A Bluestocking Knits

Read Any Good Church-Books Lately?

I haven't been knitting much lately, because I admit I've been distracted by my recent discovery of the Danish church-books to be found online at Statens Arkiver.  Even if you are not much interested genealogy, you can probably understand the fascination of something like the page above -- which is a beautiful thing in itself, and all the more when it is one's own ancestors (even if only by marriage).  The Danes, bless their record-keeping hearts, required local ministers to keep track of births, marriages, and deaths from quite early on, the late 1600s in some parishes, and later they also recorded movements to and from the parish and of smallpox vaccinations (which were in fact not only sensible, but a requirement for getting married).  This is of course a genealogical treasure-trove.  A birth record such as the one above gives not only the date and name, but the parents' names and residence, the age of the mother, and the names and residence of the baptismal sponsors, who were often relatives as well -- so that it is often only a matter of following the trail back to the previous generation, and on.  Quite satisfying.

Of course, it isn't always as simple as that.  After 1814, they had printed books to fill out, so that things are arranged quite tidily, but before that it was up to the individual priest, and instead of something as clear as the above record, readable even if you know little Danish, you get ones like this, from the early 1800s --

-- which takes a little more work.  It's funny, though, that since starting this post a week or so ago and thinking of how much time it took me to decipher the above page, it looks a walk in the park to me now, compared to this one from 1777 --

So, well, no, I haven't been knitting much.  But I did manage to finish these socks, plain ones with a Dutch heel and round toe, in the Deborah Norville Serenity Sock yarn in the Violas color.  I won't say how long ago I started them, but it's been a while.  This yarn feels a little different from the Acquamarine pair from a year or so ago, a bit sturdier, soft but less squishy.  I do like this color, too.

And here is something I found in a church-book that amused me, one of those little non-genealogical gems that you get every so often --

Found Object

Why Genealogy is So Amazing...

So we lived in Hong Kong for a while a few years ago, right?  We passed the cemetery in Happy Valley any number of times on the way into town.

So I have family from Pike County, Illinois, some generations back.

Who would have thought that these two would ever coincide?

Thanks to another wonderful researcher at Findagrave.

Renaissance Pleasure Faire

We went to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire yesterday-- not exactly for Mother's Day, but as it was certainly my idea of a good time, it was fine with me!  I took a little "class" in blackwork embroidery this year, while Julia was doing a mask-painting one.  I didn't have the camera with me the whole time, as David and Laura went off on their own while Julia and I were at the "Queen's College", so some of these photos are from last year.

I meant to sew myself a costume for this year -- had even bought a copy of The Tudor Tailor in preparation -- but alas, that was not to be.  But my ambitions, although modest, are inspired yet again by the lovely costumes, from commoner to nobility, that you see every few yards.

Back to School

Today was the first day of school.  We went to the mall last week in preparation.  Both of the girls said that they didn't really need clothes -- Grandma has gotten them each a skort-and-top set -- but Julia's shoes were literally falling apart, and Laura has already outgrown her size sevens from last year.  We got back in less than three hours (including a long thirty for lunch), which compared to last year was the blink of an eye, thank goodness.

I also made them each one of these --

from the "Little Wallet" pattern by Valori Wells that I bought at the craft store. The girls keep losing their coin purses, so I thought this would be perfect, as the two fat quarters recommended in the materials list would easily make three wallets.  I probably even had enough in the scrap stash, but these fabrics were bright and cheerful.

The pattern is pretty easy even for a novice like me, and the directions are clear, and printed conveniently on a single folded piece of cardstock.  I didn't get the turning hole together quite to my satisfaction either time, so I might try next time shifting the hole down a little and actually sewing the corner before turning it right-side out.  (Now that I look at the photo on the cover of the pattern, that one doesn't look quite symmetrical either!)

Laura said when I gave them these this morning, "You made these?" astonished, so I guess my stock has gone up!

At the Ballet

We went to see a performance of Inland Pacific Ballet's "The Little Mermaid" at the Redlands Bowl last night.

I was very impressed with the performance -- lovely staging and costumes, excellent dancing.  The designer's use of the set was very clever, and the music was woven seamlessly from pieces by Ravel, Debussy, Britten, Vaughan Villiams, Dvořák, and Leoš Janáček.  I felt that the second act didn't quite live up to the first, as most of the drama and spectacle were in the first, including this splendid villainess --

I actually loved the original ending of the story, and so although not entirely disappointed by the "surprise ending" promised by this company, thought that they actually didn't make enough of it in their version.

