Document: Embroidered Sampler - 1659

Young girls and women were often taught embroidery to decorate home linens and shirts.  A sampler was sometimes displayed in the home both as decoration and as a way to help reference stiches and patterns.  

In this sampler you can see a seated figure spinning yarn.   Perhaps it was her mother, grandmother, or sister?   The Met Museum has interpreted this figure as an ape, but perhaps there are other interpretations. 

Met Museum Summary: This sampler features motifs common to Dutch samplers of the period, including flower pots, birds flanking trees, and pierced hearts. The sampler maker also stitched an ape spinning yarn, possibly symbolic of the thread of life. Apes appear in seventeenth-century Dutch and English needlework, functioning as a mirror or critique of human behavior, or representing the sense of taste in compositions of the five senses. The letters AI (or AJ, as "I" and "J" were written interchangeably in the Latin alphabet at this time) and the year 1659 are stitched onto the linen, most likely the initials of the maker and the year in which she completed her work.