London - (Reuterus & Ass Mess): Two hundred years of missionaires' sewing techniques are on show at a Royal College of Needlework exhibition devoted to educational samplers demonstrating appropriate stitching techniques to foreign heathens hell bent on practising female genital mutilation.
The show focuses on charitable attempts to teach neat, tidy and effective stitches after missionaires capitulated in a long-running battle to stop female circumcision in the colonies.
Over five hundred FMG samplers are on display including Scottish Presbyterians' overlock stitch examples, Quakers' blanket-stitch, Plymouth Bretheren's cross-stitch and topstitch as well as the fabled Methodists' button-hole and running stitches.
"The Methodists deserve most of the credit," the exhibition curator Dame Daphne Overboard said today.
"They knew they couldn't ever stamp out the evil practice of female circumcision and went to great lengths to ensure that at least the sutures were appropriate and dependable."
The show's star exhibit displays missionaries' techniques on actual sampler making in what has been described by some as an innovative fore-runner of the traditional British Xmas office party bottom-photocopying pastime.
The mission head's wife would strip, daub her nether regions in colorful pigment made from cerise bouganvillea blossom or blue hibiscus petals, for instance, and then sit down on a piece of linen chosen to be an educational sampler, firmly imprinting her outer lips on the material.
Once a solid imprint was established on the cloth it would be dried before the stitches were added on.
"Of course some missionary sects - mostly breakaway Welsh Calvinists I'm afraid to day - recoiled at the very idea of this technique and simply used potato prints by way of example."
The exhibition runs until the 1st April.
With special thanks to Jalapenoman
