Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Baseball jacket in Baby Cashmerino (from Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino Bk 4)

Being confined to quarters has been a great plus on the embroidery front. I’ve finished a cushion for the last couple my husband married. As that event was two years into full retirement there will probably be no more weddings, so I threw myself into the embroidery for this one and had a really enjoyable time. I have now to make it into a cushion and will blog about it then. I also started out on whitework letter P but was stopped in my tracks by finding my stock of embroidery thread in the right shade of white was diminished to the point of invisibility. Sourcing a new supply hasn’t been easy.

Fair Isle samples worked from a design in Mary Jane Mucklestone’s ‘ 200 Fair Isle Designs’

I use  4 different white threads. To me there are fine differences.

DMC B5200  = snow white   = Anchor 01 (though the latter has a slight pearl sheen that I love)

DMC 3865     = winter white =  Anchor 02 (though 3865 is more yellow)

DMC Blanc  also   =  Anchor 02  (though Blanc is less yellow)

Anchor WHITE with no number is produced by and for the Indian market and seems a brighter white

Sometimes I mix up these whites on the same piece to give subtleties of shading, but more often for bigger pieces like cushions, I just use one shade. I admit to having favourites, though my faithfulness can shift – unfortunately more like transient affairs than  serial monogamy!

Detail: Baseball jacket in Baby Cashmerino (from Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino Bk 4)

Through a personal foible, I don’t like to pay online but prefer to ring up with an order. Right now, many of the larger firms have closed their phone lines and will only deal with online orders. I could get my husband to order but that’s selfish of me. After a bit of a wasted morning on April 1, I finally hit upon a phone answered very efficiently by Hobbycraft who took an order for 30 skeins of DMC Blanc @ 99p per skein, due to be delivered today (they had no stock in the other shades). Anchor 01 & 02 (83p per skein) I tracked down to Cross Stitch Workshop whose owner, Jane, rang me back twice after our initial phone calls found each of us busy elsewhere. It was from Jane that I learned that Anchor WHITE was a shade on the colour card available in India whose range is much reduced compared to that we’re used to in Europe. Online this white is highly available, though without any explanation of  lack of the usual colour number. I had bought a box myself which is why I can compare shades. I suspect the bright white works well in Indian sunshine but for me it’s just a bit too sharp. I shall use it but I don’t love it. Jane and I had a lovely chat, she popped 20 skeins of each white in the post and they arrived this morning. I love these sewing and knitting women running efficient little businesses scattered across the UK. Since Debbie Bliss piled all her eggs into Lovecrafts (no phone orders and not at all good on embroidery threads which  I think they’ve only just got into) I’ve sourced her Baby Cashmerino yarn from several of these independent sellers who are unfailingly helpful, informative and with a real understanding of their customers’ needs. Baby Cashmerino will soon dry up from these sources and then I shall have to use Lovecrafts or find a new yarn (and patterns – sob, sob.). If one good thing comes out of this crisis I hope it is an appreciation and  flourishing of the small specialist suppliers who answer the phone, distribute gems of information and are generally willing to debate the problems of the world. Small is very beautiful.

Detail of collar: Baseball jacket in Baby Cashmerino (from Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino Bk 4)

Meanwhile here is my fourth Debbie Bliss Baseball jacket which the family love. The pattern from Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino  Bk No 4. At first I was disappointed that the pattern called for poppers not buttons and I thought the next one I made I would make the button band a bit wider and add buttonholes. However, feedback for poppers was good as once popped they seem to stay popped while the buttons usually wriggled out of the buttonholes. I still prefer buttonholes but decided to make an exception for this pattern. My only reservation about this pattern is that size 3-4 year old has come up very big. Better that way than too small but if I’d have known this I might have made it for other children who by now really are too small for it! The colour is Clematis (093) which is very similar to Lilac (010) in the same yarn. I wish I had always made a note of the yarn colour on my blog as colours disappear from the online charts and even then are very difficult to tell apart. (Clematis is indeed no longer on the Lovecrafts Colour Chart.)

Baseball jacket No 1 

Baseball Jacket No 2 

Baseball Jacket No 3

Addendum Sunday 5 April:  I’ve just read an article set on one side from a recent Sunday Times colour supplement – just as the most recent Sunday Times is thudding on to the hall floor! Of course, I’d set it to one side without the title page but basically it’s an interview with Dr Sharon Moalem, a Canadian doctor who has a theory about the ways in which women are genetically different, even tougher  (his word not mine) than men, something which may well come from the benefit of the genes that appear on the fourth arm of the X chromosome, for example,  “Women tend to have better colour vision than men and … some are tetrachromatic, which means they may see up to 100 million colours, not the one million most men struggle by on.”        (Dr Sharon Moalem’s book: ‘The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women’.)

Whitework O for orchid (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

We are taking not going out very seriously. My last day actually going anywhere was on Monday when I took 2 parcels to the local sub post office (one parcel of bedlinen for the family in London and the other with last week’s little Fair Isle jumper), relieved to be doing something constructive. Since then I try to run on the spot for a minute every hour which is possibly useless and pathetic and I aim do more hoovering – always necessary as our fluffy black cat trails loose fur everywhere. My husband, however, goes out every day for a walk or to shop and has odd random greetings with people he doesn’t know across the width of the road as fellow intrepid but rule following individuals shout cheery good mornings or offer random information about things like the fact that Marks and Spencers are empty but the shelves are full (Tuesday, not Wednesday).

