Last night I finished stitching the wordplay for my Anthea Calendar textile book. This is the SAL by Faby Reilly which gives us a very pretty flower design each month. I’m making mine into a book and making a wordplay to face each page with basically what that month means to me.

I stitched May earlier in the month, it’s very pretty…

I usually wait until nearer the end of the month before I design my wordplay, it sometimes takes that long to think of words to stitch.

We have a birthday in May, we were meant to have a wedding too but that has sadly been postponed for a year. I checked my diary (rather empty at the moment!) but I remembered sitting outside for Dawn Chorus day, listening to the birdsong in the garden…

We also had a socially distanced street party for VE Day, it’s 75 years since VE Day and there were meant to be lots of commemorations planned, but obviously everything got cancelled. Instead it was suggested that we stood by our front doors for a two minute silence at 11am, it was actually quite moving, just stood alone with my thoughts. We then had an afternoon tea with everyone at the bottom of their drive. We wandered round, chatting to neighbours, kept our distance, but had a lovely afternoon. I was a bit short of supplies for an afternoon tea, so I defrosted some puff pastry and made some sausage rolls. I had a large rectangle of pastry left, I looked in the cupboard and found an old jar of mincemeat, I spread it on the pastry, rolled it up and sliced it, it came out a bit like a Danish pastry! A few home made fairy cakes and cheese on toast slices and we were sorted! I set a pretty table with a vintage embroidered cloth, a tiered cake plate and a beaded net fly cover which was my grandmothers. The Australian flag made my OH very happy when he came home from work to join in.

I was a bit stuck trying to think of some suitable poem or prose to stitch for May, I couldn’t think of a month specific one I wanted to stitch. I then remembered a French poem I’m rather partial to. It’s all about true friendship, as I’ve used my time at home to chat to distant friends, I decided this was rather apt. The full poem is as follows;

L’amitie vrai c’est comme la mer, elle s’en va, elle s’en rentre, mais elle est toujours la.

Apologies to the French speakers amongst you, I never have worked out how to put the acccent over the e on a computer!! Anyway, it translates roughly as ‘True friendship is like the sea, it goes away and comes back, but it’s always there.’ I only had room for the first half, one day I shall stitch it all on an embroidery.

In Otley we still have a Maypole, usually around Mayday, the local primary schools set it up and dance round the Maypole, I have happy memories of watching Helen in a pretty dress, skipping round holding her ribbon.

Hanami is the lovely Japanese tradition of visiting the cherry trees in blossom. I’ve added sewing and gardening at the bottom as that is pretty much what I did for a month!! Flower of the month had to be the beautiful bearded irises.

We have blackbirds visit the garden regularly. One of them sits on the tree opposite my sewing room on an evening and sings his heart out, it’s beautiful. We’ve also really enjoyed seeing the fledglings being brought into the garden for feeding. The robins were first, today the blue tit family came to visit.

June’s design has just arrived, it’s lovely, full of very pretty cornflowers.