A couple of months ago a friend from Embroiderers Guild (or Skipton Stitchers as we are now since the demise of the Embroidery Guild as we know it!) asked if I would do a cross-stitch birth sampler as a commission. She’d been having a sort out at home and found the one she had made when her first baby was born. She wants to pass it on to her daughter but realised (as is often the way) she hadn’t had one made for her second daughter! My friend admitted she just hasn’t got the patience for cross-stitch, preferring the more relaxed or experimental forms of embroidery.

She gave me the original sampler to work from as she wants something similar but subtly different. I think it’s a typical sampler of the time, mid 1980’s…

I’ve chosen a palette of blues, greens, pinks and a soft gold and I’m using a parchment coloured linen, which looks a similar colour to the original. I started trying to plot it all out on graph paper, but I realised that was going to take forever, so I’m just adapting things as I go and keeping my fingers crossed it will all work out! I’ve decided the original border will stay the same as it’s too complicated to try and work out spacings of another. I’m changing the bottom two borders and also the font of the name and date of birth.

I’m using bands from a sampler I did at around the same time (thirty years ago!! where did that time go!) I’m planning to use the two border patterns which are on the 7th row and I’ve also used the scroll pattern near the top. Some of these are narrower than the original as I’m hoping to space things a bit more evenly than the original sampler.

It’s surprising the difference a slight colour change makes, in these top few rows there’s not that many differences, just a few extra stitches, but I think it looks so different. I’ll probably stitch the outer border before I get to the bottom, just to check it works out OK count wise.

I’m please with it so far and more importantly my friend was happy with the progress photo I sent to her.