Altar frontal for Ipsden Ch. Oxon: lily of the valley (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

A few days of comparative calm after the stress of moving my photos to an external hard drive has been creatively productive – though I never really know whether calm leads to more embroidery or whether it’s the act of embroidering that soothes the restless spirit and lowers the blood pressure. Whichever it is, the good thing is that I find I’ve finished quite a few more flowers for the altar frontal (which I shall drip feed to the blog) and I think it brings the total finished to about 20, with perhaps another 10 to go. I must take advantage of a lull in calls on my time and arrange for the sewing bees to start up again.

Altar frontal for Ipsden Ch. Oxon: lily of the valley (hand embroidered by Mary Addison) 

Lily of the valley and Dior’s perfume Diorissimo come to my mind like tick follows tock. I only ever had just one bottle in the year before I went to university but now the very sight of the flower summons up the smell. Owning a bottle made me feel very sophisticated, not least because the black and white hound’s tooth check label and box looked very chic  – the box is no longer the same and rather like the perfume itself is now just a little bit more bland and less memorable.

Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez: Perfume: The Guide  (a great little present for anyone who loves perfumes) call Diorissimo the archtypal muguet. Informed and hyperbolic, their prose continues in a manner not unlike sticking a lollipop in sherbert dip…

Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez: Perfume: The Guide

“Bear in mind that no extract can be obtained from the natural flowers, so all muguet are reconstructions. The original 1956 Dioissimo established Edmond Roudnitska as the Mozart of postwar French perfumery. And Diorissmo was a truly Mozartian fragrance, with a catchy, jaunty presto tune like the overture to the Marriage of Figaro. How Roudnitska achieved it is the  stuff of legend. In the garden of his house in Cabris, near Grasse, he planted lily of the valley and used it for reference. The idea of Roudnitska on all fours among the little white bells, a smelling strip in hand is delightful. A fundamentally important material to the original accord was hydroxycitronellal, one of a tiny number of hydroxyaldehydes in perfumery, which has much of the soapy, floral whiteness of muguet. Hydroxy, as it is familiarly called, is now restricted in use, though still present in the “list of allergens” on the present Diorissimo packaging. Today’s Diorissimo is unquestionably different from the older version, though still a thing of great beauty. The best way to describe it, it seems to me, is as the voice if a great soprano close to retirement. The melody, the timbre are there, but some of the high notes are a little forced and have lost the effortless soaring, the liquid fluency of old. Up close, this thing shouts a little. But it has tremendous radiance and at a distance still works fine as likely the most distinctive fragrance of all time. “

And to think, some people regard perfume as just a nice smell!