Embroidered Fables: Velma and Mountmellick

Aunt Velma is actually no blood relation to me. She is the older sister of my uncle who is married to my aunt who is my mother’s older sister. All of us in the previous sentence were born in Holyoke, Colorado, a little town of about 2500 that is the county seat of Philips County. Aunt Velma is aunt to all my cousins on my mother’s side. So to me she was always just one more loving adult in the long days of my childhood.

Aunt Velma in August celebrated her 100th birthday in what was to be a big party, but what turned out to be a stay in a hospital--her first. Velma fell in her garden while she was making concrete stepping stones shaped like turtles. She assured me that she was being very careful, but the bag of cement had a mind of its own and tipped over the wheelbarrow. Down she went breaking her shoulder.

Velma has done needlework in her long life. She knows about needlepoint and “pillowcase” embroidery. But she also knows about Mountmellick work. Mountmellick is an embroidery technique done in Ireland around the town of the same name. It was introduced as a cottage industry in the 1800s during one of the famines--a way to give housewives some extra money. It is whitework done on heavy cotton ground with thick cotton threads. The work is done in plant themes such as blackberry fruit and leaves and, in this instance, grape vines, tendrils, and leaves. Sometimes the satin stitches of the fruits are padded to give them relief. Everything about it is curvilinear.

Velma has a piece of Mountmellick that was done by her mother around 1900; see the pictures of it below. I don’t know where or why Elsie Biddle, Velma’s mother (I thought Grandma Biddle was one of my grandmothers too), would have learned Mountmellick, perhaps from a friend or even from a magazine. But she did this piece and then passed it on at her death to her only daughter, Velma. Velma told me on her 100th birthday that she was passing it on to me because she knew that I knew the value of it to the family. Velma did ask me what I would do with it when it was time for me to pass it on. I will donate it to the collection of the Embroiderers’ Guild of America, where it can reside for other people to see it and study it.

Mountmellick work done by Elsie Biddle c.1900