Sampler's Embroidery — Crafting Communities

Embroidery Samplers

Tutorial created by Joe Diemer, with help from Kiarra Burd, Kavita Premkumar, Lucie von Schilling, Rebekah Stretch, and Denae Dyck

Online tutorial created by Priscilla Adebanji

Embroidery thread, embroidery hoop, aida cloth, scissors, and blue embroidery thread

Embroidery samplers have been produced in England since at least the late sixteenth century, but the purposes for which they are created have evolved over time. Until the eighteenth century, samplers functioned primarily as reference works, created by women and girls in order to develop and catalog the motifs and decorative borders in their personal crafting arsenals.

However, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, samplers decreased in size and increasingly highlighted stitched letters (in the form of alphabets, names, dates, and biblical and secular verses) alongside decorative and illustrative designs. While samplers were broadly associated with feminine accomplishment throughout the Victorian period, their role and scope continued to change throughout the nineteenth century. Samplers were shaped by a variety of forces including the rise of the Arts and Crafts movement (particularly William Morris’s “art needlework”). Toward the end of the century, the sampler declined in popularity, partly as a result of escalating industrialization.

Victorian embroiderers worked with a variety of stitches on a variety of fabrics. For the sake of simplicity, however, this tutorial uses cross stitch on aida cloth. Technically, the use of aida cloth postdates the height of Victorian sampler creation, but it is a much easier material to work with than other evenweave fabrics, particularly for beginners. This tutorial will walk you through the steps involved in creating an alphabet sampler.

Want to learn more about this craft? Click here for a list of scholarly readings, blogs and websites, instructional videos, extant examples, and 19th-century tutorials.

To read some makers’ reflections on this craft, and to see what they made, click here.

You will need

14-count aida cloth (often sold in 12 x 14 inch pieces; “14-count” means that there are fourteen squares per linear inch of cloth)
Embroidery pattern
Embroidery floss, any colour
Medium or large embroidery hoop
Embroidery needle (or several—they are easy to lose)
Scissors

Optional Items:

Highlighter or pen

Seam ripper

For Instructors: Visit our Crafting in the Classroom page for information on embodied learning, or click here for further resources about this craft.

Preparing Your Aida Cloth

This craft involves using a running stitch, as demonstrated in the video from our broidery anglaise tutorial. Check out the video below for a quick refresher:

Running Stitch

The first step is to find the centre of your fabric, which will provide you with useful guidelines when it comes to positioning your pattern. Most aida cloth comes in pre-cut rectangles, but if you’re finding that you have more cloth than is easily manageable, feel free to trim it down slightly before starting.

Fold your aida cloth in half lengthwise and widthwise, pressing down on your folds to make prominent creases.

Cut an arm’s length of floss and thread your needle by pushing one end of the thread through the eye.
TIP: Moisten the end of your floss if you are having difficulty.
Beginning at the outer edge of the aida cloth and working along one of the creases, pull your needle through one of the holes in the fabric from back to front, making sure to leave a small amount of thread hanging loose at the back side of the fabric. If you find it difficult to avoid pulling the thread all of the way through, feel free to knot the end of the thread.
Count eight squares forward on the aida cloth and push your needle back through the fabric. It should now be on the same side as the dangling thread.
TIP: It may be helpful to use the tip of the needle to mark your place when counting.
Count eight squares forward again and pull the needle back through to the front side of the fabric.
Continue to use this running stitch along the crease until you reach the other edge of the aida cloth. There is no need to anchor the thread; you will be removing it when you have finished cross-stitching.
Repeat this process along the other crease—don’t worry if the intersection of the two lines isn’t in the exact centre of the fabric. You just need to have a rough idea of the middle point.

Reading and Preparing Your Pattern

A cross-stitch pattern (or “chart”) is a visual reference used to determine the spacing of stitches on a piece of cloth. A chart consists of coloured squares or black-and-white symbols laid out on a grid. Each square of the grid represents one square of the aida cloth, and each marked square represents one stitch. Oftentimes, the small grid will also be divided into larger 10x10 squares, which are useful when it comes to counting out patterns. Each different colour or symbol correlates with a different colour of thread.

TIP: For our purposes, these thread colours are recommendations, not requirements. Work with whichever materials you are most easily able to acquire!

Embroidery hoop pattern and two coloured pens

The purpose of preparing a pattern in this way is to find the middle point from which you will begin to stitch. Usually, there will be arrows on each edge of the grid indicating the centre lines. Because this tutorial models only one portion of a larger pattern, the process of finding the middle involves quite a bit of counting. If you find yourself in a similar situation, use the larger 10x10 squares to count out the total length and width of the section of the pattern that you are working with, then divide those numbers in half in order to find your centre lines. You may find it useful to mark these centre lines on your pattern using a highlighter or pen.

