Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Whitework alphabet: N for nautilus (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Nautilus shells are things of great beauty but although I’ve borrowed the form of the shell a few times for embroidery, I’ve never thought about the animal housed in such gorgeous architecture. This time, my whitework N for nautilus has the whole animal – head, with prominent eye and some of the up to 90 tentacles. In spite of the arresting – and even intimidating –  appearance of the eye it functions little better than a pin hole camera and, with no solid lens, its vision is pretty poor. Mathematicians love the shell as much as designers for it’s about the best natural example of a logarithmic spiral exemplifying the Fibonacci series that you can meet  in nature (blogged about here with diagrams if you’re interested!) And with that I dried up, unable to think of anything more on the subject, until … I made the exciting discovery that a C19th uneducated embroidress turned naturalist had unlocked the secrets of the so-called paper nautilus.

Whitework alphabet N for nautilus (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

The first thing to say is that the nautilus, shell and animal, is not to be confused with the so-called paper nautilus. Similar shells house very different animals, both of the class Cephalopoda, but the paper nautilus is an octopus while the nautilus is, well, a nautilus. Further, the shell of the paper nautilus, thinner, more transparent (reminiscent of pleated tissue paper or Fortuny’s finely crinkled Delphos gown), is not strictly a shell  (the animal doesn’t live in it and doesn’t rely on it for protection) but an egg case which the female starts making early on in life and then carries with her ever after. Initially, naturalists thought that the paper nautilus animal adopted shells much like the hermit crab, but, gloriously, in the early C19th, an uneducated French woman, proved otherwise. Jeanne Vilepreux-Power, daughter of a shoe maker, and a skilled seamstress and embroidress  (she’d embroidered the wedding dress of an Italian princess), met and married an Englishman in Paris and settled in Messina in Sicily.  Here, with more leisure and presumably no need to work for a living, she set about studying the paper nautilus.

Whitework alphabet N for nautilus (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

To begin with Jeanne determined that she would study the animals alive and to this end she experimented with various models of simple aquariums, including ones small enough for the domestic study while others, bigger, floated in the sea, anchored to the sea bed. Though Philip Gosse is credited with popularising aquariums, Jeanne is usually credited with inventing the first properly functioning one in 1832. From then on, she could watch young nautili develop and prove that they grew their own shells. She also observed that what looked like just another suckered arm in the egg case was in fact the diminutive male. Further evidence that the shells were of their own making came when she watched adult females mending damage to the shells, using secretions of calcite from specialised membranes on two of the many arms.

Drawing for whitework alphabet N for nautilus (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Jeanne met much opposition from the scientific community although she was fortunate enough to be championed by the eminent naturalist Richard Owen who challenged anyone questioning her findings in his hearing. Jeanne and her husband left Messina for England in 1843 and disaster struck when the ship carrying all her papers and specimens was sunk at sea. She published nothing further and it is only through her letters to other scientists that her work is remembered. In 1997 a large crater on Venus was named in her memory.

How wonderful is that? I started this post with nothing much to say and then discover there’s an there’s an embroidress underneath it all. For a little more about Jeanne Vilepreux-Power see here.

Mis for manicule (hand emroidered by Mary Addison)

After a wonderful weekend almost entirely taken up with celebrating the life of a friend no longer with us, we’ve returned home to find that spring may be here – I know 3 days of sun do not spring make, but they do lift the spirit. In fact a weekend which could have been miserable turned out to be wonderful. Kind people put us up in a beautiful York town house and over dinner on Friday evening we began to find out about our friend’s life in a city he’d made his own. The memorial service, like the curate’s egg, was good in parts, in the main because there were so many people in the chapel – far more than seats available – that the standing bodies in their thick winter wear soaked up falling cadences of the spoken voices and muffled delicate musical passages. The small person beside me coped well with what he might have thought were interminable longeurs. Of course, with music you can always whisper “can you hear the flute?” or ask what instrument he thinks is now playing but the greatest spur to ensuring he sat still was to point out that the lady sitting in front of him had brought with her two plates full of the very best chocolate brownies. (Meanwhile the small person’s sister, after a little bit of balletic arm stretching and a couple of thankfully quiet choruses of “Happy birthday to you” had been withdrawn to dance with the memorial angels in the churchyard outside.)  Fortunately, someone has recorded the service, so the contingent overseeing the graveyard nymph should be able to see what they were missing. Hooray for modern technology. More eating, and identifying people not seen for 40 years, continued in a couple of venues across York during the evening and I have come away from sadness, happy – with email and website addresses for both old and new friends.

M is for manicule (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

This M is for manicule, from the Latin for little hand. It is almost unique among typographical marks in that it has remained practically unchanged since it first appeared in the margins of hand written manuscripts where is was used to literally direct the reader’s notice to a bit of text. Manicules tend to be very personal emendations and were not really intended for the general reader – indeed it can often be difficult to fathom why they point to what they do. As someone once said, “one reader’s manicule is another reader’s nuisance”, which is true of most marginalia in books made by people other than oneself – something almost borne out by that most famous of marginalia, Fermat’s Last Theorem (1637)  until, that is Andrew Wiles recently solved it to the satisfaction of the Mathematics fraternity.

Sketch for M is for manicule

Manicules come in all sorts of styles and seem to reveal something about the character of the writer. Medieval manuscripts have all sorts of pointy hands. Petrarch is notable for giving his hand 5 fingers and a thumb. Medieval manuscripts often have wiggly fingers extending to encompass whole paragraphs if necessary and sometimes individual fingers can be seen to ramble over entire pages in a manner anatomically impossible. From time to time animals are used instead – a C14th copy of Cicero has a 5 limbed octopus doing the job. Usually, manicules end at the wrist, but some opt for fancy cuffs or even flowing sleeves (Petrarch again). Victorian ones go for crisp shirt cuffs – sometime with their own notes – and even cuff links. A C17th treatise on the medical properties of plants amusingly goes in for something quite different and various little penises pop up in the margin to draw the reader’s attention to passages relating to male genitalia.   Modern printing has no truck with manicules and on the personal note-making level, most of us would just annotate our books with a simple line in the margin or at the most an arrow. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Pottery mosaic of hand by Cleo Mussi

My manicule was inspired by Cleo Mussi’s pottery mosaics.

Looking at my sketch, I now see various shortcomings to bear in mind should I embroider another one.  The pointing finger should have been longer and overall my hand overall is podgy rather than elegant. In fact, it looks like the embroidery has turned hand into glove.  Hey ho!