Madeline Keller Sampler

There are lavish samplers with intricate stitches and complex patterns. There are also samplers with a basic design and simple motifs.  And then there are samplers like the red monochrome one stitched by Madeline Keller. 

Samplers like Madeline’s simply make you smile.

Madeline’s unusual needlework sampler features a comical vaudevillian scarecrow-looking figure with only one leg showing. 

Is he meant to be sitting on a ledge with his other leg underneath him? Is he meant to symbolize her father? Or was he a man who happened to visit their hamlet as part of a traveling show? We will never know.

When acquired by Red Barn Samplers, it was framed with no glass, in an older, wooden frame painted red. When the sampler was removed from the original frame, a top section of the sampler that had been folded under was revealed. 

There is no doubt Madeline Keller had to have been a precocious child with a quirky sense of humor because her whimsical stitching gives her away.