Do try this at home

Here is a lovely inspiration for a stitching project without much stitching - it only involves finding some pretty printed images and gluing them to thin card, then binding them with ribbon and bringing them together to make a charming floss basket. You can age your images, fabric, ribbon and threads. Play around with some paper shapes and cellotape until you are confident about how all the shapes fit together. It doesn't have to be totally perfect, as you can see. Once you have made this, just think what else you could do!
(I shall have a free download for the construction next week to help you.)

Three Cheers for the Head Girls

The Mary Wigham project would not have been possible without the unstinting and uniting support of country Head Girls. Not only are they leading the SAL in their various countries, they are also providing an invaluable translation service also. Here you can see that Paule, French Head Girl, has even found some time to stitch. Do visit the beautiful blogs of the Head Girls and say Hello to them - they all speak wonderful English and they won't put you in detention for being behind with your stitching. Just click on the flags on the right hand side bar and follow the links. So Head Girls take a bow - hip, hip, hip hooray!

Ackworth School Motifs - The Swan

Although Mary Wigham's sampler can be said to be typical of Ackworth School, it is rare in that it does not possess that defining Quaker medallion - the Swan. There are four types of Swan that appear on the samplers, ranging from a rather chubby duck to a most elegant specimen. A first tentative explanation was that it recalled the tale of Cygnus from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Children at Ackworth were schooled in the classics and the tale of Cygnus' repeated diving to save his friend Phaethon who crashed the sun's chariot into the water appeared to be a symbol of agape - self-sacrificing love. The theory was also helped along by the prominence of the star cluster, since there is constellation named Cygnus.

However, children at Ackworth also read Aesop. This is my copy of 1740 by Samuel Richardson, 'curiously' illustrated for children. Aesop has a fable of the Swan and the Stork. The Stork asked the dying Swan why it was singing - it seemed perverse to do so. The Swan replied that it would no longer be in danger of snares, guns or hunger - who would not enjoy such a deliverance? It could be you might be able to shed more light on this.

The Samovar Awaits You - in Australia

At the end of a stormy and unpredictable week, it is lovely to gaze on this warm and promising sunset. Even if we are late in settling down for our weekend, it is good to know that there is a simmering samovar of tea waiting for us in Sydney, Australia, and we can sit around together and discuss those initials on Mary's sampler - to whom did they belong? We can now hazard that the HT under Mary's name belonged to her mother whose maiden name was Hannah Thistlethwaite, and those beneath - JW - to her father, John Wigham. There is also HW in all probability for Hannah, her sister, but the rest we cannot be sure of. What is interesting is that there are these family initials, which continue the North England and Scottish sampler tradition of having ranks of family initials, including grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. So, whatever the origin of the medallions themselves, there is definitely the twining of North of England roots of Quakerism amongst them. And what of our roots? The first language of Natalie (aka Koala) who is stitching her Mary Wigham in Sydney is Russian, so she is stitching in the company of Olia's Russian SAL members thousands of miles distant. And that is why it is a samovar, not a teapot waiting for you at the beginning of sundown. At the end of the day we all seem to blend like this terrific sunset, how could you begin to unpick the gold from the red or the red from purple? Or who would want to?