Embroidery Samplers hold a special place in the needlework community, and for good reason. Many stitchers develop their passion for embroidery through the stitch sampler. Historically, schoolgirl stitch samplers preserve the handwork legacy of young women, which would otherwise be lost to time.
Today, we’re sharing some fresh ideas for embroidery samplers that will invigorate your stitching! If you’re interested in pursuing different sampler styles with EGA, consider our Online Studio Class Whitework Sampler with Janet Salerno, the Group Correspondence Courses Ancestree with Carolyn Standing Webb, Love and Laughter with Denise Harrington-Pratt, and Perfectly Counted Crosses with Carolyn Standing Webb, or the Individual Correspondence Course The Sampler Family Tree with Carolyn Standing Webb. You can also learn more about the history and impact of samplers in our interviews with Carolyn Standing Webb and with our Needlework Faire 2025 Sampler U teachers Becky Noland and Sylvia Stecker.
The Silhouette Sampler
The Silhouette Sampler is pretty straightforward. Simply trace the silhouette of your choice, and fill it in with the stitches of your choice. This idea works for all different shapes and sizes. The above heart by Rachel Beyer is not unlike the free Hearts for Hospice pattern the EGA Sittch-a-Long group used to create donatable heart samplers. Margaret Kinsey’s Heart of My Heart pattern offers another take on the Silhouette Sampler theme (below).
Consider RikRack Embroidery’s Free Elephant Embroidery Pattern for a more complex silhouette. While she provides filler ideas for stitching inside the elephant, you could also choose a unique selection of stitches to make the design your own.
The Quadrants Sampler
You’ve likely seen a Quadrants Sampler before in examples of yearly stitch journals. We shared the above free journal template in 6 Ideas for Stitching an Embroidery Journal. Stitching within quadrants on a canvas—whether inside a square, circle, rectangle, spiral, or other shape—creates an easy means for delineating stitch zones dedicated to one particular stitch or color.
A really fresh take on this trend is to start with shelves (or simple lines) that the stitcher can fill with books, plants, and other knick-knacks, as in Celeste Johnston’s (@Lemon_made_shop) example, shown above.
Colette Kinley’s Saatchi Gallery winning design Allotment, which offers a bird’s eye view of a garden, offers another fun treatment on the quadrant sampler.
The Functional Sampler
Who said a sampler can’t be functional? As the name implies, the Functional Sampler creates a sampler that you can use for other purposes. The Functional Sampler is meant to be admired while also being utilized, as with Becky Noland’s Sampler Sewing Roll for Sampler U.
A Functional Sampler might form the base for a bag, pin cushion, ottoman, or pillow. Stash Nash Design’s Pocket Sampler (below) turns an alphabet sampler into a small bag.
The All-of-a-Kind Sampler
Do you love flowers? Precious stones? Cats and/or dogs? Create an All-of-a-Kind Sampler to demonstrate and showcase your love of a single item in all of its forms. The All-of-a-Kind Sampler can be worked freeform, in quadrants, or even in the silhouette of the thing you love.
The Stitch-Strengthening Sampler
The most time-honored sampler is the one that strengthens your stitchwork techniques. The Stitch-Strengthening Sampler showcases your progress towards perfecting stitch types. Worked within a unique color palette, it easily becomes its own beautiful creation. The sampler from Puteto (shown above) offers a uniform visual dictionary of stitches, punctuated by those stitches in action at the bottom, used together to create several flowers.
Beginners should check out Cutesy Crafts’ free Embroidery Sampler for a good place to start!
The Blackwork Sampler
With its variety of hypnotic stitch patterns, Blackwork embroidery feels especially suited to sampler creation. Many Blackwork Samplers also dabble in the Quadrant Sampler theme, like in The Steady Thread’s Free Blackwork Honeycomb Needlebook and Loose Thread Stitchery’s Nautilus Sampler (below).
The Steady Thread has also created a Blackwork Sampler that incorporates quadrants and all-of-a-kind themes with their Advent Calendar – Garland Tree!
EGA’s Blackwork Butterfly (in the Petite Projects Library) and Halloween Blackwork Biscornu (in EGA’s Free Projects Library).
We hope these ideas for embroidery samplers have inspired stitchers to explore some fresh ways to create samplers. Join EGA to access more sampler patterns in the Petite Projects Library and the EGA Stitch-a-Long group to share your embroidery!
