Embroidered samplers have long been a popular means for communicating spiritual and moral messages, not least of all to the young. My childhood room sported no less than three embroideries on the wall, featuring such patterns as
- the "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" prayer, whose line "if I should die before I wake" practically scared me to death every night I read it;
- the Lord's Supper, in which the gender of certain apostles was even less apparent than in the Da Vinci painting on which it was based; and
- Neil Armstrong walking onto the moon--which might explain why my earliest childhood ambition was to be a minister and an astronaut.
The Vogue Sampler pictured below is a consciously postmodern pastiche of the spiritual & the pop, crafted by London-based artist Kate Westerholt as part of the "Fashion Fantasies" pictorial in the July, 2006 issue of British Vogue.
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