my baby brother, my design

Nick came home from school with a poem he said was about Arden and it quickly become a family favorite. (Note that the actual author is Bruce Lansky.) In fact, I  liked it so much that I modified it slightly and created this sweet prim design from it. Nick picked the colors and I chose motifs from antique samplers and art work that I thought worked well with what a boy would’ve stitched around the 1830′s, when it wasn’t unheard of for boys to stitch – especially as a form of punishment if a boy had been particularly naughty.

The story behind this design is loosely associated with the Dame Snowe series that I began for The Gift of Stitching magazine. In this instance, the stitcher is a boy who is being punished for hiding the basket that contained his baby brother in the shrubs behind his family’s homestead. Nicholas was sent off to Dame Snowe’s school for the weeks it took him to complete a sampler as penitence for his wrong-doing. Being a very mischievous and smart little fellow, Nicholas performs his punishment with a sharp sense of humor that must have exasperated his parents even as they found it impossible to hold their laughter when he presented his finished sampler.

Stitched on very distressed (I used coffee and tea over several treatments to get this effect) white 36 count linen using Crescent Colours one-over-two with a stitch count of  99 by 80. The hemstitched border was done randomly using random snippets of floss in the lightest colors left from my stitching, and then the linen was cut crookedly around the hemstitching and fringed. I backed the stitched piece with a scrap of light interfacing to prevent any show-through of the final backing fabric. The entire stitched piece was then mounted on a piece of  homespun fabric and framed in a homemade frame that I cleaned up and randomly sanded down.

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