Cushion with monogram M, leaves and feathers (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Daughter No 2 asked me to make and embroidered cushion for a colleague in her office in Vietnam where she is country director for MAG . I add this link to those of you not familiar with my blog as it is a laudable non-governmental organisation doing a fantastic job clearing landmines from areas of conflict throughout the world. MAG, the acronym for Mines Advisory Group, is also active in the training and subsequent employment of  local people to work alongside their experienced technical teams with the aim in the end of  these local employees taking over the work for themselves. I was going to apologise for boring those who may have read about this on my blog before but then I thought that that was taking politeness a step too far and that few would begrudge me giving a little bit of blog space to so worthy a cause. Lecture over.

Embroidered feather ( or is it a frond), hand embroidered on cushion with monogram M

A short deadline for getting this cushion finished and lots going on in other bits of my life meant that I didn’t have much thinking time to fiddle around with a design, so I rather threw myself into sketching the frondy, feathery plumes directly onto the linen wherever the needle took me, using just simple back stitches and french knots. The leaves and the M are in satin stitch. For the first time I decided to try grey on white and DMC 762 provided just the effect I wanted – quite silvery and not far from white, without any greenish tinge which so many greys have.

Embroidered feather/frond; hand embroidered on cushion with monogram M

Well, I finished the embroidery in good time but making up the cushion got side-tracked by family life. I’ve learned not to hurry any part of creative manufacture and fortunately my daughter’s Manchester-based line manager will be going out to Vietnam in a couple of weeks’ time, so the finished cushion will be hitching a lift with him. (Last time, he had to take wadding for a quilt – well only a baby’s quilt, so not too bulky and I think the office have got used to being haberdashery couriers by now.)

Embroidered feather (hand embroidered on cushion with monogram M

Now I have a bit more time at my disposal, I’m wondering whether to make this into a little round cushion and daughter No 2 then started to get excited about filling it with lavender. Mother-of-pearl buttons are apparently non negotiable essentials (particularly as she scoured all the markets in Hanoi for them to bring home to me and I now have several plump bags of pearly swag crying out to be used), so no short cuts in that direction. I have no spare time until the weekend, I  shall blog a picture of the finished item then.

Hand embroidered cushion: detail of monogram M