Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Elizabethan style jacket embroidered in crewel wools, silks and metallic threads

There’s something glorious about Elizabethan jackets with their profligacy of flowers and richness of colour through which rambling golden whirls of curlicues wander. I just had to make one. With all the enthusiasm of an 18 year-old whose A-levels were over and for whom an extended summer yawned empty until university in October, I began what was to become the jacket you see in the photograph above. The rest of the story is a bit of a let down as I have no memory of when I finished the jacket and I’m pretty sure I never wore it. However, in spite of never giving it an outing and disregarding all the things not quite right about it, I’m rather pleased at having made it. It is just a bit too tight for any of my daughters to wear for any length of time so I’m thinking of remaking it with a bit of extra fabric at the side seams. Funny thing is, considering the ornate clothing it would have been worn with in the late-C16th/early C17th, it looks really good with jeans. The other funny thing is that while I think of the style as Elizabethan, most of the examples you find date from after Elizabeth’s death in 1603.  Thinking of it as a Jacobean jacket doesn’t sound at all right. Hey ho. (Google images of Elizabethan jackets and then Jacobean jackets and the same pictures appear.)

Elizabethan style jacket embroidered in crewel wools, silks and metallic thread

I can’t now find a picture of the particular Elizabethan jacket that struck such a chord in my teenage self and upon delving into the subject further I shall be amazed if I ever do find it, for somewhat surprisingly, there are about 50 paintings of proud ladies wearing such garments dating from this period – it was obviously a style in vogue for between 20-30 years, though whether I’m missing the fine changes to the style that would have updated the fashion, I can’t tell,  particularly as so few of the jackets themselves have survived. (It is sad to discover that of those that have survived in museums their online details usually include the information that the jacket is in storage. Three of the best examples the V&A have all come with such a dispiriting  addendum.) The Layton jacket – of which both jacket and painting survive and are on display in the V&A – is perhaps the best known example. Margaret Layton, a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth I, was painted by Marcus Gheeraerts (the younger) and she was married to the Master Yeoman of the Jewel House of the Tower of London. However, this wasn’t the jacket I remember looking at when I made my own. It is very lovely but I wanted to show different flowers. It may be that I just liked the swirlycue curlicues and went off and found flowers from different sources.

The origin of this particular stylised flora and fauna decoration in English clothing goes back to the mid- C16th century and coincides with the rise in interest in gardening and plant collecting. The first printed book of emblems was Italian and appeared in 1531. Herbals (illustrating flowers which had medicinal uses) and florilegia (which showed lovely plants at their most beautiful) became popular in England a little later. The first English emblem book was Geffrey Whitney’s (1586)  which had 248 emblems, each entry consisting of a woodcut, a motto and a poem. Much of  Whitney’s work incorporated material from the books of continental authorities and it was said to be from Whitney’s book that Shakespeare was introduced to the wider European literature on the subject. A frenchman, Jacques Le Moyne, published La Clef des Champs (also 1586) with the specific purpose that his prints of flowers should be used as a pattern book by craftsmen of all sorts. John Gerard, herbalist and gardener to Lord Burghley’s London garden in Long Acre, published his Herball or General Historie of Plants in 1597. Delightfully he often describes plants in terms of textiles. For example, of sunflowers he says, “the middle whereof is made of unshorn velvet or some curious cloth wrought with the needle”.

Elizabethan jacket: unicorn 1

The golden scrollwork typically seen on the jackets was inherited from Opus Anglicanum, England’s famed ecclesiastical embroidery (which itself  recalls Celtic ornamentation) and which is often still used today in ecclesiastical embroidery. My biggest failure on my jacket was not doing the scrollwork on an embroidery frame. My tension is wrong and the couched metal threads wander about all over the place like an abandoned set of railway lines. I don’t like using a hoop but it isn’t optional if you want to get metalwork to look good. When I joined the cathedral embroiderers, the first thing I had to do was set up a frame for a goldwork sampler. Once you have a frame set up, you have to continue with it and I wouldn’t have enjoyed sewing that way with wools. I like to feel the fabric and be closer to the thread. I suppose I could have done the flowers first and then put it on a frame, that would have worked better. But this is all the wisdom of hindsight.

Elizabethan jacket: unicorn 2

This post shows just a few of the animals embroidered on my jacket. There are 6 unicorns (there may be more, I keep losing count and as I wonder whether I’ve counted the one tucked away by the underarm seam). I think I copied these mainly from pictures of The Lady with the Unicorn tapestries in the Musée de Cluny/Musée du Moyen-Age in Paris. In spite of having stayed for a week in a hotel on the same road as the museum, I never got round to seeing them – a ridiculous bit of carelessness.

