Available as a pdf download and as a printed booklet. Click HERE for the printed booklet.
We are delighted to present to you this sweet sampler that was worked by Mary Ann Groom in the year 1876 when she was ten years old. We particularly liked the border that frames the young maker’s stitching. Mary Ann worked with a limited palette, yet she has created a colourful sampler with some very pretty motifs.
Although Mary Ann did not record her age or location on the sampler, her granddaughter Jackie carefully noted on the reverse of the frame that
“This was done by my grandmother, mother of Robert Edward Wesley Whitbread, my Dad. Bless him”
Jackie also included her name, address and telephone number. We telephoned Jackie, and she told us that she had inherited the sampler and only sold it when she downsized. Jackie knew very little about her grandparents as they were never talked about. She believed they had died when her father was a child.
Mary Ann was born on April 24, 1866 in Tebworth, a hamlet located in Central Bedfordshire. Her parents were Thomas Groom, a labourer, and his wife Charlotte. She was baptised in the Methodist church in Toddington.
The 1891 census return records that as a young woman Mary Ann worked as a straw-hat maker.
In 1893 Mary Ann married Edward William Whitbread who worked as a groom. The couple had four girls before the birth of their only son, Jackie’s father. Mary Ann’s husband died in 1907.
In the 1911 census return Mary Ann, now a widow, can be found living in the High Street of Toddington owning a grocer’s store and supporting her five children.
In the 1921 census return Mary Ann is no longer working. Three of her daughters and her son are living with her. Two of Mary Ann’s daughters worked as milliners for W Pope esq.. They followed in their mother’s footsteps by working in the hat industry.
Mary Ann died in early 1930 just short of her 64th birthday.
It is sad that Mary Ann was not talked about within her family. Today, we remember her through the sampler she worked as a child.
Mary Ann’s sampler has been reproduced using a palette of 6 colours. The model was stitched using Soie 100.3 from Au Ver à Soie, and we have included below conversions for Soie d’Alger (SDA) and DMC. You will only require one spool or skein of each colour.
The design area is 132 stitches (w) x 105 stitches (h).
The sampler is worked in cross stitch over two threads of linen together with a satin stitch sawtooth border that encloses the verse.
Within this download you will receive: Graph 1 ~ A four-page colour chart and Graph 2 ~ A one-page colour chart (intended to be viewed/used on your tablet, phone, or PC).
At the very core of Hands Across the Sea Samplers there is a team of needleworkers who are passionate about antique samplers and being able to share those samplers with you.
