Modern Folk Embroidery - Peace To My Friend - Booklet Chart IH

Peace To My Friend was first released in February 2016. As I am celebrating 15 years of Modern Folk Embroidery, I am going through some of my older charts - and this one caught my eye as I felt it was in need of a little update.

The sampler here is worked in the style of Quaker2 samplers. Back in 2016, I had the privilege of visiting the Yorkshire Museum Trust’s depot and researching samplers in the museum’s collection. It was really special being at the depot and seeing the many fantastic samplers in their collection.

Besides regular English samplers, the museum also has a collection of Quaker medallion samplers and knitted Quaker pinballs. All of the Quaker medallion samplers in the collection are unfinished.

For this particular design, I took inspiration from a sampler by a girl named “Stickney”, who worked an anti-slavery sampler with the words “Peace To My Friend”. She also stitched a shackled enslaved man - an interpretation of the image used by the abolitionist movement. The sampler is shown on page 192 of Carol Humphrey’s book “Quaker School Girl Samplers from Ackworth”.

Besides regular upper and lower case alphabets, a series of ligatures is also featured on this sampler. Ligatures are joined letters that improve the flow of reading. The sampler also features the use of the "long S", a letter that looks like a lower-case f. The ligatures are CT, ST, SI, SL, SS, SH, SK, SB, and FFI.

Not only did Quaker girls make stunning samplers that fascinate us to this day, but their activism was, and still is, one of their most inspiring legacies. The first anti-slavery statements were written in 1688 in Germantown by Dutch and German Quakers who felt compelled to speak their truth.

For this updated booklet, I added a quote to the bottom of this sampler. It was taken from an 1822 pamphlet entitled “An address to the inhabitants of Europe on the iniquity of the Slave Trade; Issued by the Religious Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers, in Great Britain and Ireland”.

“The arguments of the Christian, like the religion from which they are derived, are plain and simple, but they are in themselves invincible. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is a system of peace, of love, of mercy, and of good-will. The Slave Trade is a system of fraud and rapine, of violence and cruelty. (...) That which is morally wrong cannot be politically right.”

Now, more than ever, those last words seem to ring particularly true.