What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries | Hacker News Reader

What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries

hyperallergic.com

57 pointsPetiver12 comments

As a huge fan of 8-bit titles from the golden age of the 80's, I can't help but feeling like these pieces are a kind of pixel art. The intricate detail and consideration for colour placement, while also reducing the load to a minimum (those amazing glyph bitmaps!) is very much aligned between these works, worlds apart..

Well, they are both done in a grid, using squares that are (ideally) uniform in size and shape. The same limitations apply to both.

A quick check says it doesn't meet the definition, but they seem pretty similar to me. They are conceptually similar and I think the automated embroidering machines, those that turn pictures into patterns and then stitch them, work on that principle.

I think...

I could maybe ask the lady at the Grange Hall. She has one of those machines. Err... Don't tell her, but the output is uninspiring.

Not necessary world's apart. People stitch video game art now.

My favorite things to embroider are fractals and flowers, fractals because you can keep your place without a pattern handy and flowers because you can freehand them easily. It's a therapeutic, contemplative activity when done for leisure.

I can't imagine having your personal worth judged by your stitching though. It's such a frivolous thing.

The missus made me a quite large star map, complete with constellations marked and labeled. It took her forever. So, it may not be good to judge her worth - it might be good for judging her dedication to complete a task. It took her the better part of a year and a half.

I love finding historical artifacts that reveal some of what has been excluded from our stories. We can forget how much the internet has removed gatekeeping and resource constraints on who's writings are considered valuable enough to devote paper and archive space too.

Now instead we have the question of search ranking algorithms. I wonder if some day researchers will be trawling through the internet archives looking for old Geocities pages overlooked by the then-traditional scholarship.

On the sadder side, this http://www.dewsburyreporter.co.uk/news/tragic-story-behind-r... is a tapestry which records a ladies nine children who died in infancy between 1855 and 1871. Seen it and it is affecting.

In the "M C" sampler near the top next to the pumpkin thing there are two of those "cool s" that were the subject of an article I remember being posted here discussing their origin. Proof that the "cool s" is at least several hundred years old rather than just a few decades that I've been seeing on articles discussing it.

Truly wonderful handicraft and workmanship, these women really do deserve to be remembered.

It's interesting how close some of these get to being fractals. Some probably are based on counting spaces and threads.

The cross-stitch/counted-thread samplers look exactly like old-style pixel art, aside from the "fonts" and the subject matter. Plus ça change.

It's kind of fun, speculating about the interaction between medium and style. Like, that there's something about human minds and a grid of squares that leads to certain things that ~work~ and feel good, regardless of whether that grid was created by the warp and weft of woven cloth or an electronic bitmap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com