Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Reiss jumper with two colour darning (plus my Jigsaw scarf with darned moth hole)

A year ago we first entered lockdown and began to understand the reality of living with a pandemic.

This week, just the other side of Cheltenham, the annual Horse Racing Festival is in full swing – that is for horses, riders and support staff but without a single spectator. Last year the organisers were hauled over the coals for letting the racing go ahead and for the subsequent possible seeding of  Covid all over the country as people came together in crowded stands and then returned home – many on crowded trains. This year, the police, wary at having the finger of blame pointed at them for lack of public order, have even closed off an entire hill to prevent crowds gathering. Cleeve Hill is the highest point in the Cotswolds and rises above the racecourse snug in its own natural amphitheatre.  No more than just a good pair of binoculars away, the hill  is obviously quite a tempting destination for a thwarted racegoer –  or thousands of racegoers which is where the problem would come as such gatherings are still against the law, not to mention common sense.

Pink Reiss jumper with darned patches on arm

Our self imposed lockdown had started a week earlier. Tickets for Sunday 15 March for Fascinating Aida at the Town Hall had been burning a little hole in my brain. I’d been looking forward to the show but was already wary of reports of escalating infections. Fortuitously, the friend I’d asked to come along is married to a retired professor of biological sciences, so we put our dilemma to him. ‘Don’t go’, he said succinctly. So we didn’t.  Further, impressed by his clarity, David and I tucked up tight right there and then.

Toast jumper with darned elbow (plus invisible darn in middle of Fair Isle)

Last Sunday was Mothering Sunday and all the more enjoyable for each of my children getting in touch. A phone call from the London household left one 3 year old thoroughly confused as she buzzed busy as a nectar hunting insect over to the phone to wish ‘Happy Mother’s Day Granny Mary”  before bustling off to some more interesting flower – but before she flew away she just caught me saying “It isn’t Mother’s Day … it’s”. The damage was done. “Granny Mary says it’s not Mother’s Day”, she chanted repeatedly and somewhat affrontedly in that way small children have when they feel they’ve been lured into believing something now shown not to be true. Meanwhile the adults in the London house rolled their eyes and no doubt exchanged arch looks at each other. “I knew mum would say that,” Daughter No 3 interjected as they tried to recall the dancing nymph for an explanation. In defence of my pedantry, I am married to an Anglican priest for whom such things matter (For the difference between Mothering Sunday and Mother’s Day see * below).

Toast jumper – close up of darned sleeve

Later in the day our next door neighbour and their 2 girls surprised us with two little bags of homemade baking. One bag contained two star shaped scones and the other one had 3 little biscuits in the shape of flowers with stem and leaves – all iced beautifully in different colours – I should have photographed them!

Too much close work has led to a bit of deterioration of my sight, so it was off to be tested for new lenses. Had a fascinating discussion with our excellent optician as we got round to talking about research that indicates young children need to spend plenty of time playing outside because it helps prevent short sightedness. He explained a bit of the science behind this but then surprised me by saying it had recently possible to treat incipient short sightedness by the use of special contact lenses which, worn at night,  re-shape the lens and even reverse myopia. He is already treating children in this way. Fascinating!

Mend and Patch by Kerstin Neumüller (pub. Pavilion 2018)

Meanwhile it’s been a bit of a mending and altering week. Daughter No 1 sent a bagful of holey knitwear which I have been working through as best I can. Both jumpers shown (the pink one is Reiss, the oatmeal one is Toast) would not have been cheap but seem to be made of a poor quality yarn – part a loose slightly fluffy yarn spun around a thin thread of what is probably an artificial fibre, a combination that doesn’t wear well and is a bit of a devil for the mender. Even worse, the pink jumper seems to have suffered a chemical attack that has eaten away the pink yarn to reveal a white plastic thread. Having no pink of the right colour I opted for one bright pink thread woven with a pale mauve one. Oh well, Daughter No 1 will get a bit more wear out of them both, but really, you don’t always get what you think you’re paying for. Other jumpers I’ve mended are too dark to show which is a shame because one jumper I mended with tiny moth holes has worked out rather well.

