Christine's Mary Wigham is Sitting Pretty

There are so many possibilities for sampler design as you have seen from all the Mary Wigham finishes. How wonderful is this idea of Christine's!

When I first carried out the research on the Ackworth medallions, I charted everything. The aim of that research (which gave rise to the Ackworth School Pattern Book) was to see if there were certain Ur-Motifs or fundamental motifs from which others had been copied. If this were true then we might be able to put forward the hypothesis that some samplers were model or teaching samplers and that the other girls had recourse to these, using them as a kind of pattern book for working medallions on their own samplers. What I did find out was that, with the sample we had, no medallions appeared to have been copied from a single source. In fact, all the medallion patterns differed slightly from sampler to sampler. Some had slightly different borders, others minor adaptions. The girls were doing exactly what you do, making slight personal changes...or mistakes which they worked into the overall design with a certain aplomb!