Today I was at the MFA helping with some stitch identification and looking at a few pieces.  I was treated as part of it to several samplers from private collection that will be part of the upcoming year of ‘Boston Embroideries’ that will be on view in the new American Galleries that will be opening in November.  You will WANT to come.  There will be four rotations of pieces with different themes – one of them will be samplers of late 17th to mid-18th century that have a Boston provenance.  Another is heraldic pieces made in Boston.

One of the schools of samplers (1730’s-1750’s) from the part of Boston known as the North End that Textile Curator Pam Parmel and her staff has uncovered seems to have a very close relationship to an earlier set of 17th century English band samplers.  So much so that one possible theory is that the teacher had one of her own (descended in the family?) and copied much of the pictorial part for her teaching.  I was working on the English sampler they have of this type and the Boston ones and doing stitch comparisons to see if they matched.  I won’t tell you what we saw – but they are definitely on to something here.  They have gathered many examples of the Boston sampler type from this school but haven’t identified many of the English sampler set to be able to do good enough comparisons yet.

So this is how you all come in – Distributed Problem Solving.  I was telling Pam about a recent test that DARPA did to see how fast unusual problems could be solved in the age of the internet using many people.  They hid 10-red weather balloons around the entire USA and then on a particular date said ‘go’ to a large number of university or research teams.  These teams all had their own ’system’ of using the internet or social media to solve the problem of ‘where are the balloons in the USA’.  The problem sounds incredibly daunting – how to find balloons somewhere in the USA – but the MIT team found them all in less than nine hours using social media.  I was amazed and it made me think of the problems of finding related embroidery pieces and how we can use the blogs such as this or Needleprint solve some of these problems by putting out ‘calls’ for info.  I suggested to Pam that this was one of those times where the distributed band of aficionados could find more of the samplers in collections or books that looked to be of the same English school.  She said ‘let’s give it a try’.

So here is the link to the English sampler from 1654 by ‘MD’. Accession number MFA 43.275.  The important part is the bottom of the sampler with the pictorial.  The adam and eve with the large snake wrapping around the tree.  Their funny hair.  The leopard and unicorn.  The funny frog and the rose with the detached petals.  The sun, clouds and funny parrot.  If you know of, have seen, or have a link to a sampler that is really similar to this one – send it on to me at tricia@alum.mit.edu and I will pass it on to the team at the MFA (full credit to you).

It would be really fun if something was uncovered this way!

Tricia