but it truly was a sampler; it hasn’t been planned out, and was instead a collection of stitches and motifs.
I didn’t buy it, and by the way I’ve described it, I don’t think many of you would either. So why do I still think about it?
Whilst we all known the stories of cross stitch samplers in the 18th and 19th centuries, stitched as proof of a young woman’s home keeping skills, the reality is actually rather more complicated. This sampler system, in Britain in particular, was purely for the upper classes. Thread still hadn’t dropped in price enough for the practice to be taken up by the working class. Therefore, the actual number of samplers from this period is limited. And those that have been saved are usually stored in museums.
But here this sampler was, in the North of England, in what would have been at the time a pre-industrial landscape filled with farms and mines and not a lot else.
This simple sampler interested me not due to its content, but its story. What I haven’t told you up to this point, is that it came from Pennsylvania, in the US. This sampler had been stitched by an American girl in a state known for its German collection, who produced some of the first known cross stitch pattern books, had somehow found its way across the Atlantic less than 20 years after the American Civil War, into Britain, up to the working class north and into a quirky looking antiques store.
You see, cross stitch finds its way into the strangest of places…
I’ve spoken before about Nazi’s who took a cross stitch made in a POW camp across the Nazi empire and lauded up how POWs were also devoted to the Führer, not realising it was secretly coded and spat in the face of Hitler.
I’ve even spoken about the now famous Ikea cross stitch invites that went out to 40,000 Ikea members (they actually released a cross stitch pattern early this year for free online!).
I’ve spoken about how we don’t see cross stitch from the Caribbean, how we see cross stitch in museums even though no one is really sure if it’s art or craft, and how cross stitch is being graffitied across cities everywhere.
Yet still, I’m amazed by stories of how cross stitch keeps on popping up through history in the weirdest of places.
I recently found out about the Whitman Collection, which back in 1969 was the largest known historic cross stitch collection in the world. The interesting thing about it? It was owned by a chocolate company.
The Whitman’s Candy Company released the “sampler collection” of chocolates in 1912, which had 6 chocolates you could sample from across their range. The CEO’s wife, a keen cross stitcher, stitched a simple pattern for their first box, and it became an instant success. Despite the company always making their own patterns from then on, they slowly started collecting stitched examples from across the world, with some of the earliest known American samplers, and examples of Russian, Spanish, Mexican and Dutch works. These works covered heavy political pieces talking of slavery, war and death, but also featured more modern works including towering skyscrapers and examples of works reminiscent of early modern pixel art from 1833!
The samplers in this collection all had an incredible history, each telling their own story, but somehow being unified thanks to chocolates.
I know most of us store our cross stitches in our homes, or gift out a few, but we don’t think more than the here and now. That cross stitch you’re stitching at the moment, where will that be in 120 years? What crazy story will it have taken on? And what will say about you, the time we’re in, or the connection to the past?
Cross stitch has taken on a life of its own throughout hundreds of years of history, and we only really know a fraction of it. But thanks to a simple cross stitch found in an antiques store, we get to see a little glimpse of its history.
Happy stitching!
Lord Libidan