Samplers as Teaching Tools:

How Young Girls Learned Their ABCs, Numbers, and Life Lessons

When we look at antique samplers today, we often admire their quaint alphabets, neat rows of numbers, and carefully stitched verses. They seem like charming relics from another age. But in their own time, samplers weren’t just decoration—they were powerful teaching tools. For centuries, these little pieces of cloth were a child’s first “notebook,” where literacy, discipline, and moral training all came together in stitches.

The Classroom in the Parlour

In the 17th and 18th centuries, formal schooling was far from universal. Many children, especially girls, were taught at home or in small private schools. A sampler became both curriculum and test. Before books were cheap and widespread, a sampler could serve as the single place where a girl practiced her ABCs and recorded what she had learned. Teachers, governesses, or mothers would set the task: stitch the alphabet, both capitals and lowercase. Add the numbers, one through ten. Work them again until your letters are neat and evenly spaced. In the process, a girl learned to read, to count, and to sew—all vital skills for a future household manager.

Learning the ABCs in Thread

Imagine a child of seven or eight, linen stretched taut in a simple frame, brightly dyed silk or wool threads in hand. She begins with the first row: “A B C D E F G.” Each stitch had to be exact—no erasing, no starting over. By the end of her exercise, she could not only recognize her letters but also reproduce them perfectly. Some samplers include several alphabets in succession: block letters, cursive, italics, and sometimes even Greek or Hebrew characters. Each style reflected a particular curriculum and gave the student more practice in precision and memorization.

Numbers, Verses, and Moral Lessons

After the alphabets came the numbers. One through ten, then often up to twenty, fifty, or one hundred. This repetition helped children become comfortable with arithmetic basics, but the stitching itself also reinforced discipline: every digit must be straight and aligned. Then came words—often entire sentences. These might be Bible verses, moral proverbs, or poetic couplets. Popular examples included sayings like:

• "Idleness is the root of evil"
• "Love They Neighbour"
• "In They Youth Remember Thy Creator"

By working these texts into cloth, children were quite literally imprinting lessons of character and faith into their minds. The slow pace of stitching meant each word had to be considered carefully, letter by letter.

Iane Bostocke Sampler - 1598 England - Silk, metal threads, seed perls and black beads on linen. from Victoria and Albert Museum, London - in "Girlhood Embroidery" by Betty Ring

Discipline, Patience, and Perseverance

One reason samplers became so central to education is that they taught more than reading and writing. They cultivated habits that parents and teachers valued: patience, obedience, perseverance, and neatness. A crooked letter or uneven row was a permanent reminder of haste or inattention. For young girls especially, these virtues were seen as preparation for adult roles. A diligent child with tidy stitches was expected to grow into a capable woman who could run a household, manage servants, and raise children in discipline and order.

The Social Significance of Samplers

Beyond personal practice, samplers carried social meaning. Displayed on walls, they demonstrated a family’s investment in a child’s education and virtue. A well-executed sampler was a badge of honor, showing visitors that a daughter was not idle but industrious and skilled. In some communities, schools required students to complete a sampler as proof of progress. Families kept them as heirlooms, while others were donated to churches or local institutions. Today, these pieces give historians extraordinary insight into educational methods, family life, and even regional styles of stitching.

A Famous Schoolgirl’s Sampler

Perhaps the most famous example of a teaching sampler is the one worked by Elizabeth Parker of Ashburnham, England, in 1830. Unlike most samplers of its time, Elizabeth’s wasn’t simply rows of alphabets and verses. Instead, in tiny red cross-stitches, she filled her linen with an astonishingly personal and anguished account of her life. She began with the standard opening—her name, age (17), and date. But instead of listing moral proverbs, she poured out a confession of despair: stories of mistreatment, loneliness, and thoughts of suicide. Her words run uninterrupted across the cloth, almost like a diary stitched in red. While Elizabeth Parker’s sampler is an extreme and haunting example, it highlights the expressive potential of these teaching exercises. What began as an alphabet drill became, for her, the only safe space to tell her story. Today, her sampler is preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and remains one of the most studied and poignant artifacts of the period.

Variations Across Time and Place

Not all teaching samplers were the same. In colonial America, for instance, they often included patriotic sayings alongside religious texts. Dutch and German samplers featured distinctive motifs—crowns, tulips, and geometric borders—woven between alphabets. In Scandinavia, teaching samplers sometimes served double duty, practicing not only letters but also household marking stitches used to identify family linens.

The one thing they all shared was the blending of practical literacy with needle skills. Whether a girl was in London, Boston, or Amsterdam, her first stitches often spelled out her ABCs.

My Oma (Grandma) stitched this sampler in school in Holland when she was 8. This is a more modern example of schoolgirl samplers 

From Teaching Tool to Treasured Art

By the 19th century, as formal schooling became more accessible, the purely educational role of samplers began to fade. Yet their importance never disappeared. Instead, they became more decorative, more elaborate, and more personal. Flowers, houses, animals, and elaborate borders joined the alphabets, transforming practice pieces into works of art. Still, every time we see an alphabet stitched into a sampler, we are reminded of its original role. Those neat rows weren’t just pretty designs; they were a child’s classroom, sewn into linen.

Why They Matter Today

Modern stitchers who work alphabets into their designs—whether in samplers, wedding records, or family heirlooms—are unconsciously continuing this centuries-old tradition. Every alphabet row nods back to the children who once learned to read and write by sewing letters into cloth. For collectors and historians, antique teaching samplers remain an invaluable resource. They tell us how children learned, what societies valued, and how families marked a child’s growth. For stitchers today, they provide inspiration, connecting us across time to those who once learned their first lessons with thread in hand. Samplers were never “just pretty pictures.” They were classrooms, moral textbooks, and discipline trainers all in one. They shaped not only children’s literacy but their habits, virtues, and even their identities. The next time you see a row of stitched alphabets, imagine the small hands that first stitched them, the lessons slowly sinking in with every patient cross. Whether neat or wobbly, each letter is a testimony: this is how a child once learned to live..

Written by Thea Dueck: designer, teacher and founder of the Victoria Sampler. A professional needlework designer and a recognized authority in specialty stitches. She loves sharing the joy of samplers and specialty stitches.