Sampler of the geometric, counted thread-stitch infills used in blackwork, worked running and double-running stitches with black, green, yellow, brown and pink silk floss on linen. Two sides have been finished with a drawn-thread hem. Linen sampler embroidered with coloured silks; 1870-90, English; samples of geometric infill patterns When acquired in 1929, this sampler was thought to be a seventeenth-century example of the counted-thread stitch, geometric infills used in Elizabethan and Jacobean blackwork embroidery. Close examination of the linen and the silk threads indicates that the materials are nineteenth-century. The colours of the threads are typical of the greens, yellows and browns popular during the Aesthetic movement of the 1870s and the embroidery is an example of the revival of traditional hand needlework styles in the late nineteenth century. The embroiderer has carefully worked the stitches in threads of different weights, imitating the thinning appearance of surviving 16th and 17th-century blackwork. This effect was not intentional in the original embroideries, but a result of thread loss due to the use of a corrosive mordant in the black dye of the embroidery silk.