JGF monogram – new border

I decided the border on the monogram done for my son-in-law was too wide and clunky, so I re-did that too.

JGF monogram – old border

*A brief note on Mothering Sunday and Mother’s Day. Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent, was traditionally the day families made a special outing together to the mother church or cathedral for a service of dedication. The day became even more important in Victorian times as people in service in big houses and those serving apprenticeships in the towns were given a day off to go back to see their own families and to go to church with them. Young women often went home bearing Simnel Cakes and flowers picked from the hedgerow.

Mother’s Day was the inspiration  of Ann Jarvis of Philadelphia who, grief stricken by the death of her own mother, campaigned for a day to be allocated for the celebration of mothers. This falls on the second Sunday in May.

Rhinoceros in Blackwork after a woodcut of 1515 by Dürer (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

I’ve always been much taken by the idea that Tennyson was “ The man who had the extraordinary literary luck to write In Memoriam before Queen Victoria got bereaved and needed it.” (see blog Lynn Truss’s book ‘Tennyson’s Gift’ – a definite for the boudoir shelf and I’m pretty sure the funniest book I’ve ever read.) Well, similarly, Philip Hoare’s ‘Albert and the Whale’ is just the book I needed, before I realised I needed it when I set about embroidering Dürer’s wood cut of a rhinoceros for Daughter No 3’s Christmas present (for 2020).

Detail of Rhinoceros in Blackwork after a woodcut of 1515 by Dürer (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

I finished the embroidery a few weeks ago and almost immediately read a positively Louis XVI golden sunburst of a review of Philip Hoare’s book by Rachel Cambell-Johnston in The Times of 28 February. A brief phone call to our wonderful independent local bookshop, The Suffolk Anthology, had the book ready for collection a few days later (complete with a stamp on my Suffolk Anthology Loyalty Card which is now full and means £10 off my next book purchase there! Goody! ). And now, here I am much better equipped to write a blog post on both Dürer and his rhinoceros woodcut.

Detail of Rhinoceros in Blackwork after a woodcut of 1515 by Dürer (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Tales of strange beasts, both real – like giant sea mammals, the whales, narwhals, etc  – and imaginary, set Dürer’s heart racing. The whale of the title of Hoare’s book had caused much consternation when it washed up on the westernmost reaches of watery Zeeland. Dürer, determined to see it, and self challenged to depict it, set about an adventure, trekking through soggy, rain-soaked landscapes and battling with storms at sea to witness for himself the dead, beached creature. All in vain, he got there too late – a voracious tide had taken a grip of the giant corpse and wrestled it back out to sea. Dürer never did see a whale but he returned home, imagination newly fired up – bereft of the reality of the whale but alive to the possibilities of what was out there.  Fascinated equally by the myths and legends of the Medieval world he was rooted in and the new science and discoveries of the future – “Janus-faced Dürer” as Rachel Campbell-Johnston calls him.

Dürer’s Rhinoceros

In 1515 Europe was excited by the first rhinoceros to set foot on European shores since Roman times. Named Ganda, from its name in Gujarati, it was a present from the Sultan of Cambaia in NW India to the Portuguese ambassador who didn’t seem to know quite what to do with such a gift, so sent it on a journey of 120 days half way around the world (via the Cape of Good Hope) to his king, Manuel I, in Portugal. Manuel himself had no better idea of what to do with Ganda and instead of letting the creature BE and DO nothing he organised a fight between Ganda and a young elephant from his menagerie, ostensibly to test Pliny the Elder’s assertion that the elephant and the rhinoceros are natural enemies. This test was a failure as the elephant, surprised by the strangeness of Ganda emerging from under a mound of carpets and unused to the noise of the crowd, fled before fighting could begin (hooray!). Still perplexed by his strange present, Manuel  did what many of us do with unwanted Christmas bounty and re-gifted it. Manuel liked to send very special presents to the Pope, Leo X, to keep him  sweet and to distract him from thoughts of all those ‘new’ lands in SE Asia ‘discovered’ by Portugal. Now, the previous year Manuel had sent the Pope a white elephant, which had gone down very well.  Perhaps Ganda would continue that winning streak, so back on a boat the beast went.  Unfortunately, there was a terrible storm at sea and the rhinoceros, chained and shackled to the deck, went down with the boat.  Once again, Dürer had missed his beast.

