Week 28 Up and Down Buttonhole
This is one of my favourite stitches. It goes in straight lines, spirals, curves and you can even stitch in two directions at once because the stitch has two arms.
My design has a story attached to it. Back in the early 1970's I was in England and had hired a mini minor car to get out and see the countryside in my spare time. I was flatting with a girl from Western Australia, we were two innocence abroad. We got talking about what our grandmothers had told us about family who had come from England orginally and some of the sites we wanted to visit.
Her family in Australia had come from Kalgoolie in W.A. and her grandmother had been sold to her grandfather, as a wife, for food. Her grandparents had made a match of it but still I was astounded that such a thing could have happened. (I did say innocent.) Times must have been desperate on the goldfields back then (1900's)
My grandmother regaled me with stories that her grandmother had told her about how all the medieval paintings in churches that had been destroyed back in the time of the Civil War. (She spoke as though she was there!) But, some parishioners had whitewashed over the painting and she had seen some of them when she was a girl. I'm not sure if she approved or not, her father being a Methodist Missionary here in Australia and them coming from staunch round head families.
So I wanted to find one of these churches and see these painting. And I did. It was in the church of St Peter Ad Vincula in South Newington. Back then the paintings were only partly visible and I was enchanted by the spiral design I could see behind the virgin. For some reason I saw this design as a rose bush spiral. I can still see it. Problem is when I found an image on Flickr there were no roses but I could have sworn there was back then.
As a result my design has rose buds in it. I stitched the outline in a stem stitch and then used up and down feather stitch to twine around it. The buds were inserted in between the arms of this using a chain stitch.

Link to Pintangle Link to Flickr