Around here we love both cross stitch patterns and Cicely Mary Barker’s flower fairies. So it is a wonderful privilege to see completed works like this ”Pinks Fairies”, pictured at left. It was stitched by a lovely customer named Sally who completed this work of art in December of 2018. It was a gift for her great niece who is five years old. Sally says that the little girl looks exactly like these fairies. She must be a gorgeous little girl indeed!
When the fairy drawings were first published they were accompanied by a poem or verse and here is the verse for the pinks fairy.
Early in the mornings,
when children still are sleeping,
Or late, late at night-time,
beneath the summer moon,
What are they doing,
the busy fairy people?
Could you creep to spy them,
in silent magic shoon.
You might learn a secret,
among the garden borders,
Something never guessed at,
that no one knows or thinks:
Snip, snip, snip, go busy fairy scissors,
Pinking out the edges
of the petals of the Pinks!
Pink Pinks, white Pinks,
double Pinks, and single,—
Look at them and see
if it’s not the truth I tell!
Why call them Pinks
if they weren’t pinked out by someone?
And what but fairy scissors
could pink them out so well?
The “pink” refers to pinking shears which are scissors that cut in a sawtooth pattern, rather than a straight line. The result is a zigzag pattern which is what one of the the fairies is doing to the flowers.
When I first saw the verse above, I wondered what a “shoon” was? It is defined as the “dialectal plural” of the word shoe.
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