Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Striped cardigan (George and Annabel’s cardigan from Debbie Bliss’s book Eco Family, 2010)

The unusually intense heat of the beginning of this week (6 days of over 34 degrees C) has left me with little energy for getting the sewing machine out and making up the white linen cushion covers that are so near to being finished. Sweaty hands are even less good at handling embroidery threads than sewing machines, so embroidery too has been put to one side. Thank goodness for having this little cardigan in need of just its neckband, the joining of seams and the sewing on of buttons.

Striped cardigan (George and Annabel’s cardigan from Debbie Bliss’s book Eco Family, 2010)

Once again a Debbie Bliss pattern and one I’ve used before, simple and satisfying to make. I particularly like the fit of the semi set-in sleeves and the V neck is just the right height, not so low as to fall off the shoulders when fastened and not so high as to irritate at the neck. The pattern, called George and Annabel’s Cardigan from the book Eco Family, recommends DB’s Eco Baby yarn, but as the tension is the same as for her Baby Cashmerino  I could use yarn I already had. Here is another I made a couple of years ago, this one in coral with a Fair Isle band. I’m not sure about the buttons for this stripey cardigan (little stencilled flowers on coconut shell bought a couple of years ago from Ray Stitch) which I veer between loving and thinking they don’t work. I haven’t yet sewn them on.

Detail: Striped cardigan (George and Annabel’s cardigan from Debbie Bliss’s book Eco Family, 2010)

As we hunker down in our homes and real human interaction is limited I spend more and more time scouring interesting things from The Times, which thankfully is still delivered to our door by human hands at 7.20 almost precisely on a weekday. I particularly enjoy little regular unheralded columns which come with no blazing headlines or photographs and can be found in exactly the same part of the paper as they have for ever – well, for a long time. Recently I’ve noticed that Nature Notes, for years written by Derwent May is now on alternating days attributed to two other Times writers. May is now 90, so I hope he’s chosen to retire and wish him good health. I do, however, miss him. I also enjoy Paul Simons’ Weather Eye, a long thin column buried deep within the less frequented pages of the paper. Simons is always interesting and often enlightening about weather phenomena, like unusual cloud formations or the fact that Britain does have plenty of earthquakes, it’s just that they are never very big. I’ve also been following letters in the paper after a piece on August 10 by Benedict King “Good riddance to insanely expensive cathedral powers (no, “choirs” not “powers” – only just noticed this – was it me or auto-correction? Hurrumph!) I am, however,  happy to report that Times Readers are bashing King’s negativity to the boundary with intelligent and informed sweeps of counter argument and reminding us of the impact of the British choral tradition on the global music  industry, from rock and pop, to opera and classical music (not to mention cricket – sir Alastair Cook was a choral scholar at St Paul’s Cathedral!).

Debbie Bliss’s knitting pattern book Eco Family, 2010)

From the beginning of August, we wrinklies now have to pay for our TV licences, £157.50 p.a. Dutifully my husband has sent off our payment. There are many good arguments for and against and I have my suspicion collection of the fee may cost more than the BBC anticipate as there are rumbles of minor but inconveniencing civil disobediences about the matter. The Detection Van glowers over a new community now, so I was amused by the following story (possible apocryphal) in The Times Diary  of the 12th of August.  Just as a man was leaving home he was accosted by an inspector from a TV detector van asking to see his TV licence. The man said he was late for a meeting, asked them if they could return in an hour when his wife would be home and told them to tell her exactly where the TV licence was. An hour later the inspector returned and the man’s wife opened the door.  The inspector presented his credentials and asked to see her TV licence which he said he understood was “in the chest of drawers, third drawer down, in the blue folder.” The woman was stunned. “Crikey”, she said. “Those vans are really powerful aren’t they?”

Next week, there will be embroidery.

Cardigan with Fair Isle Yoke 6-9 months from Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino (pub 2001) Fair Isle design from Mary Jane Mucklestone’s ‘200 Fair Isle Designs.

