Mourning Samplers From a Series of Interviews with Susan Deaver Olberding |
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At the end of May, 1996, Susan Deaver Olberding joined the Thursday Night Stitch Chat for talk about Mourning Samplers. With only an hour to chat, we felt we barely covered this fascinating topic. So we asked Susan back to tell us more. Susan also has a love of the history of stitchery and the women who stitched, so we expanded the conversations to speak on this subject as well. This article is a summary of the Stitch Chats in America Online’s Fiber and Needle Art room on June 28 and 29, 1996.
Susan is an historian and a fiber artist who has combined the interests into one to study women and their fiber work. She wrote an article about Mourning Samplers that was published in Piecework magazine in the March/April 1996 issue. Back issues are available. The address is:
Susan is working on a new article on Arizona women and their fibers. It covers about 3,000 years of Arizona women. Susan loves the tie of fibers that runs through all cultures and time periods. Research is done through oral histories, library time, museum time, reading, pondering—whatever it takes. Sometimes travel goes with the research. For the Arizona project, there was travel all around the state. Susan loves finding unpublished diaries and journals. She finds them delightlful and worth looking for. These can be found in manuscript collections at major libraries or in small town historical societies. Susan’s new article will be historical, but there is lots more to it. She does not have a publisher lined up for it at this time. Susan also loves to do "fibering" ... spinning, dyeing, weaving etc. She yearns for more time to do more exploring in these areas. She supports herself by "either writing or fibering from home." Susan worked with mourning samplers for about three years. She was interested in the society that allowed a woman to create such a piece.
Mourning Samplers are pictures created around 1800 by wealthy, young women. These women were not allowed to do any "constructive" work. The samplers were often a school assignment. The schools were known as Dame Schools and the subjects included needlework, domestic training dancing, music, as well as a little bit of normal academic subjects. The samplers were the final exam and probably took about a year to create. By the time the student was ready to do a mourning sampler, she was quite an accomplished needleworker. The earliest known mourning sampler in this country dates to about 1780. You can find out more about mourning samplers by reading Betty Ring’s books which may be found in your local library. The samplers were popular around 1800 and "died out" around 1830. The average size is about 18 by 23 inches. The designs were very detailed and were done to create the illusion of an engraving. Mourning samplers included funerary objects such as tombstones, weeping willows, churches, ladies in mourning, etc. Often there was an epitaph with the name and dates of a deceased loved one. Some of the techniques used in mourning samplers came from England and France. Mourning Samplers involve very advanced stitchery. The materials used were also varied—chenilles, metallics, silk, etc. The funerary symbols were stitched in many colors and types of materials. Some of the colors used were either dark or subdued, but some of the samplers were quite colorful. Mourning samplers were more crewel work than cross-stitch. Some of the stitches used were tiny long-and-short and chain stitches that created the illusion of engraving. Chenille, silk and metallic threads were used and some of the backgrounds were painted instead of stitched. Silks came from China (remember the kimonos) and the other fibers came from England or France. The ground fabric could be velvet, finely woven silk or linen. The velvet had a really short "plush"—more of a crushed-type velvet. The designs were put onto the ground fabric by the instructor. The students then worked between the lines and chose the colors and threads with the teacher’s guidance. Their design overshadowed the colors. They are beautiful. The framing was elegant. Victorian homes were usually very opulent which extended to the framing of samplers and other needlework. The mourning samplers were proudly hung in the family’s Victorian parlor. Mourning samplers dealt with death. Many samplers of all kinds in that time period had things like rather morbid verses in them. It tied into the Victorian society with their being overly dramatic. Susan surmises that people don’t stitch them now because of the amount of time they take to complete. The morbid subject is probably another reason. There are no specific patterns books available for Mourning Samplers at this time. Some of the East Coast Museums have originals that could be replicated. There are books about specific techniques but not an overall general book on stitching history that Susan knows of. Where can you view these samplers? Most of the major Museums on the east coast have them, both historical and needlework museums. Most of the ones that survived can be found in historical museums. They were not found in the west because they were not being done when it was settled. Moravian school in Pennsylvania is credited with making mourning pictures popular at George Washington’s death when the whole country was in mourning. Going to view them is a great excuse to visit the Daughters of the American Revolution museum Washington, D.C. And JamesE4830 told us about a mourning sampler at Woodlawn Plantation in VA that has an optical illusion. If you looked at it in a mirror across the room, a figure disappeared and an angel appeared.
Susan is a fiber artist with family responsibilities who took a women’s history course. Susan tried to figure out how women made their own textiles, clothes, etc. We have labor-saving devices and can’t even do it all ourselves! Susan marvels at our foremothers who kept their families clothed. This inquisitiveness eventually led to more study. Now Susan is interested in rural fiber manufacturing—that is, growing your own fiber source, harvesting/shearing the source spinning, dyeing, weaving, and then creating clothing or other textiles (sheets, etc) from the product. By scratching the surface in research, it’s easy to see that it was not unusual for very young girls to be adept with the needle. At about three years old, a girl was taught to use a needle with the idea that she would be able to clothe her family. The older women made the young girls sit and stitch. Many of the Stitchers at chat can only WISH to be made to do that today! ------------- This is an example of an old Mourning Sampler found on the web:
The following websites have examples of modern-day Mourning Samplers:
Written for the purpose of informing and stimulating the creativity in other lovers of counted cross-stitch. Permission is granted to redistribute this article in its entirety for noncommercial use provided that this copyright notice is not removed or altered and that no portion of this work is sold either by itself or as part of a larger work without the express written permission of the author.  |
