Lecture and two-day course with Chris Berry from Glasgow, Scotland

Lecture: Friday 17th September 2010
Two-day course: Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th September 2010

Lecture: Stitch by Stitch

Stitches found in early samplers but not just the history of cross stitch Starting with the earliest European samplers from C14th Coptic Egypt this lecture will look primarily at the stitches and techniques found on British samplers up to the eighteenth century. It will cover records of samplers from contemporary wills and inventories, sources of designs and pattern books, the earliest English dated sampler, and evidence of how these stitches and techniques were translated into the costume and furnishings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There will be some detailed examination of samplers from the Embroiderers’ Guild of Great Britain Museum Collection at Hampton Court Palace, London and the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, Scotland.

Two-day course: Stitch by Stitch

This course is for everybody who loves to stitch, who loves to play with stitches and is curious about stitches in the past, how they developed, how they were passed on from embroiderer to embroiderer. It will offer students the opportunity to try a wide variety of stitches found in sixteenth and seventeenth century samplers and Chris will provide coloured images from samplers for students’ use. The aim is to start an illustrated notebook of stitches using images from historical samplers and embroideries – a sort of sampler in print! Chris will cover coloured silkwork techniques using flat to raised detached buttonhole stitches, the various techniques associated with the term blackwork and some whitework techniques.

Chris Berry has a passion for Tudor and Stuart embroidery, has wonderful macro photographs and loves to pass on her skills to others. She currently works at the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, cataloguing, researching and photographing the embroidery. A practising contemporary embroiderer, Chris is competent in a wide variety of embroidery techniques which she taught for twenty years as a City & Guilds Creative Studies tutor. She also teaches courses based on historical embroidery throughout the UK and in the USA and Canada at national embroidery seminars and researches and writes on historical embroidery.   

The class is full!

There is a wait list. If you'd like to be added, contact education@northwestsamplerguild.com

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