A STITCH IN TIME: Museum display features Cook’s samplers

By Janice M. Howard / Style Editor for the Southern Standard

COOK

Minute by minute, hour by hour, stitch by stitch, award-winning needlework artist Peggy Cook keeps herself busy recreating museum quality samplers as well as embroidered sewing boxes, needle cases and sewing kits that she calls 3-D needlework.

Choice pieces from Cook’s collection are being featured through Feb. 28 in an exhibition entitled, “A Stitch in Time: American Antique and Contemporary Samplers,” being presented by the McMinn County Living Heritage Museum in Athens. Eighty of her samplers with American, English and Scottish influences have been loaned to the museum. Most of these are reproductions modeled after antique samplers.

Samplers have become much sought after and prized as fascinating examples of early American embroidery. It began as a basic method of teaching the essentials of both practical and ornamental needlework.

Cook, a resident of Knoxville, is the wife of retired army colonel Walter C. Cook, who graduated from Central High School and whose parents, Clyde and Agnes Cook, lived for many years in the Mt. Zion area of Warren County. She has lived in eight states, Casablanca, Morocco and Guam, traveled to 16 countries on four continents and lived in 25 different houses.

Her mother taught her to sew and do hand embroidery at an early age and by the time she had reached 10 she’d taught herself to crochet. She was introduced to counted cross stitch in 1981. Within three years her interest turned to reproduction samplers ranging in size from 2 by 3 feet stitched on linen down to 1-3/4- by 2-inch miniatures stitched on silk gauze. The average size is 15 by 20 inches.

“I’m an early riser and it doesn’t bother me at all to get up early and stitch,” said Cook. “I also realized that when I laid a project aside I wasn’t tired of stitching, but actually just bored with it. I changed my strategy and always keep three or more different projects ready to work on.”

With encouragement from friends, she entered her first needlework contest in North Carolina and to her amazement won a blue ribbon. After winning her second blue ribbon the following year, she began showing at small sampler gatherings. Although considering herself a maverick stitcher because she is self-taught, Cook encourages everyone to join an embroidery guild and learn to make stitches the correct way from the start.