Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Green altar frontal (North Stoke Church, Oxon.)

For the next few weeks I’m trying to harness the rising sap of Spring and pour my energy into getting on with the patchwork altar frontal. Deciding it would be lovely if the frontal featured embroidered flowers – both wild and domesticated – I had hoped to encourage others in the patchwork group to have a go at embroidery. This hasn’t happened, which is understandable in a small village. Throughout the winter I have embroidered flowers and these have been posted on the blog as and when they’ve been finished. Now I feel I need to make a concerted effort to gather things together, take stock and have a few meetings in which I have things for others to do which I know they can cope with. (I hadn’t realised how problematical some would find turning fabric under for the points on the diamonds or how tight a tension some sewed with, so it’s been a big learning curve for all of us).

Green altar frontal : detail (North Stoke Church, Oxon.)

Today I am showing North Stoke’s green altar frontal, which along with the white and purple frontals, consists of beautiful goldwork and sumptuous silkwork. Once again, the couching threads holding the gold thread in place have proved to be a weak point but, generally, considering that the green one is in use the most, this frontal has worn its 100 years pretty well.

Green altar frontal: detail (North Stoke Church, Oxon.)

In liturgical terms, green indicates Ordinary Time, two periods of which occur in the church calendar: the comparatively short time between Candlemas and Ash Wednesday  and an extended period after Pentecost. Somewhat confusingly ‘ordinary’ as used here has nothing to do with common or what you’d revert to in between special feasts, but rather it refers to being numbered – an ordinal number is an adjective like first, second, etc and so Ordinary Time is counted time e.g. the First Sunday after Pentecost. Counted time after Pentecost begins with the First Sunday after Pentecost, which is also Trinity Sunday and ends with the last Sunday before the beginning of Advent which celebrates Christ the King.

Green altar frontal: detail (North Stoke Church, Oxon.)

Ordinary Time allows for more uninterrupted reading of scripture in sequence, for the exploration of other themes, such as creation or the environment and for creative response to things like the saints’ days that appear at this time.

Green altar frontal : detail (North Stoke Church, Oxon.

Green altar frontal: detail (North Stoke Church, Oxon.)

Green altar frontal (North Stoke Church, Oxon.)

For details of North Stoke’s other frontals:

White altar frontal 

Purple altar frontal

For other posts on liturgical colours and stoles:

Green and purple

Red and white

Pecan and cherry cheesecake cookies

I was impressed at how well last week’s biscuits tasted after several days in an airtight tin, so I thought the recipe deserved another outing with a bit of tweaking. First I reduced the amount of sugar by 50g, using 150g where the first recipe required 200g. Glacé cherries made the already sweet biscuits even more sweet, so I tried using Waitrose dried cherries (Love Life range), which tested straight from the packet were very juicy, slightly sour and extremely delicious. Less sugar was definitely better.  Sadly, the dried cherries were not very much different from glacé cherries, which I found a bit surprising. But when all’s said and done, these are still jolly nice biscuits, just not amongst my favourites.

Pecan and cherry cheesecake cookies

Ingredients

115 g butter

115 g cream cheese

1/2 teasp vanilla

150 g sugar

100 g wholemeal flour

100 g SR flour

50 g pecans (bashed to the size of coriander seeds)

as many dried cherries as there are cookies

Makes about 30 smallish biscuits

Line several baking trays with baking parchment (wiping butter papers over the base of the tin will help the paper to adhere to the tray.)

Cream butter and cream cheese; then add vanilla and sugar and mix until smooth. Add the flour bit by bit until incorporated and then fold in the bashed pecans and quartered glacé cherries.

Flour you hands, pinch off a walnut size piece of dough and roll into little balls. Put these on the baking tray spacing an inch or so apart. Flour the bottom of a drinking glass and press this down on the cookies to flatten them.

Bake 11-14 minutes until beginning to brown around the edges.

Pecan and cherry cheesecake cookies – last two

This week has seen the first primroses push through – quite late, it seemed to us, to no surprise as although ever other day has been quite sunny, it has been jolly cold – especially in the evenings. So I went back to check my blog for 13 March last year (a year to the day!) and guess what, the church biscuit (actually coffee brownies) is decorated with – the first primroses) and a photograph of the garden shown later in the same post reveals that the garden looks just as bare as it is now).  In 2013 I also got very excited about primroses, although this time  it was a bit later in the season when they were more plentiful as this post from April 21 shows.

Primrose, hand embroidered by Mary Addison (for altar frontal for Ipsden Church, Oxon.)

Last week a car journey along country roads and bypasses revealed trees and shrubs stiff in their winter clothes and apart from the green of lichen and ivy, there was no hint of new buds or the fluff of white blossom. Yesterday, six days later, we took the same journey and this time there was there was white blossom in intermittent profusion all along our route. Blackthorn was in full flower, its sword like branches softened by frizzes of  hazy white and, contrasting with the more unruly blackthorn,  were the tall wild cherry trees, not quite in full flower, whose blossom draws attention to their lovely shape which is invisible for most of the year when its silhouette recedes back into the  general hedginess of country lanes. Spring may not be in full flood but this little trickle of yellow and white is for the moment animating and enlivening and I must capitalise on this by getting on with the altar frontal flowers.

Water colour of primroses and primulas by Bertha Fowle

I saw this watercolour in a sale of paintings put on in Chiswick 30 years ago and couldn’t resist it.