A Bluestocking Knits

Thoughts on the Pi Shawl

Well, I don't know if it was the effect of the Addi Turbos,

but I have taken to calling them the Nickel-Plated Beauties.  I finished the shawl on Tuesday, and worked the border Wednesday morning.

It's about 62 in./1.5 m. across, which around my shoulders is just slightly small, so if anyone wants to make this with Koigu and US6 needles, I would recommend 10 skeins just to be safe.  I did want a rather warm everyday shawl, and so of course a looser gauge would take less wool.  (Another option might be to increase the needle size at the increase rows, thereby making a shawl that is actually more than a circle, sort of crescent-shaped when folded in half, which would make it sit on the shoulders better.)

David came upon it stretched out to dry on the floor, and stared at it for a few minutes, mesmerized by the rather psychedelic sensation of falling into the center, both from the increasing/decreasing eyelet rows and the color smudges.  (The curious funnel shapes in some of the larger plain circles are actually a result of resizing the photos, one of the downsides of my camera's phobia about straight lines, and are not in the actual shawl.)

I really enjoy the Gull Stitch, as it's both very simple to work and very pretty.  I can see, though, why Elizabeth didn't care much for the crocheted-loop finish -- she starts off by saying that it's "good," and goes on to describe the method, but then adds, "I no longer finish shawls in this fashion, so have not much of an opinion to offer" -- it seems a bit anti-climactic here, although in other situations I think it is quite effective.  I didn't want to do the sideways knitted-in border though, as it made the Koigu's color smudges go in a different direction all of a sudden, which I found rather jarring.

Laura is quite taken with this shawl -- purple is her favorite color!

The Blacks and Whites Gallery, Portrait Room

Jan Cornelisz. Verspronck, "Portrait of a Lady" (1641), Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.  One of my favorite portraits ever, not just at the Norton Simon.  I'm rather drawn to the Dutch, their comfortable, maybe even stolid outlook on life, and this portrait speaks to me on many levels.  It's not only technically brilliant, but captures character wonderfully.  I like how her dress manages to be plain and extravagant at the same time, and the way that her bum roll tips up at the back because she's resting her hands on it in the front, and most of all her smile.

Peder Severin Krøyer, "Marie Krøyer" (1889), Skagens Museum.

John Singer Sargent, "Mrs. John Jay Chapman" (1893), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.  Another wonderful portrait from a master.  The Smithsonian has a brief background of the painting here (slight quibble, though -- these are not leg-of-mutton sleeves).

Unknown artist, "A Moravian Single Sister" (ca. 1810-1820), Moravian Historical Society, Nazareth, Pennsylvania.  The first of my family that I know of to come to America were part of the earliest Moravian migration to Pennsylvania, in 1742.  This came as a surprise to me, having always assumed that the various mid-19th century immigrations were pretty much the whole story.  The early Moravians, like the early Quakers and some of the Brethren today, were "plain" people, wearing simple clothing and living with a strong emphasis on community, although they did take a fairly active part in society in general, unlike the Amish.  At the time of this portrait, the single women wore plain dresses with a pink ribbon on their bonnets, and the married women wore blue ones.  I find it rather poignant that the name of this sister is not known, nor that of the artist -- though she is not particularly pretty, her face is drawn with a gentle affection and respect.

Peder Severin Krøyer, "The Architect F. Mendahl" (1882).  The way that the light plays off of various surfaces -- the gleaming brass, Mendahl's shoes, the tile chimneypiece, the dull woollen suit -- is wonderful.

Sophonisba Anguissola, "The Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia" (1573), Galleria Sabauda, Turin.  Oh, the Spaniards!

Rembrandt Peale, "Portrait of Rubens Peale" (1807), National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, Washington DC.  This is of course the same fellow with the geranium, six years on.  It's hard not to sympathize with someone about whom the Grove Dictionary of Art via Artnet writes, "Poor eyesight dictated a career in museum management."  I find it interesting that in both portraits his spectacles obscure his eyes, instead of being the means of clearer sight.

Sir Edward Lutyens, "Jekyll Sketched by Lutyens" (ca. 1896).  Such a concise, economical, yet gentle sketch of the famous gardener, by her friend.

The Brown Gallery

Sir Joshua Reynolds, "Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse" (1784), The Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California.  I must confess that my favorite story about the actress Mrs. Siddons -- and possibly about Reynolds as well, apocryphal or not -- is his exasperated comment to her while painting this portrait, "Good heavens, madam, your nose! is there no end to it?"

Rembrandt, "Self-Portrait" (ca. 1636-38), The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California.  Rembrandt is, I think, one of the most interesting people in history, certainly one of the most interesting portraitists.  His "official" pictures can be masterpieces, certainly, but I find myself more drawn to the private ones, the ones he made for himself, like this one from his lifelong series of self-portraits, and the one below of his mistress Hendrickje.  Like Shakespeare, he had a way of looking at people that is infinitely fascinating, in which one can find something new with every viewing.

J.M.W. Turner, "Rain, Steam, and Speed (The Great Western Railway)" (1844), National Gallery, London.  Coming from a train-mad family, I could hardly not like this picture.  It does not, I think, capture train-ness so much as a sort of train dream, the "rain, steam, and speed" of a moment.

Carl Larsson, "Karin by the Linen Cupboard (Karin vid Linneskapet)", 1906.  I like this because everything isn't all tidy!  Larsson managed to produce an incredible number of paintings, watercolors, and sketches, and yet really took the time to look at a scene -- how Karin's body is tilted towards and away from the window at the same time, here, for instance, to make the light fall on her work.

Dürer, "Self-Portrait" (1498), Prado, Madrid.  What a piece of work! and so modest, too!

