Oh dear. It’s time to admit it: middle age is creeping up on me! I used to be able to work quite happily on 36ct without any special light or magnification, but I’m beginning to find anything over 28ct a struggle, unless I take off my glasses altogether and work in extreme close-up – which is fine for a few stitches but not for a whole evening, especially when I’m trying to follow NCIS at the same time. As I needed new glasses anyway, and the optician had said that reading glasses might be a good idea (even though I could read the finest print at the bottom of their reading chart without any problems), I looked into varifocals. After a lot of discussion with the very helpful gentleman at Vision Express (and some experimental stitching at their premises) we decided that was not the way forward. Plain glasses plus a pair of stitching glasses, a little stronger than the reading glasses the optician had recommended.

Getting used to my new glasses (or rather my new frame) has been a bit of a struggle, and is taking a lot longer than I had expected, so I’ve tried the stitching glasses only a few times, but they definitely help and I will probably use them when working on anything very fine or detailed like goldwork – projects that need concentration, and that I’ll be working on without any distractions. Not for my usual evening’s stitching, however, as I can’t see the telly very well with them, and I tend to combine the two (did I mention NCIS?)

Obviously an additional aid was needed, and after some research I settled on Daylight’s table-top lamp. It has quite a few accessories which I’m not using at the moment, and it would have been nice if the lamp were available at a discount without them, but it isn’t – I rang the company and asked. Fortunately I found the lamp on offer at Sew & So at a price well below any others I could find, so it doesn’t feel like I’m paying for something I won’t use, and anyway, I may well feel the need for a magnifier, a chart clamp and a storage tray some time in the future.

And does it make a difference? Yes it does – a lot! Not only does it help me see smaller stitches, but the colours are more true to life, meaning I can choose fabrics and threads and beads in the evening and actually find the next day that they still match . It does also show up in rather ghastly detail that our chairs could do with re-upholstering, or at the very least a good wash…

So all hunky-dory then? Well, no. As you can see the shade is a milky white, and when the lamp is on, even after we’d changed the 20W bulb for a 12W one, the whole shade becomes a big glowing blob of whiteness. It’s a bit distracting to me, using it (I would prefer all the light to be on my stitching, not radiating all around), but even more so to my husband, who sees it not only from the corner of his eye, but also reflected in the television screen. Did they do dark shades for them, he asked. Alas, no. Some lateral thinking was called for.

I temporarily draped some black Lugana around the shade, and this made a noticeable difference, but the light still shone quite fiercely through the holes. Right, a fabric without holes then. Felt! Fortunately the lamp doesn’t get very hot, so that shouldn’t be a problem. After playing about with some paper templates and full circles of felt (felt does not pleat very successfully…) I managed to cut out a shape that wrapped cosily around the shade without too much ruffling. Another one followed, as even the felt could not contain the lamp’s output with one layer. Because felt sticks to itself I now have a double-layered lamp jacket which is easily put on and removed. Marital harmony preserved by a piece of felt!