But the girls were enchanted, and I recommend the production as a lovely family evening.

All photos by E.Y. Yanagi from the IP website.

Happy Thanksgiving!

From Laura (aged 9 11/12).

When Bad Things Happen to Good Knits

I knitted a pair of mitts for Laura this past spring, with some leftover Koigu.  I have learned by experience not to expect careful treatment of handknits from the girls, even if they are as delighted with them as Laura has been with the mitts, but when Julia came to me the other evening with a mitt in her hand and said, "Mom, what's this?" I tell you my hair stood on end. 

I couldn't think what it was, a solid, flexible plastic-like mass some inches in diameter, with curiously cratery edges a little harder than the rest.  "Oh," Laura said, suspiciously nonchalant, "that's putty," some gacky stuff from a Mad Science workshop she went to late in the summer.  Apparently she and a friend had been playing in the girls' room and were, I regret to say, throwing the putty at each other, and when it disappeared, they simply shrugged and went on to something else.  I could not seem to pin her down as to how long it had been missing, but it was at least a week.

And so, well, Mommy got a little science lesson of her own.  The first step, of course, was to research removing putty from wool, both in my indispensable Home Comforts reference and online. Helpfully, the (now-empty) putty container listed the ingredients -- sodium borate solution, polyvinyl acetate, and diluted paint -- which David tells me is much the same ingredients as white glue.  Most of the sources I found recommended Simple Green cleaner or isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol, but warned that stains were almost certainly likely, from the dye in the putty.

I didn't think to take photos until I was well into it.  This first is after a soak in plain water.  The putty had, curiously, lost most of its color in the water, and gotten rather revoltingly glutinous.  It felt slimy, but was still quite firmly attached.  I managed to pick off some of it at the top left, but instead of coming off in rubbery strings (or, I should be so lucky, in one big mass), it was only tiny anticlimactic bits.

 

The next thing I tried was Simple Green.  The wool felt stiff and squeaky in it.  ("Koigu!" I thought mournfully.)

 

I scrubbed the putty with an old toothbrush, and picked at it a bit,and it did have some effect but not much.  It might be that I was not patient enough to let it soak longer in the Simple Green, though.  The putty seemed to come off better down in the purl ribs, possibly because it had either not adhered as thoroughly there or because it didn't have enough surface area to cling to, with the shape of the stitches.  

 

The last resort was isopropyl alcohol.  I was concerned that it would bleach the wool, but by this point I figured that I didn't really have anything to lose.

The next picture is after a few short soaks and rinses.

 

Yuck.  After this, I thought, "oh well", and just left it in the sink in about a half-inch of alcohol, and went to bed.  Perhaps half an hour later, David looked at it, and the putty had dissolved completely, and so he rinsed the mitt and left it to dry on the edge of the sink.  The mitt was, from all of the picking at it and scrubbing with the toothbrush, I guess, nearly an inch longer than it had been, but I tossed them both in the delicate wash cycle as usual, and it went back to its original shape.

The color, alas, will never be the same.  You can still see the shadow of the putty -- which was purple -- and the effects of the rubbing alcohol, although luckily the stain is not quite so obvious in real life as in the photograph.  The texture of the wool is a little different, with not so much body as before, as though it had been through a number of rough washings.  I am resigning myself to a soak in alcohol for the other mitt, to make the colors more like between the two.

Oh, well.

(Still very comfy and warm, though, I must say.  Hurrah, Koigu!)

Reading Aloud

We had a very bookish Christmas this past year.  In October or November, I had impulsively picked up in a local independent bookstore a beautifully illustrated edition of The Secret Garden and began to read it aloud to the girls; it so fascinated both of them that they each secretly snuck off with it to read ahead.   At Christmas, then, among other stacks of things -- Noel Streatfeild, Eva Ibbotson, et al., thanks to Amazon's 4-for-3 promotions -- for them to read on their own, I bought the girls a selection of things I thought would make more good reading aloud, and a few weeks later when Daddy hared off to Florida, we settled in with E. Nesbit's 1906 classic, The Railway Children.  We all enjoyed it very much, the girls' first shrieks of laughter arriving quite early on, in Chapter One, at the thought of Three Chimney's garden in the gloom --

    There was a low wall, and trees inside.
    "That's the garden," said Mother.
    "It looks more like a dripping-pan full of black cabbages," said Peter.
    The cart went on along by the garden wall, and round to the back of the house, and here it clattered into a cobble-stoned yard and stopped at the back door.    

