Thursday, January 30, 2014

Where's Waldo

Spot samplers all look different, don't they?  Or do they?  I think an interesting project would be to assign designations to the patterns on the samplers and then catalog them by these designations.  Giving them frequency groupings.  Like all samplers which have a 50% overlap go into a group.  Maybe some trends would fall out of this.  I bet we are looking at a group of teachers or workshop projects that at first seem random but aren't as random as we think.

Just look at these two samplers.  The first one is mine and it forms the major project of my Tudor and Stuart Goldwork Master Class.  The second one was sold by Toovey's Antique & Fine Art Auctioneers in 2008 (Lot 3148, 17th June 2008).  The Toovey piece is dated 1655.  Mine is not dated, but it has more than 50% overlap.  I like to think about this - how can we derive information from things that don't have their records anymore.
Spot Sampler Lot 3148 Toovey's 17th June 2008
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1 comment:

  1. The Chilly Hollow Needlepoint AdventureJanuary 30, 2014 at 9:10 AM

    Set up categories with an unambiguous image as reference for each, then ask folks to do counts on samplers. If all of your readers work up 2-3 samplers, from a big museum site or two.... Visit the ambiguous motifs and put them in the correct category, then tally the results. It sounds fairly easy and with a lot of hands helping, you could do it. The trick is setting up the categories. You need someone very familiar with samplers to do it I think and you'll have to use the online museums' descriptors of their sampler.

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