Detail of embroidery pattern, with centre lines marked

Note that small counting mistakes are inevitable, especially for beginning stitchers and especially in patterns with lots of blank space. If you find that your stitching does not match up perfectly with the pattern, don’t worry! You can always use a seam ripper to unpick your work and start again from the point where you miscounted, or, if the mistake does not affect the stitches around it, you can simply continue working.

Setting Up Your Embroidery Hoop

Twist the screw on the top of your embroidery hoop in order to loosen the clamp—be careful not to unscrew it completely.
Separate the outer hoop (the one with the clamp) from the inner, closed hoop.
Lay the inner hoop flat on a table and place your fabric over top. Try to place the centre point of the fabric as close to the centre of the hoop as possible.
Gently push the outer hoop down over the inner hoop and tighten the clamp to secure the fabric. You may need to readjust the hoop throughout your stitching process.

Stitching

Now that you have found the centre points of your pattern and your fabric, you are ready to start stitching!

Step 1: Threading the Needle

A skein of embroidery floss is made of six separate strands of thread. For the loop method demonstrated in this tutorial, you will only be working with one thread at a time.

Embroidery floss separated between thumb and forefinger

Cut an arm’s length of embroidery floss. When beginning a new pattern, it is useful to start with the colour used for the stitches closest to the centre point of your pattern.
Pinch the end of the floss between your thumb and forefinger and separate one strand of floss by taking it between the thumb and forefinger of your other hand.
Pull the loose strand upwards until it comes free of the others. Set the five remaining strands aside—you can use them later.
Fold the strand in half and moisten the looped end. Gently push the loop through the eye of the needle. You should now have a loop on one side of the needle and two loose ends on the other side. It may be useful to stick one finger through the loop to prevent it from slipping back through the eye.

Step 2: Anchoring Your Thread

On your prepared pattern, find the stitch closest to the centre point—this is where you will begin stitching.
Using your running stitch guidelines as reference points, count out the squares on your aida cloth until you reach the corresponding point on your fabric. TIP: Remember that one square on the pattern = one square on the aida cloth. Each square on the aida cloth has four holes, one at each corner.
Beginning on the back side of your fabric, push your needle up through one of the four holes. It is important that you keep the loop at the back—try holding it in place with your finger if you’re having trouble.
Bring your needle back through the fabric at the opposite corner of the square that you are working on until the loose ends come through the hole. Make sure not to pull the needle off of the thread! Your stitch should resemble slash or backslash, depending on which corner of the square you began from.
Keeping the needle on the back side of the fabric, pull the doubled thread through the loop.
Your thread is now anchored! Remember not to pull too hard as you complete your stitches—it’s easy to unthread the needle by accident. That said, if the floss does slip out of the eye of the needle, simply moisten the ends and thread them back through.

Step 3: Making Your First Row

Using your first anchor stitch as a reference point, count the squares on your pattern until you find the next stitch in the same row. Because this tutorial uses an alphabet pattern, the next stitch is not directly adjacent to the first one. However, in many illustrative patterns, the two stitches will be right beside each other.
Once you’ve found the edge of the next stitch on the pattern, locate its corresponding position on the aida cloth. Remember to count squares, not holes!
Push the needle from back to front through the corner of the next square, and bring it back through the diagonally opposite hole. You should now have two identical stitches.
Continue to make diagonal stitches until you have reached the edge of the letter. Then, with your needle at the back of the fabric, simply move up or down one hole, and cross your stitches back over the other way.
Continue to stitch row by row until you finish a letter. Note that some rows will consist of only a single stitch—in this case, simply make your cross and continue on to the next one. Once you’ve finished a letter, count the squares on the pattern and on the aida cloth, and begin the process again!

Step 4: Tying Off

When your thread begins to get too short to stitch comfortably, it's time to tie it off. In order to do so, simply hold the needle parallel to the back side of the fabric and push it through several stitches. Now you can re-thread your needle and pick back up where you left off!

Needle held parallel to back side of fabric

Joe’s Embroidery Sampler

How to Display Your Project

Once you’ve completed your sampler, why not display it? If your alphabet is small enough (and your embroidery hoop large enough) you can simply keep it in the hoop and trim around the edges. Or, if you’d rather frame your sampler, check out this tutorial by Caterpillar Cross Stitch.

You might also consider adding some more decorative elements to your sampler. Browse DMC’s “classics” section for some decorative borders, or try stitching a mansion motif at the bottom of your sampler. If you would like to practice your alphabet some more, you could stitch your name, a significant date, or even a line from your favourite Victorian novel or poem. The possibilities are endless!

Please send us your own work-in-progress and/or finished creations! Email us at craftyvictorians@gmail.com, tweet us @craftyvictorian, or connect with us on Instagram @crafty_victorians.