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sampler

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.06 sec.
sampler, sample piece of needlework or embroidery, of silk, cotton, or worsted, for the preservation of some pattern or as an example of the ability of a child or a beginner. In museums and private collections there are samplers dating from as early as 1643. It was long the custom for each young girl to work her own sampler as soon as her needlework showed a proper degree of skill. Certain features of the sampler remained constant—the name of the maker, the date, the alphabet, texts from Scripture, proverbs or bits of verse, and a conventional border framing the whole.

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With her near-sightedness, and those tremulous fingers of hers, at once inflexible and delicate, she could not be a seamstress; although her sampler, of fifty years gone by, exhibited some of the most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework.
I had entered on my studies at Oxford, while you were a good little girl working your sampler at home
The mantelpiece cast up a great black shadow, over half of a mouldy old sampler, which her defunct ladyship had worked, no doubt, and over two little family pictures of young lads, one in a college gown, and the other in a red jacket like a soldier.
 
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