and continuing at the children's pitch-perfect dialogue, whose occasional bickering tempers any Victorian sappiness.  Favorite bits have now entered our family lexicon -- "Ripping!" and "My heart's in my boots!" especially.  And when we'd finished reading the book, we watched the 1970 film, the one with Jenny Agutter as Bobbie and Bernard Cribbins as Perks.  That was just as lovely as I remembered it, too, but in a different way, very idyllic and warm-hearted.   (But how creepy that Dr. Forrest is!  I veered wildly between thinking, oh, Bobbie's going to marry him when she grows up! and alarm at how pre-pedophilic he seems at times.  Strange.)

Not long after that, drunk with success, I began The Hobbit. 

 

I thought at first that it might be a little much for the girls -- who are after all only nine and six -- but on the other hand felt that the poetry of Tolkien's prose would surely enchant them.  They laughed heartily at the dwarves' making themselves at home in Bilbo's comfortable hole, and shivered with fear at the trolls in the moonlight.  Daddy took over reading this when he got home -- Bilbo is just about to escape from the dungeon of the king of the Wood-elves.

Santa had also tucked into Julia's stocking Geoffrey Palmer's reading of Just So Stories, which lay forgotten on top of the girls' dresser until not long ago, when Julia unwrapped it and popped the first disc into the player, where it has played almost constantly for some time, as she reads along with the book they'd ignored for years.




This morning, having the luxury of the week off of school, I suggested Anne of Green Gables, and when Laura snuggled up next to me we started reading from the annotated edition.



Julia professed herself uninterested, but halfway along Chapter Two she crept in and settled herself at my side.  Unlike the Nesbit, I was already intimately familiar with this book, but still I could not keep from laughing aloud sometimes --

    [Matthew] said as shyly as usual:
    "Oh, you can talk as much as you like. I don't mind."
    "Oh, I'm so glad. I know you and I are going to get along together fine. It's such a relief to talk when one wants to and not be told that children should be seen and not heard. I've had that said to me a million times if I have once. And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?"
    "Well now, that seems reasonable," said Matthew.

-- as Anne charms us as much as she does Matthew.

Catching Up

Good heavens, I'd almost forgotten how to log in to TypePad!

So what have I been doing, you ask, these long months?  Very little knitting, I'm afraid -- two pairs of socks finished, one of which was actually started in January.  Now I am plugging away at half-finished projects, a row at a time, apparently -- Vintage Velvet (wh. for some reason leaves me quite indifferent lately), a Muriwai Bathmat, a Harry Potter scarf in the Ravenclaw colors, not counting the projects that I found under the sofa cushions and stuffed back with a shudder.  I am, however, chain-reading fiction, racing through Joanna Trollope (loved The Men and the Girls), Anita Brookner (until I froze from the chilliness), Kristin Lavransdatter in the Tiina Nunnally translation (miles better than the old one, remind me to expound on this some time), and so many others that suited my fervid fancy at the time that my mind begins to boggle.  I suppose I don't need to explain that I now have two children in school all day.

The Father-in-Law socks, finished at last, during the Summer Olympics.  I was so excited by Michael Phelps' races that despite working exactly the same number of rows on the second sock, it came out noticeably smaller than the first. 

This is Jitterbug in "Blue Parrot" -- a quite apt name, I think.  Vivid isn't in it.  The socks are presently residing in Laura's sock drawer until cooler weather.  And still unmodelled.

We went camping at Lake Tahoe at the end of August with a passle of cousins.  They had just taken the kids down to the beach when we had our first visitor.  This was the baby bear -- mama came back in the middle of the night to rattle the Dumpster.  I actually did not know that a Dumpster could be so very loud.

Am also deep into choir rehearsals, what with our first concert of the season at the end of October.  We are doing, among other things, Benjamin Britten's "Hymn to St. Cecilia" with the small choir, and Monteverdi's "Beatus Vir" and Charles Ives' "Psalm 90" with the big group.  The Britten is lovely and strange, set to a poem by W.H. Auden, and the Monteverdi is just as wonderful as the first time I sang it years ago, and doubtless as wonderful as it was in 1630.  The Ives is seriously weird -- if you don't believe me, look at this --

Why the sopranos got off so easily, I don't know.  Man, that's a lot of notes.  And no help from the orchestra, either.

Tone clusters, Blue Parrots -- I'm seeing an unexpected connection, here, all of a sudden ....