I’m popping in for a brief post before we head north to relatives in Yorkshire because I have spent the last couple of days giving the embroidered shell seen in the previous post a much better destiny than ending its days as a scarcely used evening bag.

Shell embroidery with initial H,YY,A (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

My husband’s youngest son is shortly to take up the post as Head of Education for the British Council in Beijing and along with him will go his Chinese wife and their baby of 9 months. I have made the baby some embroidered vests and a knitted jacket but I suddenly realised I hadn’t embroidered her a monogram and that I had to get it done quickly if I wanted them to be able to take it with them. The shell just offered itself up as ideal in so many ways. I snipped the embroidery from the silk background, appliquéd it to linen, did a bit of extra quilting to anchor the shell to the linen, added her initials and felt very happy with the result. The shell having been quilted stands nice and proud on the linen and I padded out the initials firstly with chain stitch, then satin stitch one way followed by satin stitch in another direction, so that they too looked nice and chunky. (Sorry no time for snaps of the various stages as it was all done very quickly. The photographs of the completed piece are also not very good as I had to finish and frame it up late at night and take pictures in artificial light with strong reflections from the glass, but I think you get the idea.)

Shell embroidery with initial H,YY,A (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

The baby’s second name is Yan Yan, whose Chinese characters stand for two swallows. The baby’s father was very happy to see I’d included YY. In design terms, the YY, one slightly lower than the other work very well. I had a bit of a fantasy about the two birds being the birds on the willow pattern plate but I’m glad I didn’t mention that as a bit of research shows that the willow pattern was very much an English construct of a Chinese model. We not only tried to emulate their porcelain, their style of decoration but also made up our own ‘Chinese legend’ in which the thwarted lovers become translated into the pair of swallows (some say doves). I can’t help feeling our bad behaviour in the Opium Wars lurks somewhere around this historical corner.

On Wednesday the family met up for a goodbye lunch and a trip down the Thames to Greenwich. In some hurry we headed off to beat the tube strike on the underground and found ourselves walking past the Cutty Sark in its innovative dry dock.  A Clipper ship which brought tea from China, we were reminded that another leg of its journey took opium from India to China. In fact, I can’t find any reference to the Cutty Sark actually carrying opium, although there is no mention of the nature of the cargo on the outward to China, so I am suspicious.  Whatever the truth about this particular ship, we cannot escape the guilt of our carrying opium to China with the clear intention of causing serious addiction, opium having the unique power to balance the books and pay for the British addiction to Chinese silk, ceramic and tea. (For interesting analysis see this article from History Today, 2002 here.) My step son may have been wrong in the particular but right to remind us such shameful trading activity.

Shell embroidery with initial H,YY,A (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

This post at least more accurately reflects the colour of the embroidery. I would tone down the colour of the shell in the previous post but I am still getting used to an updated iPhoto and have exhausted myself. (I’m still sad at no longer being able to drag and drop my photos into the blog which used to make life so much easier…)