Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

JM monogram in suzani style: improved version (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

This is much, much better than this.  It is no where near perfect but I’ll settle for it being significantly better. ‘M’, having been re-shaped, now has a lot more substance to it (the former design would have worked in calligraphy but not in embroidery unless perhaps standing alone). Both of the downstrokes are thicker and slightly wider at the bottom than the top and this also has the fortunate effect of making the letter stand out better on the red silk of the madorla (almond-shaped motif) beneath.

JM monogram in suzani style: revised version

I am now much happier. As I’ve got older I’ve finally clicked about the merits of putting troublesome things to one side for a while. When younger I would have worried away at a piece of sewing I knew wasn’t right and just like  picking at an irritating scab, all I did was to make things worse. Now I  stick the offending article out of sight in a drawer and return to it when I know exactly what to do – and strangely enough that knowledge does just seem to pop up unbidden when thinking about something different. I would never have been patient enough to do this when younger.

Sorry not to have shown photographs of the steps involved. Isn’t it typical, the one time I show you in any detail how to do something, I end up completely re-doing it!?

Altar frontal for Ipsden Ch. Oxon: aquilegia (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

This week saw a real push on the altar frontal. We had lots of stars, a clutch of stars with embroidery and a tin full of yellow linking pieces – now they just needed joining up.

I used to think this was an easy job but working with people who’ve not done much of pieced patchwork on papers, I now realise it’s not so simple. The acute angled points of the diamonds are so tiny that it’s very fiddly to fold the fabric in neatly enough to alter neither the angle nor the length of the side. Inaccuracy here has a knock on effect and it’s disheartening – but not unusual –  to discover that the 2 sides to be joined up differ by a quarter of an inch or more. This is fine if you’ve done something similar before as you know it just calls for a bit of firm pinning in on the one hand and some gentle stretching on the other.  But such details were not uppermost in my mind when working out a design for a group project – squares, or hexagons with angles of 90 and 120 degrees would have been so much easier! It’s quite a learning curve for me too.

Altar frontal for Ipsden Ch. Oxon: joining up the patches continues.

I think the quilt is now about two thirds complete and for our next meeting I shall cut out more of the yellow linking diamonds for people to tack up.

Altar frontal for Ipsden Ch. Oxon: about two-thirds finished

This week I also embroidered an aquilegia for the altar frontal quilt. The aquilegias I like best are the everyday variety that pops up all over the place – Aquilegia vulgaris – specially those inky indigo ones, pleated, gathered and scalloped in origami perfection. Look at one fallen petal, and you see it’s a perfect little ice cream cornet, or even better one of those cornucopias baroque artists couldn’t resist turning their hands to. Then turn it the other way up and it’s a small dinosaur. For early plant classifiers the petal was an eagle (Latin ‘aquila’) or a dove (columba) and so we call them aquilegia or columbine  instead perhaps of cornetia or dinosauria (and the spell checker isn’t very keen on them either).

Altar frontal for Ipsden Ch. Oxon: aquilegia (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)