This one came out of a box of freebies at a yarn sale. I'll grab every loose pattern I find in a box like that, no real sorting, just scoop it all into a bag and sort it out later.
Later, sorting through it, I found a completed sampler folded into that same shopping bag, wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. When I unfolded the newspaper to set it aside, I realized it wasn't newspaper at all. It was the actual pattern instructions for the sampler sitting right on top of it.
I pulled the sampler out to photograph for the shop and saw it was signed and dated in stitch, right in the corner. Somebody sat down in 1977 and signed a piece of needlework the way you'd sign a painting. I'm not sure yet if I'll list it or just keep it.
Having the pattern and the finished piece together made me curious about where they'd both actually come from. So I looked into it.
The piece is done in the primitive folk-art style that was everywhere in the '70s: bluebirds mid-flight, potted flower baskets, small stylized evergreen trees, a heart worked in red near the top, all held inside a continuous geometric border in blue. Stitched across the middle, in black cross stitch lettering, is the line: "A TRUE FRIEND IS A GIFT OF GOD."
In the bottom corner of the linen, worked in the same black thread as the motto, is a name and a date: LIN (?) TRACY 11-17-77.
That's not a manufacturer's mark or a printed label. That's a person, sitting down at some point in 1977, finishing a piece and choosing to sign it the way a painter signs a canvas. I don't know anything else about L. Tracy. But I know the exact day she considered this piece done, which is more than I usually get from an object like this.
The instruction sheet is titled "General Instructions, Catalog No. 96," printed by Herrschners, Inc., out of Hoover Road, Stevens Point, Wisconsin.
Herrschners is a real institution in the needlecraft world, and older than I expected. The company traces back to 1899, when a German immigrant named Frederick Herrschner started out selling sewing notions from a pushcart on the streets of Chicago. Customers who moved away kept writing to him for the goods they couldn't find locally, so he built a mail-order catalog around it instead of a cart. The business stayed in Chicago until Frederick's death in 1929, changed hands, and eventually relocated to Stevens Point in 1970, where it's still headquartered today.
This particular sheet isn't a single-pattern chart. It's a general reference page, the kind Herrschners tucked into their multi-project kits, with a stitch dictionary running across the top: blanket stitch, lazy daisy, French knot, outline, cross stitch, long and short, buttonhole, feather, chain, plus instructions for appliqué and cutwork. It was meant to be kept and referenced across more than one project, not thrown away after a single use, which probably explains why it survived this long alongside the piece it was actually used for.
A few pages in, the exact pattern shows up: design number 10-9792, with its own color key mapping out black, green, dark pink, light pink, dark blue, light blue, yellow, and dark brown, and a full graphed chart underneath it, birds, trees, potted flowers, and the lettering laid out square by square exactly the way it appears on the finished sampler.
Comparing the two side by side is the part I like most. You can watch Tracy's actual thread choices against the printed key and see where she followed it precisely and where she made small calls of her own, which flower got which shade of pink, how dense to work the border. A pattern chart tells you what to stitch. It doesn't tell you who's going to stitch it, or how. That part only shows up in the finished piece.
It's a lot to have survived together this long, a chart, a signature, and the object itself, all still in one bag. I've started keeping a drawer for finds like that. Craft history, more or less, is what I'd call it.
Most of what comes in my craft hauls, I sell or pass along, and I'm glad to. That's the whole point. But once in a while something like this shows up, a piece and its own paper trail, still together after almost fifty years, and I can't quite make myself list it.
This one's going in the drawer.