Philip Hoare: Albert & the Whale (pub. 4th Estate 2021)

Nuremburg, Dürer’s home town, had trading agents in Lisbon when Ganda arrived and they sent reports home. One newsletter included a sketch of the beast and from this Dürer made a pen and ink drawing.  Flying in the face of the facts and with his head full of stories from Aristotle and the C13th monk Albertus, he made a creature, in all except  bodily shape, almost completely a thing  of his own imagination. Yet, on the back of the woodcut Dürer wrote the following untruth, “This is an accurate representation. It is the colour of a speckled tortoise and is almost entirely covered by thick scales. It is the size of an elephant but has shorter legs and is almost invulnerable. It has a strong pointed horn on the end of its nose which it sharpens on stone…” In truth it was no accurate depiction. Indian rhinos do have folds of skin that from a distance look like discrete plates of thickened skin and some rhinos have wart like bumps but neither features are pronounced to the point of resembling armour, metalworked designs nor scales. It is also possible that poor Ganda may have suffered from skin imperfections caused by an inadequate diet or insufficient exercise during those 120 days at sea but no skin imperfection would look quite so regular or artistic. No,  the conclusion is as irresistible as the creativity Dürer put into his drawing – such ornamentation was born of his imagination not reality. And inaccuracy was no obstacle to publication. Not only was Dürer’s image the go to one for many eminent naturalists’ texts but, until the 1930s the image also appeared in school textbooks in Germany as a true likeness!

Rhinoceros in Blackwork after a woodcut of 1515 by Dürer (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

The fact is we all love the image – and perhaps even wish rhinoceroses looked a bit more like it. Just as Dürer departed from the sketch sent by a Nuremburg trader, so I have departed from Dürer’s woodcut – though more out of necessity than imagination in my case.

Rhino (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

An embroidery of a C16th woodcut of a rhinoceros isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but I’m quite sure it’s a good present for Daughter No 2 because when I did these embroideries of rhinos here,  (and also above and below) she reminded me that she still expected an embroidery of Dürer’s beast as well. What surprised me was how much I really enjoyed sewing it – in just black thread and with a lot of leeway as to Dürer’s decorative detail. The whole thing was greatly helped by the use of Magic Paper which not only enables you to draw in pencil (on the Magic Paper which disappears when washed) but which also acts as a stabiliser while embroidering, so there’s no puckering and no need to use a hoop (which I dislike). Embroidery is made even easier because the ‘fabric’ of the Magic Paper is more tightly ‘woven’ and smoother than most of the linens I’ve been embroidering on, so the resulting embroidered line is more true to the drawing than it would be if embroidering directly on to slightly knobbly, textured linen.  I love it – and so I won’t run out soon (it comes from DMC in France), my husband bought 15 packets (two A5 sheets per packet).

Rhinoceros (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Philip Hoare’s book, a tour de force is more that a biography of Dürer, being an eclectic mix of literary sleuthing, historical and contemporary travel writing and references to more erudite texts than I can absorb at one reading. It is also a personal memoir of the writer, his interests and even his ailments. It reminds me of W.G.Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and also of Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life and I know from experience that you either like this genre of books or you don’t – I am enjoying it but I am finding some of the lines of thinking in Hoare’s book a little difficult to follow –  perhaps reading in bed just before sleep isn’t the best place for books like this! As with Patchwork. A Life Amongst Clothes by Claire Wilcox, mentioned a few weeks ago I wonder whether this sort of writing hasn’t become a bit too precious and inscrutable. I would prefer to find the author appear more clearly in their writing so that I don’t have to constantly keep going back in the book to make sure I haven’t missed some vital detail that makes everything else clear and fall into place. I wonder what others think.