Nuclear Blast from the Past

In what feels like my former life, I was the working-but-stay-at-home mother of three children who, in early 1995, were 13, 10 and 3. I had given up my teaching job and started charting for designers, working at Ewe & Eye & Friends and doing data entry at home (I pulled lots of all-nighters). I was a busy girl and was all about stitching. I was an EGA member for several years, and I loved to take classes from designers and EGA teachers.

Way back in those olden days there was a needlework design company called Samplers of Sylke. Marianne and Lillian designed beautiful and complex works of art, as well as some smaller, simpler works. If you don't know about them, you can see some of their work here and here. Anyway, Marianne Rohrer designed a sampler (maybe a commissioned piece) for Dr. Eleanor Sinton, the Sinton Sampler. Dr. Sinton, who died in 2004, then gave months-long seminars on the sampler, complete with a 44-page instruction booklet, for what was a lot of money at the time. So here's a poor picture of a picture of the completed project and my notebook.Now this sampler seminar wasn't like any other I've ever heard of. We met once or twice a month (it's been so long that I can't remember) and received only parts of the instructions and close-up pictures of sections. I think I'm kinda cranky about the whole thing because I felt so manipulated at the time. I remember having to rework my schedule and arrange for kids to be watched to show up for a hastily rescheduled meeting, just to stand at the door and ring the bell for 20 minutes (Dr S did call later to tell me that no one heard me ringing the bell). It was after that incident that I snippily quit the group and stopped working on the sampler. I know! I was silly, huh? But I was feeling controlled, and that's not a happy situation for me. I also remember that Marianne was unhappy about the way things had turned out between her and Dr S, and I felt that maybe Dr S had taken advantage of her and treated her badly.

The point of this rambling account is that, because of all the WIP talk that goes on around here, I've remembered all of the things I started and never went back to. All of a sudden, I remembered this beautiful sampler and how I had wanted to stitch it from the first time I saw it. I think I'm gonna concentrate on it as being a sampler Marianne designed rather than its given name. That feels better.

Below you'll see my progress which, considering all that was happening at the time, isn't too bad. There's no telling when I'll actually work on it ... maybe after I finish ATS. But now I've brought it out of its cute little rabbit box, along with all the memories that accompany it, and I like the idea of working on it again.