Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Sweet Pea embroidered T shirt for a 4 year old (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

One busy week of lots of sitting and sewing passed into another equally busy week though this time it was more physically active with no time for sewing and little more than a twitch of the knitting needles.

Once up in the morning Daughter No 1 settles into position on the kitchen sofa with the surgically upholstered offending limb resting on a kitchen chair. It all looks uncomfortable in the extreme but there is work to be done and she gets on with doing it come what may – whether the occasional curious cat, friendly though overly physical children or your mother asking where the cheese grater/colander/vase for the latest delivery of flowers might be. “It’s all right, I’m on mute” is sweet to the ears as saucepan lids clatter on the the cooker from the too full shelf above. With this injury any attempt to walk is difficult and stressful and though she manages coming down stairs with 2 crutches well enough, albeit noisily as the crutches catch the part of the stair without carpet, getting upstairs is a completely different matter and usually done on the bottom. It’s unnerving to see her coming into the kitchen backwards with a bottom shuffle until she hits the sofa when she can haul herself up – usually with a sigh and a very weary look. Fortunately she has top class pelvic floor muscles and doesn’t have to rush to the loo every five minutes. To help our invalid, I do what any mother would do and feed her with as much deliciousness as I can source.

Embroidered sweet pea on a T shirt for a 4 year old (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

I think it was just after the dear daughter had just said how glad she was that I was there that I was overcome by a surge of unaccustomed zeal and decided to clean and sort out the open shelves above the kitchen cupboards. I’d previously given the semi recumbent invalid the little set of Ikea steps as a handy table, so rather than take them away from her I drew up a kitchen chair and hoicked myself up on to that, noting to myself how it wasn’t an altogether sensible thing to do. Up and down I went several times. A brief interlude for more newspaper reading followed. The Lloyd Loom chair by the window was comfortable and I could enjoy the plants in the little front garden. White and blue hydrangeas are flowering side by side. The blue hydrangea fills a giant terracotta pot and is Daughter No I’s peak gardening achievement. For years she’s been treating the earth in the pot with a soil acidifier to lower its ph and this year it’s been a success. People who pass, comment on its loveliness. Suddenly realising it was time to leave to pick up my grandson from school I made a move to get up … but found myself immobile and with a sharp pain in my lower back whichever way I tried to move. It soon became apparent I was not going to be fetching anyone from school and possibly not going anywhere in the near future.

Embroidered sweet pea (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Daughter No 1 looked worried. I looked worried. Somehow I made it to my bedroom, rubbed in Ibuprofen gel and managed to get into a comfortable position. I slept. At some point the son-in-law appeared with a mug of hot milk and collagen (as directed by Daughter No 1) and then at some other point I managed to way lay him to switch off the light. Miraculously I awoke the next morning much improved – still rickety and with a niggly pain but nothing too dreadful. Phew. I think we were all contemplating the utter impossibility of a summer with two invalids and no discernible backup. Having told my husband he’d have to come to London to take me back to Cheltenham (for two days of frequent back massage) I was so happy to cancel the first part of that instruction and to be able to take up my own suitcase and walk – well, take the train home. I shall return on Monday. Blissfully, I’d booked my seat and as GWR only permits one person in every two seats, the journey home was relaxing and, wonderful to relate, the day remained light for the whole journey. From the train the countryside was resplendent in sharp green shot through and lace edged with silver and white  – Ox eye daisies, frothy Queen Anne’s Lace, white campion and elder flower flowers. I wanted to read but the lure of the view from the window was too great.

Ipsden altar frontal: sweet pea (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

The smallest person wearing her sweet pea T shirt (with pyjama bottoms – as you do when granny wants a photograph!)

