Patience and Skill

In the 1870s, when Berry schoolgirl Helena Kinneally stitched the buttonholes, fancy borders and darning to create this needlework sampler, she probably didn’t know how useful those skills would later be, when she became the mother of ten children. Helena Kinneally (c. 1868-1904) was born in Victoria about 1868. She was the daughter of William […]

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Making Her Mark

Embroidery samplers from the late nineteenth century made by children were often small in size and called ‘marking samplers’. The one shown here was worked by Catherine Frost of Orange in 1872, when she was eight years old. Typically, samplers were made by girls between the ages of five and fifteen, they were the work […]

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