Furlough – a great and generous attempt by the government to help retain jobs during the Covid-19 crisis – has led to inactive work emails and the realisation that you can no longer get in touch with lots of people you thought you knew because it had never till now seemed necessary to get their personal email as well. So it was that we took a while to discover that a friend of my husband’s who curated Fine Art at The Wilson (Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum) had had her baby – in fact she’d had a little girl a couple of months ago.  I rapidly reached for my knitting needles. Another knitting project was exactly what I needed after faffing around with odd bits of mending – replacing difficult zips in daughter No 2’s dresses before she flew off to a new job ridding Cambodia of landmines, cutting off hated handkerchief points from a new dress belonging to daughter No 1, oh yes and, how could I forget, while waiting for delivery of the linen fabric to complete my five embroidered cushion covers. (The first delivery had been sent to the wrong – and unknown – address and signed for by a name not on any of the paperwork, then negotiating the despatch of a replacement fabric had not been without its complications. Wonderful to relate, replacement linen has now arrived.)

Front yoke detail: Cardigan with Fair Isle Yoke 6-9 months from Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino (pub 2001) Fair Isle design from Mary Jane Mucklestone’s ‘200 Fair Isle Designs.

This cardigan is now my 8th using the same Debbie Bliss knitting pattern found in her book  Baby Cashmerino (pub 2002). As with my last one, I extended the Fair Isle to the whole of the yoke and once again based the design on a pattern found in Mary Jane Mugglestone’s  very useful ‘2oo Fair Isle Designs’.

Cardigan with Fair Isle Yoke 6-9 months from Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino (pub 2001) Fair Isle design from Mary Jane Mucklestone’s ‘200 Fair Isle Designs.

I write this as a new Test Match (cricket) series has begun, this time with Pakistan. We had an exciting win over  the West Indies, in the last series which only finished a scant week ago, so once again our lives are organised around the hours of play, with Test Match Special on the radio burbling on as background to domestic chores, knitting and sewing. As I clack away with my knitting needles, I like to think of the little knitted W.G.Grace figure, complete with a very splendid beard standing sentinel in the TMS commentary box. Now that cakes are no longer permitted as presents for the commentary team, it is good to know that some ingenious woman sent something knitted instead. I think of my brother enjoying the cricket, and undoubtedly being exasperated by the irrelevance of things like the knitting or the sampling of Marmite aftershave and body lotion, my image of him not a bit weaker for the fact that he’s been dead – and s0rely missed – for 3 years. For that matter I can still quite clearly see my father watching the cricket from his armchair in front of the television in our former family home (then every minute of the five days of each Test Match was shown on terrestrial television) –  and he’s been dead for nearly 20 years!

Cardigan with Fair Isle Yoke 6-9 months from Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino (pub 2001) Fair Isle design from Mary Jane Mucklestone’s ‘200 Fair Isle Designs.

But if memories are strong at the moment, memories of smells in particular are up there at the top of the list, probably because we are all extra conscious that losing one’s sense of smell is now a diagnostic sign of having Covid-19. I love perfume and most days my fingers play over my various bottles like a wine connoisseur choosing which wine to set aside for a meal. I had long forgotten Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass but it was the perfume my sister-in-law wore as a teenager and into her twenties and I suppose it has come to me on the wings of cricketing memories.  Although I adopted it too, it has always remained her perfume to me. It was my niece’s birthday last week and I had the sudden desire to buy her her mother’s former perfume (she died too early about 5 years ago)  but a bit of research revealed that gone are the wonderful bottles I remember – neither the frosted Lalique-style bottle with raised horse motifs, nor the clear glass one with dimpled sides and stems of blue grass in bright turquoise alongside the name in gold. Today’s perfume comes in an undistinguished glass bottle, tapered with rounded shoulders and silvery cap. The image of a horse’s head in trademark turquoise is actually quite good but overall it just doesn’t look nice enough for a present, so I didn’t buy it. It was also surprisingly cheap, which, superficial person that I am, put me off it further. But the thought that I will buy some is creeping upon me. I have such a desire to smell it again and compare it to that fleeting imagined aroma that comes in gentle bursts to me every now and then. If it works for me, then I’ll share it with her daughter … even though I don’t know whether she ever knew her mother use it.

Sample Fair Isle

A Philosophy lecturer at university once told the story of someone who having had an operation to give them the ability to smell for the first time, thereafter continually complained of distractions, until the doctor worked out it was his brain trying to process smells for the first time!

Design 140 from Mary Jane Mucklestone’s ‘200 Fair Isle Designs.

Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino (pub 2001)