Description
Each year Hands Across the Sea Samplers publishes a sampler which we consider to be not only beautiful but outstandingly so and worthy to be crowned our Queen of the May.
We are pleased to present to you Maria Ewin – our Queen of the May for the year 2023. Maria is a beautiful sampler that has been painstakingly reproduced and exquisitely stitched by Lisa Brown.
“Maria’s colours are beautifully preserved and she was reproduced using the colours on the front of the sampler. I stitched her model on 46ct linen which, when finished, was almost the exact size of the original sampler.
Maria was an excellent stitcher. Her execution was precise and accurate. It amazes me that at the young age of 11 Maria took such great care with her work. My impression of Maria is that she was a very organized and disciplined girl. She shows great attention to detail in the way that she matched her top and bottom borders and then also matched her side borders with perfect symmetry.
In the border flowers, she carefully placed each pair of colours so as to not repeat a combination. She did so similarly in the floral band beneath the verse. I think she was very intentional with her colours and that the results were not just a happy accident. The balance of greens, reds, and blue against an otherwise neutral palette makes the sampler so visually appealing and alive with colour. I feel Maria’s sampler is a master class in design, colour placement, and execution.
Do you love her as much as I do?” – Lisa.
Maria’s sampler has been reproduced using a palette of 24 colours carefully matched to the colours found on the front of the sampler. The model was stitched using Soie d’Alger (SDA) from Au Ver à Soie, and we have included conversions for Soie 100.3 and DMC.
