Item Detail
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30289
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0
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5
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English
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Remember Me : Discursive Needlework and the Sewing Sampler of Patty Bartlett Sessions
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Dialogue : A Journal of Mormon Thought
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Spring 2018
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51
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1
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Farmington, UT
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Dialogue Journal
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101-128
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In her diary entry for March 20, 1848, Patty Bartlett Sessions (1795–1892)
recorded an unusual note: she had begun to work on her sewing sampler, an item she had not touched for thirty-eight years. She writes simply, “commenced to finish my sampler that I began when I was a girl and went to school.” Traditionally, decorative embroidery samplers both showed a young woman’s mastery of needlework and indicated that she was prepared for a genteel marriage. Since sewing samplers were usually created by unmarried girls, in 1812 Patty Bartlett put away her unfinished sampler when she married twenty-two-year-old David Sessions. While she had begun her sampler as a sixteen-year-old girl in Maine, Sessions did not finish her sampler until she was fifty-four years old and living in the Utah territory, where she had settled as an early member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which she joined in 1833. For Sessions, as with many girls who learned embroidery, the sewing sampler was a socially acceptable site of self-expression where opinions and feelings could be depicted and displayed. Through samplers, women like Sessions were able to sew their own approbation or dissent without rendering themselves vulnerable to public censure. In other words, samplers function as a circumspect site for testing ideas as well as stitches and patterns.
[from author]