Home from Arizona and The Sampler Symposium

i am a cold weather kinda girl. i love snow and i love rain so going to Arizona is not my idea of a vacation, yet i must admit i did enjoy this past weekend in Mesa, Arizona at The Sampler Symposium that Attic Needlework put on and the 70 degrees was perfect.
i arrived on Thursday around 7pm and checked into the Hyatt in Mesa what a great room, it overlooked a beautiful pool and had a great couch to sit and stitch on in the evening.
finally with my stitches out and my bandages off my left wrist i could reenter the stitching world!

our first class on Friday evening was taught byVickie of Needlework Press. it was a piece that had originally been presented in  the 2003 Summer issue of "Sampler and Antique Quarterly" Vickie LoPiccolo Jennett redesigned it especially for the Attic Sampler Symposium. i will post mine hopefully in a few days just a few more stitches and i will be finished.
it is a great little accordion small pattern book just like those in the case above.

Lorraine Mootz above traveled all the way from Celle,Germany to share her incredible knowledge of these little sampler booklets . did you know that most young stitchers back in the 1800's used the patterns from the Sajou booklets and you see them now on many antique samplers.that is why when you look at antique samplers today you see many of the same motifs. why reinvent the wheel as they say. if it fit they would stitch it or maybe if they liked the motif. Remember there was no inventing your own motifs as we do now with paper and pencil or on a computer.
Lorraine was such  fun if you haven't been at one of her lectures make it must on you list.
Lorraine brought along a few of her charted samplers and we were lucky to receive one of her charted antique samplers called Marquerite Dumas 1895 similiar to the one below.

these are two of Lorraine Mootz charted works that she shared.

she also has a book out called "Mestertucher" a must.

two more days to go stay tuned...