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This sampler was made by my mother's mother's mother's mother, in 1865, when she was a girl of twelve. Her name was Wilhelmina Hering, and she lived in Dresden in Germany. If you look closely, you can see that the alphabets she has embroidered are versions of the German alphabet and do not differentiate between "I" and "J". Also, you can see that she has learned to embroider different types of crown and coronet amongst the motifs. I am fairly certain that she was being trained for service in some grand household, where embroidering these motifs on the personal linen of her employers would have been among her daily tasks. She died long before I was born, but I, too, am an embroiderer and I treasure this item for its merit as a craft object and for the connection it gives me with that little girl, born a hundred years before I was.