The Sampler Consortium is pleased to announce that the Vermont Sampler Initiative was the recent recipient of a $5000 project grant from the Vermont Humanities Council. Submitted on behalf of the Vermont Sampler Initiative by the Rokeby Museum in Ferrisburgh, Vermont, the funds will help to pay for Sampler Identification and Documentation Days (Sampler ID Days) held at four different locations in Vermont in 2023. Sampler ID Days are something like an Antiques Roadshow event where the public is invited to bring in their antique and heirloom samplers to be professionally photographed and documented by volunteers for inclusion in the Sampler Archive’s online database of American samplers (samplerarchive.org). The first two of these two-day events will be held at the Shelburne Museum on April 21 and 22, 2023 and at the Vermont Historical Society in Barre on May 12 and 13, 2023. The remaining two events will be held later in the year at the Windham County Historical Society in Newfane and the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury.
All four events will build on the success of the Sampler ID Days held at the Bennington Museum November 19 and 20, 2022 funded by the Sampler Consortium. Over the two-day event 76 needlework samplers, brought in by 21 different owners, were professionally photographed and documented - 64 were American and at least 49 had Vermont origins. In addition, a private collection of 59 Vermont samplers was photographed on January 14, 2023, with the cost of the photography covered by a generous donation to the Sampler Consortium from the collection’s owner.
Please consider supporting this important initiative. The cost of holding Sampler ID Days is dependent on the generosity of the hosting sites and volunteers working with the Vermont Sampler Initiative coordinators. Professional photography, however, is expensive, as is the processing and manipulation of the resulting images for inclusion in the Sampler Archive. On average, we estimate that the photography and image manipulation of each sampler costs the project $35.
The Vermont Sampler Initiative's 2023 - 2024 goal is to locate, photograph and document 350 American samplers and prepare them for inclusion in the Sampler Archive. The estimated total cost to reach this goal is $12,250. To date (March 1, 2023) we have raised $7800 from generous donations and grant funds, leaving $4450 left to raise.
Please press the DONATE button – any amount will be helpful!