Pineapple silhouette stencil design

The stencil came back from the printers with the diamonds all wrong, so I've spent three nights at the kitchen table with a craft knife and a sheet of oiled card. You'd laugh. Mr Pryce wanted the lattice on the Ballroom ceiling to look like the fruit on the tins from Jamaica, every diamond the same, and I told him nothing is ever the same when a hand cuts it. He said that was why he hired me and not the Cardiff firm.

Saturday the hall was full for the Harvest Hop. The band from Swansea played "Begin the Beguine" twice because nobody could stop dancing long enough to let them finish. I stood by the pillar with a paper crown pinned to my cardigan and watched the light from the glass globe throw the lattice shadows across the floor. Every couple that crossed them went through a diamond, one after another, and I thought, that is the whole trick of it, a pattern is only a hole that someone has agreed to walk through.

Pryce's boy painted the first crown last night while I held the lamp. The leaves came out sharp as knives and the body sat in the middle of the plaster as if it had always been there. He asked if it was a good pineapple. I said it was a fruit that had never seen a winter and would be cross about it.

Write to me before the regional competition. I'll save you a dance, but only the slow ones, because my feet have been on that card all week.

Love, Nell