Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Nautilus shell: hand embroidered by Mary Addison

Shells are such pleasurable natural sculptures that I bet there’s scarcely a bathroom in Britain whose shelf doesn’t boast at least one of them. I’ve often fiddled around sewing embroidered sketches – see the embroidered nautilus shell pictured above but have never ended up making them into something that satisfies me. I did once make a crepe de chine shirt with a shell embroidered asymmetric front and embroidered cuffs but until I’ve dyed the shell pink fabric a colour more like mushroom or stone, I won’t be blogging about it. Shell pink is after all only really suitable for shells or babies and little girls. Some lessons you earn the hard way.

Nautilus shell cut open (in a glass case in the Enlightenment Gallery in the British Museum)

Shells are not only very beautiful in themselves but they also beautiful mathematically. Growth spirals or logarithmic spirals are often seen in nature and were first described by René Descartes. Christopher Wren also noticed the logarithmic curve of the nautilus shell. Such spirals solve the problem of permitting growth yet retaining the same shape. In the case of the nautilus shell, the growing soft bodied animal needs a new hard whorl of shell every so often and this is done by scaling each successive whorl up by a constant factor  – a relative change in just one factor has the required effect. .

Archimedean spiral (thanks to Wikipedia)

To try to make this clearer, look at the above spiral, also known as the Archimedean spiral. Here the distance between turnings is constant. Spirals such as these are used in watch balance springs and in very early gramophone records. 

Logarithmic curve (thanks to wikipedia)

Now look at the next diagram and from it  you can see the distance between turnings is now not constant. In fact it follows the pattern of a geometric progression but you don’t need to know this to see the difference in the two diagrams. You can see quite clearly that in the second diagram the turnings to the centre get tighter quicker. (A geometric progression is a sequence of numbers where each term is formed by multiplying the one before by a fixed number of constant, e.g. the series 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 which has a constant of 2.)

Different logarithmic spirals

This curve is also known as the Fibonacci spiral. But whatever you call it, it explains many natural phenomena to which we never give a second thought. Hawks approach prey in this manner, as insects do to light sources. The arms of spiral galaxies are so described, which are visibly like the diagram when you think about it and with the same logic this also describes bands of tropical cyclones or even low pressure cells over Iceland.  Apparently nerves of the cornea are also arranged in this pattern as are seeds on a sunflower head.  

And that brings me back to my unfinished embroidery for which I’m no nearer finding a use. Perhaps I should just embroider the caption “The right kind of shell” (in a sort of take on Marcel Duchamp) frame it and keep it for daughter No 2 who is head of MAG in Vietnam and spends her days finding and blowing up shells of a much more unpleasant variety.

White cotton cardigan embroidered with roses (Mary Addison)

A friend saw the rose cardigan I embroidered last year and asked me to do one for her to give as a present to little girl called Rose. Although she gave me the cardigan a few weeks ago, being occupied with other things – and just a dash of procrastination – meant that I only began embroidering it on Thursday with a deadline of this morning. There were some scary moments when I panicked because a rose looked more like a mess of tangled intestines and a bit of unpicking was necessary, but I finished yesterday and was even able to prepare my bag for work (checking for bus ticket, library card, library keys, etc) which I never usually have time for. Hurray.

I’ve never found a successful way of transferring a design on to white knitted cotton, so it seems to me that the only thing to do is to launch straight in and start embroidering directly onto the fabric (with a vague plan, a bit of intuition and a lot of nervous confidence – if the latter’s not a contradiction).  Starting from the middle of the flower, I move outwards. Free sewing like this can be rather a roller coaster activity in a gentle sort of way – a badly made petal in the wrong place can convert what is recognisably floral into something looking more like a cartoon monkey (or mangled intestines), in which case the only thing to do  is unpick until the recognisably floral reappears. (I’m always relieved if my flowers end up resembling roses because it’s very easy for them to topple over in the direction of peonies. But then again for many years I thought all those beautiful Chinese peonies were roses designed by an over exuberant imagination, so what do I know.) 

 I was quite pleased that in the end a couple of my roses rather gloriously resemble Centifolia, i.e. what gardeners call a cabbage rose. Luscious plumpness  of this sort also brings to mind the rose most loved by C17th Dutch still life painters, so it is scarcely a surprise to learn that when John Gerard, horticulturalist and herbalist, introduced the flower into Britain in his Herbal of 1597, he called it Rosa Hollandica. 

Rose hand-embroidered cardigan for a little girl
(Mary Addison)

An apocryphal story suggests that the Dutch invented flower painting in Antwerp in around 1650 because painted flowers were cheaper than the real thing, leading a flower lover to approach Jan Breughel for painted blooms instead. That German painters were painting flowers 50 years before the Dutch genre blossomed puts the lid firmly on this as a true story. But what is certain is that at this time the Dutch excelled in their flower painting.

Rose embroidered cardigan: right front detail (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

The earliest portrait of a Centifolia  rose dates to 1600-04, in an album of 22 watercolours on vellum by Jacques de Gheyn. His approach was that of the botanical artist clearly showing the individual flower’s distinguishing traits. Some, like the British Ambassador to the Hague at the time, Sir Dudley Carleton, found this a static talent, being too precise and lacking “morbidezza” (a sculptural softness and delicacy).

Rose embroidered cardigan: front detail (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Jan Breughel (youngest son of Pieter Breughel the Elder, well-known for his peasant scenes) had morbidezza by the bucket full and his talent met with the full approval of Sir Dudley. (Interestingly Jan, surrounded by all that masculine artistic success,  was taught to draw by his grandmother.) His nickname ‘Velvet’ referred equally to the velvet quality of the petals he painted as to the deep piled luxury fabric he loved to wear. Roses were his favourite flowers and he enjoyed painting them from life while many other artists had a portfolio of studies which they used to make into a composition of diverse flowers never naturally blooming at the same time. So important was painting from nature for Jan that, in 1606 he wrote to his patron, Cardinal Federico Borromeo, to say that he would have to put the painting the latter had commissioned to one side until the next growing season as the garland he was using was wilting and fading. One hoped the Cardinal was a patient man.

Rose embroidered cardigan for a 2 year old. (Hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

The roses are embroidered in 3 strands of stranded embroidery cotton, using 2 reds and 2 pinks; the leaves are done in 2 shades of green, with the veins picked out in pale turquoise. (The flowers are more than twice as big as those I did in the earlier cardigan.) The main stitches used are satin stitch, for the petals, back stitch for the stems  and there are a few single lazy daisy stitches.  God bless the creator of ‘Stitch n’ Tear’ for giving at least a modicum of stability when stable is the last thing you’re feeling sewing on bouncy knitted fabric.

Rose embroidered cardigan for a 2 year old (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)