Elizabethan jacket: unicorn 3

Elizabethan jacket: unicorn 4

Elizabethan jacket: unicorn 5

Elizabethan jacket: unicorn 6

My next blog post will show all the other animals and insects on the jacket and a further blog after that will have pictures of the flowers and discuss their symbolism. I suppose in consideration of how long it took to make the jacket, it is fitting to expend more than one post on it.

Elizabethan jacket: ladybird

Is it flax? Found growing along the roadsides in South Oxfordshire

I use a lot of linen for making wedding and christening cushions and as backing for embroidered hangings, so I have found it sad that you don’t often find British linen made from indigenous flax. This summer I have started to notice the above plant growing in clumps along the side of not just the main roads but also along roads in the village. Several times, I have picked some and returning home, I’ve photographed it as quickly as I could but the flowers wilted and turned even more raggedy very quickly. Consulting flower books and internet images, it becomes apparent that flax can vary considerably as to the shade of blue and as to the shape of the petals but one thing that the entries do agree upon is that the flower should have 5 petals. And that’s where I have problems as the flower is so ragged it is hard to tell, even if you try to pull the individual petals away from the calyx (?I think) with a pair of tweezers. 

Individual flower – of flax?

Unfortunately, my well-informed farmer/church warden says he’s not very up on wild flowers, but my point is it may not be a wild flower but a cultivated flower. I think he was particularly disparaging as the soil round here isn’t really ideal for flax growing which prefers more fertile, nutrient rich earth. Well, I was just beginning to think the fantasist in me was taking over and that my wish that I should be surrounded by nascent fields of emerging blue flax was becoming mother to the thought. Then last week, we were enjoying the vicarious privations of life on ‘Wartime Farm’ on BBC2 when we learned that during the Second World War many  farmers were encouraged to grow flax by the Ministry of Agriculture in order to provide things like webbing for parachutes. And, when you think about it webbing is just the sort of word that in itself conjures up all sorts of war time images – uniform belts, rucksacks, harnesses,  gun holsters,  straps of every kind, sturdy camouflage nets, seats where rushes and reeds aren’t available, blanco covered gaiters, hat bands and of course, ropes. Most of these things very rarely raise their heads above the war time horizon and I think it is only on the vary rare occasion that I have so much as uttered the word ‘webbing’, let alone given it much serious thought. So, my latest ruminations make me wonder whether flax was grown during the war on some of the lower lying, more fertile land nearer the Thames. Although the fields would have returned to the more usual crops after the war there may have remained pockets of flax at the edges of fields and at the bottom of hedges. The odd bit of flax could have flourished and its seed could well have been dispersed by the wheels of passing traffic and found road verges an ideal site for germination. I would love to find out if there is any truth to my speculations. Meanwhile, in summer, I shall continue to enjoy the splashes of intense blue which brighten my bus journey to and from work.

This is my latest piece of embroidery on linen, made as a present for a little girl baptised in the village church by my husband 3 weeks ago (I’m always late with these things). The church was full of family, friends and villagers and the weather was uncharacteristically on the side of a baby dressed in her finest christening best who was about to have water poured all over her head several times. Excellent baby made not a peep but smiled throughout. The instant coffee was rather a let down considering the slabs of the most chocolatey of brownies and cookies the size of small frisbies (made by the family) but our usual 2 giant cafetières would have baulked at serving more than 50 people. Celebrations and more good food then continued back at the parents’ house and we all made a note of the splendid marquee, a thing of beauty with its wooden supports and white spider’s web of guy ropes, the envied possession of a guest from a neighbouring village. (We have had so many weddings and christenings in the village recently, that most of us have become marquée connoisseurs and can talk for several minutes, although reaching no discernible conclusion, on the relative merits of the metal-framed version  to the pile-driven wooden poled variety.)

Interestingly, an early version of the Sleeping Beauty story, ‘Sun, Moon and Talia’ by Giambattista Basili, which was reworked into the story we know today by Perrault, involves the newly born child having her horoscope read and the prediction made that she will have her life endangered by a sharpe sliver of flax. Flax is banned from the land but, as with the more familiar telling, the adolescent girl comes upon a forgotten spinner, pricks her finger and falls into a deep sleep. She is placed in her father’s country house where she is discovered by the king who is so moved by her beauty that he sleeps with her and causes her to conceive twins – Sun and Moon. This version of the story gets  much darker  at this point for the king leaves her and she gives birth,  alone and still unconscious, to her two children. The boy child,  seeking to suckle from her breast,  sucks her finger instead, removes the sliver of flax and causes her to wake up. The king returns  briefly to Talia but is unable to break with his life in the palace with his queen. During broken nights, nightmares reveal his secret to the queen and she, with a great deal of Snow White’s stepmother about her, plots Talia’s and the twins’ demise. Talia is saved, lambs replace babies in the palace stewpot and the wicked queen gets her due punishment. The cook tells the king how she has saved Moon and Sun. Talia becomes the new queen and Sun and Moon live on.