Miniature Sampler

On my first trip to the USA last year I bought a magazine with a Victorian Sampler that has been begging me to stitch it for my dollhouse, just one problem, the chart is way too big to just stitch as it is to be a realistic scale in miniature. To my delight Annelle Ferguson did a seminar at Guild School earlier this year at Castine and taught us how to reduce sampler charts so that one can use them in 1/12 scale. I was a bit scared to try but last week I decided to give it a try, the letters and borders were fairly easy, but the motifs, at first I wanted to be lazy and just use some Victorian motifs from my large collection of books, but on Saturday morning I realized that the motifs was exactly what attracted me to the sampler in the first place.

It took me the whole weekend to figure out the cat, I had to reduce the stitch count by half in both directions, which in effect means you take 3/4 of the stitches away, plus getting the colors right was tricky.

Well, I hope it looks like a cat playing with a ball of wool, I stitched it on a 50 count cotton fabric with Pipers Floss silk.

Have a great mini week
Elga