Well life is a conundrum. You spend nearly 18 months tucked away in your own home with just the daily hour of exercise to take you into the wide world and then suddenly there’s a rent in the fabric of life and it’s all stations go. Kind friends from Ipsden drove over the Cotswolds to Cheltenham, swooped us into their capacious vehicle and took us into the bosom of their home to complete work on the quilt. For most of our home confinement the altar frontal had lain on our spare bed carefully folded as in its entirety it would easily cover two double beds placed side to side. When daughter No 2 came to stay, an origami of further folding with bubblewrap between the layers to prevent creasing reduced the quilt’s bulk to a package which could fit on top of our wardrobe where, swathed in an old linen sheet it remained almost invisible. And where it almost stayed, so invisible it was. It was only when our gallant chauffeur was loading his car with our luggage that he paused, looked quizzically at a hand held steamer and set my thoughts in motion. The steamer was for the quilt … the quilt … the quilt …then where was the quilt? Still on top of the wardrobe!!!  Only now, a week later is it amusingly to look back on but it’s still dreadful to contemplate how very near we were to arriving at our friends’ house while the very raison d’être for our visit languished undisturbed in its domestic eyrie.

Strips of fabric for binding the quilt

The next few days were all a bit Rumpelstiltskinish, if you don’t count good company, fine food, a bed of unsurpassed comfort and a house with some of the finest views in South Oxfordshire. Settled in the Ping Pong Room rather than confined in a tower, at times my mission nevertheless felt not a million miles away from trying to spin gold out of base straw, especially where the straw was as long as a piece of string. The quilt is so huge, it was quite unwieldy to handle and even a comparatively simple task like binding the edge became a battle between woman and an object which though insentient clearly had a will of its own. Machining together 12 centimetre blocks for the border, then machining border to quilt and zig zagging the raw edge took three refillings of the bottom spool of my sewing machine and a heck of a lot of contemplating of that little machine needle as it bobbed up and down on what seemed an interminable path.  I was going to turn the binding and then stitch it by machine but I just couldn’t bear another session of pushing and shoving the fabric through the needle, especially as I wanted the stitches to be in the ditch between binding and quilt so as to be almost unseen. Instead I settled myself far more comfortably on a handy sofa  and sewed the turned edge by hand. We had been due to stay 2 days. It took 3. After 2 days, my husband went home by train. On the evening of the third day, my hosts had friends round for supper and to play Bridge. We ate together and I withdrew for the final push. The last stitch went in and weary but euphoric  I sought out the card players to share my triumph. And there they all sat not with a pack of cards in the middle, but spaced apart and each with an iPad in front of their faces – how their children would have laughed!

While I sewed, country life whirred round me. Lawns were mowed, bees were tended (disaster averted as a bee found a way into the beekeeper’s protective suit), eggs were collected, plants were put into the earth, people went off to ride horses and others came to play tennis. Dogs barked at the red Royal Mail van, muntjac barked their unmelodious cry somewhere nearby, while above the red kites circled and mewed (one having nested in an oak just up from the tennis court). Roses of every shade peeped in through windows and around doors while those most insignificant of blossoms on the 13 lollipop lime trees lining the drive worked overtime to scent the air with unbottleable perfection. I’ve never noticed whitebeam trees before and though past flowering, I’ve quite fallen in love with them. I shall  not forget finishing the quilt on such a splendid June day.

Having finished the quilt at night, I left the next morning, so as yet there are no photographs to mark a task completed. These will come later. Home and a few days to gather myself together and then I came to London. Daughter No 1 has torn her Achilles tendon playing tennis. It’s a problematic injury as there’s no plaster cast just a very large boot to hold the foot in a pointy toed position which is presumably the best way to help the severed fibres grow towards each other. After a few weeks as healing occurs the angle of the foot will be changed. She’s working from home for goodness knows how long but in the interest of getting mended as quickly as possible I want to be with her and help keep the leg rested as much as possible. It’s so easy to discover you’ve left your phone on the top floor of a 4 storey house when you’ve just settled with your leg comfortable in the kitchen, 3 floors below. Working as spokeswoman for the British Government who are hosting COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Glasgow later this year, she’s having Zoom meetings with people sitting in all sorts of elegant and glamorous places. (One of her fellow zoomers sat throughout a meeting with a jackdaw sitting on his shoulder! ) Slumped awkwardly on her kitchen sofa with a background of kettles boiling, water gushing from taps into a stainless steel sink and cats mewing to be fed or let out, she soldiers on.

Altar Frontal as seen at the quilters before binding added