While my current work languishes, here’s a picture of another past sampler. This one I stitched in 1996. It hangs in my husband’s office:
Again most of the patterns are from The New Carolingian Modelbook, and the piece is a mix of plain old cross stitch, long armed cross stitch, and double running stitch, worked in DMC embroidery floss on 36 threads per inch linen (18 stitches per inch). The center twist is the same one I used on the knitted Knot a Hat earwarmer band. (It’s also pictured on Ravelry.) You can see the difference in proportion between square unit based long-armed cross stitch, and the not quite square knitting stitch units. More rows to the inch than stitches across to the inch gives the knit version the slightly squashed appearance.
UPDATES: THE CHARTED PATTERN BELOW IS ALSO AVAILABLE IN AN EASY-TO-PRINT PDF DOWNLOAD ON MY EMBROIDERY PATTERNS PAGE, LINK ABOVE. AND THE KNOT-A-HAT KNIT EARWARMER PATTERN IS AVAILABLE ON THE KNITTING PATTERNS PAGE, ALSO LINK ABOVE.
The quotation on this sampler is “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for the are subtle and quick to anger.” From JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and totally appropriate for a software developer.
String-Or-Nothing 
I’m curious re the interesting voided motif on the very bottom of Ferd’s office sampler. It’s like an alien cornucopia. Where is it from?
–Kathryn