Embroidered Stories

Samplers were embroidered pictures made by girls, and occasionally boys, as part of their education. Scottish samplers are unique with regard to the amount of information that can be gathered from them. They often include the initials of extended family members as well as details of buildings, places and events, leading to the identification of almost all of these young embroiderers. Leslie Durst, an American with a passion for Scotland, has a collection of over 500 samplers dating from the early 18th to the late 19th century; a small section of them will be exhibited at the National Museum of Scotland 26 October 2018 to 21 April 2019. This book showcases these and reveals the stories behind many of them – embroidered records of two centuries of Scottish social history.