Vernacular/Nostalgia: QWERTY sampler
'Instead of a traditional A-B-C alphabet as the central motif, I went with a QWERTY arrangement to reflect my life as a writer'.
Welcome to Vernacular/Nostalgia, an occasional exploration of my creativity and curiosity practices in the form of photography, art, and archive finds.
I learned the basics about sewing and embroidery from my Mum, who was, for a decent portion of my childhood, a homemaker. She made clothes for my sister and I, spun wool shorn from our sheep, and cross-stitched art for our walls.
For many years, a traditional sampler in shades of blue made by my Mum hung in our family home.
The English word 'sampler' originates from the Latin 'exemplum', or the old French 'essamplaire', meaning 'an example'. They were traditionally created by young women to learn the basic needlework skills needed to run the family household. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has over 700 samplers in its collection, the earliest dating back to the 1400s. They're now recognised as important representations of early female education.
Many years on – now in my own home – I set out to make my own sampler. The idea was born out of nostalgia, but also, I wanted it to be contemporary and mean something to me.
So, instead of a traditional A-B-C alphabet as the central motif, I went with a QWERTY arrangement to reflect my life as a writer.
The rest of the sampler is based on the rest of the layout of my (Windows) laptop keyboard. The space bar is, literally, a representation of space: the planets in our solar system. And all the other keys are geometric abstractions of their symbols/functions.
On the earliest typewriting machines, the keys were arranged alphabetically. The history is muddy on the impetus for the QWERTY design, but a popular theory is that it maximised the separation between common letter pairings to prevent the keys getting jammed up when typing fast. The first QWERTY layout was patented in 1878 and produced by Remington (of gun-making fame). According to the Smithsonian Institute, by 1890 there were more than 100,000 Remington QWERTY typewriters in use across America.
Love your design! Fantastic update of a standard alphabet sampler!