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Updated: June 28, 2025
Susan thought they were the cleanest babies she had ever seen; through their flaxen mops she could see their clean little heads, their play-dresses were protected by checked gingham aprons worked in cross-stitch designs. Marie and Mina and Ernie were kissed in turn, after their mother had wiped their rosy little faces with a damp cloth.
Sundrops are grouped here and there, with yellow thistles; the native sweetbrier arches over gray boulders that are tumbled together like the relic of some old dwelling; and the purple red calopogon of the orchid tribe adds a new colour to the tapestry, the cross-stitch filling being all of field daisies.
"Oh, dear, no! not to compare, Miss Grey, with one that we were just allowed the sight of not a mere pattern, but a finished specimen and I never saw anything so pathetic. I declare I was quite affected, and so was Miss Miskin. It was `By the Rivers of Babylon, most sweetly done! There were the harps all in cross-stitch, ma'am, and the willows all in tent-stitch I never saw anything so touching."
If I am mistaken, I will recall her to my side; for her needle is not so absolutely perfect in tent and cross-stitch, but that my superintendence is advisable." "Lady," said Varney, "Foster was partly mistaken in my purpose. It was not FROM but OF your noble husband, and my approved and most noble patron, that I am led, and indeed bound, to speak."
But leaving the puzzle of design and returning to the cross-stitch, which was its first interpretation or medium, and to the little Puritans who shared its acquaintance and practice with the women of all ages, we may see how the New England sampler opened the door of inheritance.
The wonderfully wrought pictures in tent-stitch, for example, bequeathed to us by the 17th century, are painful object lessons in what not to do. The origin of the term cross-stitch is not far to seek: the stitches worked upon the square mesh do cross.
They worked crewel bed hangings and cross-stitch and tent-stitch upholstery in the seventeenth century, and in still earlier times richly ornamented linens and other fabrics with flowers and scriptural subjects. Writing in reference to Queen Mary, the wife of William III, Sir Charles Sedley said: "When she rode in coach abroad She was always knotting thread."
The most ancient examples of design are founded upon a square, and this points inevitably to the stitch covering the crossing of threads, the cross-stitch, which preceded all others and remained the only decorative stitch until weaving sprang into so fine an art that interstices between threads are unnoticeable.
The cross-stitch "tidy" on the back was his mother's handiwork, she had made it when she was fifteen. Rachel sat down in the rocker. "Al" she began, still in the same mysterious whisper, "I know all about it." He looked at her. "All about what?" he asked. "About the trouble you and Cap'n Lote had this afternoon.
All this is in the story of the sampler, and so the teaching and practice of the canvas went constantly forward. The method was so simple, quite within the capacity of an alphabet-studying child. To make an A in cross-stitch was to create a link between the baby mind and the letter represented. There was no choice, no judgment or experience needed.
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