Whitework O for orchid (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

The self isolators in London are coming to the end of their confinement and as yet no one else seems to have been made ill by whatever it was that the smallest person had. For a while household numbers were swollen by another relative who felt unwell and understandably very panicky on her own with just her two children. This was great for the small person as his cousins, who he loves to be with anyway, taught him how to play chess. It was, however, quite difficult for the family as self isolating means no helpful cleaner (or granny) to clean all those loos and clear up all the pots and pans. Meanwhile Daughter No 2 arrived back from Iraq, via time in Cambodia and had to spend her first night in a hotel and a the next few days with a friend elsewhere due her sister’s household’s battened down hatches. Since then, a kind neighbour, between tenants for the house next door and with no prospect of a new let for some time, has said daughter No 2 can live there. Daughter No 1 is tiger mothering the small person whose times tables already take in part of the 13 x table. Together they have also been working on Daughter No 1’s series of children’s stories involving a band of superheroes riding – and even turning – the tides of history. The small person regularly runs 4k with his mum at the same time as keeping up a detailed analysis of the books he’s currently reading/being read/writing, including plot intricacies (and deficiencies), character assessment and scene setting. “Don’t you think running and talking should be an Olympic sport mum?” On top of all that, 7 cats – 6 kittens, now half mum’s size, occupy the playroom, while kitten mum’s brother seeks maximum human comfort in all this confusion. In Cheltenham, I have now washed everything that needed washing (sofa arm caps, not yet the whole sofa covers – not warm enough) and feel it’s such a shame I can’t be more helpful to those in London.

Sketches for O for orchid

When Rosemary and Peter Williams came to discuss making my replacement wedding ring, they brought along with them a present of a little potted orchid, so O is for orchid in my whitework alphabet. We take these exotic flowers for granted now since clever people worked out how to propagate them cheaply and in their trillions and it’s easy to forget that not long ago they would have been seen only  rarely and then in specialist glass houses in horticultural gardens or in the conservatories of the more eccentric botanists. Very few would have seen them in the wild.

Susan Orlean “The Orchid Thief”

To get a feeling for the power of orchid love at a time before they became commonplace on garage forecourts, get a copy of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (1998). The story began in 1994 when a group of Seminole native americans and a man called John Laroche were arrested for poaching rare orchids in the Fukahatchee Strand State Reserve in Florida. Susan Orlean was at first just interested in the crime but as she delved into what had happened she herself became fascinated to the point of obsession by orchids in general, by an orchid known as the ghost, in particular and by the unique individual John Laroche who lived a marginal life, running a plant nursery on the Seminole reservation near Miami. For two years she was Laroche’s shadow and dived into the swamps and the sub culture of orchid fanatics in equal measure. The New Yorker describes Orlean’s strange companion as a man, moral and immoral in equal measure, gripped by sequential natural history passions which “boil up quickly an end abruptly like tornadoes”. Laroche began orchid hunting in the swamps as a child with his mother and though other passions came and went, the orchid love rumbled on beneath, obsessing not on what he’d call corsage orchids but in the rare and endangered ones – the strange looking and often not even vaguely lovely ones. The ghost stood out for being the only pretty orchid in the swamp and as such it was hunted like a wild animal, compared to which it was equally elusive. Laroche knew where to find it but his main mission was to stamp out the illegal trade it engendered. The paradox was that in trying to protect the ghost, Laroche and the Seminoles were accused of poaching it. A film with title Adaptation of 2002 had Meryl Streep as Orlean and I have to say I didn’t care for it. Nor did Orlean to begin with although she later came to love it, especially in its depiction of obsession and in its rounding out of the book’s more subtle undertones of longing and disappointment. Perhaps I’ll watch it again. I’d like to read the book again too, but when the film came out, it contaminated the book for me and I sent it to charity.

Tom Hart Dyke & Paul Winder “The Cloud Garden”

A couple of years after Orlean’s book, the newspapers were full of another adventure involving orchid hunting. In 2000, plant hunter Tom Hart Dyke and his back packing companion, Paul Winder, were kidnapped by FARC guerrillas in the Darien Gap between Panama and  Colombia –  “waltzing round the jungle like a school trip gone wrong”.*

Tom had discovered orchids when he was nine and from there on he was hooked, “I tried to count every native orchid on the golf course near my home. Four days later, I finished. I had counted 63,424.” *

Held for 9 months they were threatened with death and British officials were said to have given them up for dead. Tom occupied his mind by designing a garden in the form of a map of the world which he hoped to live to see coming to fruition in the gardens of his family home, Lullingstone Castle in Kent. He even tried to make little gardens around his kidnap site in the mountains though this irritated his captors who could understand digging and even weeding but orchid growing was beyond them and they burnt his seeds.

No ransom demands were ever issued and the pair were released just before Christmas 2000. Their book The Cloud Garden was published in 2003. The garden Hart Dyke designed in the mountains was opened in 2005 with the planting of an Agave americana just above the Darien Gap (remember his garden was in the form of a world map). “I chose it (the agave) because Paul hates orchids,” says Hart Dyke. “And because it is the spiniest and prickliest of all the plants — which was a pain to plant.” *

We may be seeing more of our own garden walls and fences than we might wish, but we can always escape with a book that makes you happy to be at home.

Whitework O for orchid (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

(*All quotes from an article in the Sunday Times July 31 2005).