Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

K & L Wedding monogram (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

The stimulating thing about doing these monograms/initials to celebrate a marriage is that it’s a good reason to play around with all sorts of different styles for the lettering – I suppose I should call them fonts but somehow that sounds too mechanistic for hand embroidered letters. Choosing a style for these letters was easy because the design appeared on the wedding invitation and its mixture of sturdy no nonsense letters together with construction lines rather took my fancy.

K & L Wedding monogram (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Once again I cut out the initials in white felt and laid these on a lightish weight white linen. This time Bondaweb didn’t work – or I was a bit too impatient and peeled off not only the backing fabric but the sticky bit as well! It didn’t matter as the felt letters were firm enough to stay put while I slip stitched them in place. I then embroidered over the felt in satin stitch using a light aqua blue embroidery cotton (DMC 3756). The construction lines were done in a single strand of a chocolate brown embroidery cotton, now numberless on a card in my random thread box. Each letter is about 5cm/2″ high – rather smaller than I usually do them.

Ipsden church: altar frontal. The joining up begins

People have been asking to see a bit of joined up progress on the altar frontal, so here are a couple of not very good photos. There are more 7 star blocks with embroidered flowers ready to add on but first I must make a calico template to work how much space should be left for a border and how much to cut off for the curving corners. For individual flowers, see here:

snake’s head fritillary

dog rose

daffodil

passionflower

ox eye daisy

hellebore

Ipsden altar frontal: progress of patches

Late September and early October have become booked up for me as I am needed for granny duty as stand in night nurse. The political party conference season is upon us and daughter and son-in-law both being political journalists have full schedules at conference centres across England and Scotland. (Bouncing baby’s other granny and grandad will be doing duty for the Tory  party conference but no conclusion as to political affiliation should be drawn from this.) It may, of course be, that all troublesome teeth will have made their appearance by then and that we shall all just have a lovely holiday in London with blissful uninterrupted nights.  (A proper nanny will be doing the lion’s share of weekday day care, so our duties will not be exactly onerous).

Ipsden altar frontal: plenty more patches

In Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, Benedict’s eccentric wooing of Beatrice culminates in the rousing cry, ” the world must be peopled” – and who that saw it can forget Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith sparring in these roles in the 1967 BBC live transmission (seen once, the recording lost, thought to be for ever but found and returned to Britain in 2010. Come on BBC, let’s have a look at it again.) Well, Ipsden parents can be proud of their children as many of them have been doing just that recently. Accordingly, I have some confidence that my lack of success in organising sewing bees will meet with some degree of sympathy. If the world must be peopled, grandparents can only be joyful, and man the buggy and cot when required.

But all this means that I hope to call a meeting of the village patchworkers around the second week in October and full steaming ahead can go on after that.