LE MARQUOIR OUBLIE ("The Forgotten Sampler") by Maison Choisel

Stitch count 256 by 252.
 
They say that in France, long ago, a little girl embroidered her alphabet sampler with madder-red thread. Her name was Louise, and her trembling, pure scarlet letters were placed in a chest and then forgotten. Time passed, houses crumbled, voices faded away… but the red thread itself never allowed itself to be erased.
 
A century later, a seamstress rediscovered the cloth. She understood that those clumsy stitches were not just letters: they were a silent prayer, sewn into the fabric of memory. And so, so that this breath of childhood would not vanish, she took up the needle again and, with the same burning red, re-embroidered the sampler exactly as it had once been.
 
Since that day, it is said, whoever recreates an old sampler in red thread brings  back to life the one who stitched it long ago. The child returns to smile through the stitches, and the thread becomes a secret bridge across the centuries.
That is why, in houses where a red sampler keeps watch, one seems to hear, in the crackling of the fire or in the whisper of linen, the quiet voice of little embroiderers from the past. And as long as there are hands to take up the needle, the red thread will never break.