Rembrandt, "Hendrickje Stoffels" (1659), National Gallery, London.  Melancholy, and achingly beautiful.  The coral necklace and furs against her bare skin, and the sad, rather tired look in her eyes -- wonderful.

Browns from the Stash

Filatura di Amigo Cashmere/Seta, in color 68, a sort of camelly beige --

Berroco Chinchilla, in color 5517 "cola" --

and Cherry Tree Hill Supersock in "Java", a lovely merino that appears a coffee-like brown from a distance, but upon inspection proves to be a mixture of browns, taupes, near-reds, and even a bit of navy blue..

An Heirloom

The heatwave cooled a bit this past weekend, and it has been a positively balmy 82 F/28 C or so -- cool enough to tackle the Fibber McGee closet in the front bedroom, our catchall-television room.  Among a great many other things, I found this, and thought I'd share a last Project Spectrum purple --

This rug was made by my grandmother -- she dated it "1947" along one edge.  She was an excellent seamstress -- one of my greatest regrets is that I did not ask her to teach me the arts of dressmaking -- and although I don't think she ever knitted, she did a lot of other crafts, including of course rug-hooking.

I love swirly acanthus-leaf-type decorations just about any time, but this delights me no end.  I love the colors, the swirls, the beautifully-modulated flowers in the center, the subtle color variations from the stripes (?) in the fabric that makes the lighter purple, and of course most of all the fact that my grandmother made it.  (Somewhere in the thousand or so Kodachrome slides I've got is a picture of this rug or one very much like it, at a long-ago holiday celebration, in front of the piano that I have now.)

I'm not quite sure what to do with the rug -- I hate to wrap it up again and put it away, but it is quite fragile around the edges.  Perhaps I could sew a new backing on it....

The Purple and Violet Gallery

John Singer Sargent, "Lady Agnew of Lochnaw" (1892-93), National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.  Another fascinating Sargent portrait (there is a fairly long discussion of this painting here).

Georgia O'Keeffe, "Black and Purple Petunias". 

Mary Cassatt, "The Child's Bath" (1893) Art Institute of Chicago.  I've always loved this painting, the fabulous combination of colors and patterns, starting with the lovely lavender/green/white stripes on the mother's dress (especially against the curved lavender rim of the washbasin).

Édouard Manet, "Berthe Morisot With a Bunch of Violets" (1872), private collection.  I'm not a huge fan of Manet generally, thinking him more than a bit hit-and-miss, but I like this portrait, Morisot's big, dark eyes and straightforward expression.

Carl Larsson, "Under the Chestnut Tree" (1912?).  This is nice on a summer afternoon, a lazy tea in the shade!

Kind of a Drag

I was hoping to have finished the Pi Shawl by now.  I kept thinking, though, that it didn't quite speak to me.   I guess that in the laceweight wool of Elizabeth's original, the "bumps" made by the K2tog, yo flatten out considerably with blocking, or that they just didn't get on Elizabeth's nerves as much as they did on mine.  The Koigu is much stiffer than laceweight, has more body, so that the bumps are quite pronounced..  And even though I like the effect of the concentric circles, I missed the pi-ness (pi-ety?) of the ever-doubling radius, which to me seems a lot of the point of the thing.  I also had so wanted to use my rosewood circular needles that even though the gauge was pleasant (they are 3.25mm), I was already on the sixth ball before I'd gotten to the "last" increase, and was starting to worry about running out of wool.

This is the first version on one of its few "travels" -- to the park --

Here, by the way, is one of the posies that Laura and her enterprising friend made from dandelions and scraps of popped balloons, that day at the park.  Laura's friend is the daughter of a businesswoman, and I had to smile to myself when she went up to someone else's mom and said, "Do you want to buy this? it's a quarter."  The other mom was so startled at this enterprise in a six-year-old that she handed her twenty-five cents without a word.

And the second version of the Pi Shawl, which I started the other day --

This is on US5 and US6 needles -- my largest dpns and my handiest circs.  Much bigger gauge, of course, and so it's going fairly quickly, although I'm sure that it won't be finished by the end of the month!

The color in the bottom photo is more accurate, as the camera tends to pull the reds out of purple in natural light, although the inside light, even if it leaves more of the purple, rather flattens things out here.  It looks a bit drab in the new photo, whereas in reality it is quite vivid, for purple and grey.  Almost intense, and luminous, yet in a very subtle way.

Posy

Too Darn Hot

Well, there isn't much knitting going on lately, what with the temperatures in the daytime well into the 90s F (high 30s C) and humid with it.  In other years, we've consoled each other with "but it's a dry heat," but can't do that now.  We have to do our errands in the mornings before it gets too hot, and then we sit around and drink iced tea (me) and cold juice (the girls) and listen to summery music in the afternoons, or go to the library where there is air conditioning.

Show and Tell this week is our coffee maker.  Ah.  Well....  When David and I got married, we had a tiny cappuccino maker that David had picked up as swag from some job he was working on, and I used that for a long time, running it through its paces for each individual cup as necessary, but it eventually gave out, and, barring the almost-uncontrollable cravings I had for coffee during my first pregnancy, I've rarely missed it.  This, I confess, is my coffee maker now --

It makes a decent cup of coffee, not particularly high-brow, but sufficient unto the hour!

In other news, this, since there isn't much knitting (or coffee, even), is what I will be working on soon --

Yes, it's going to be a "Turning Twenty" quilt!  I've been wanting to make quilts for the girls for some time now, inspired by the beautiful things that people like Nancy and Jane create.  Laura and I went to the crafts shop this morning, while Julia was at summer school, and chose twenty fat quarters and a couple of yards for a border.  She chose pretty much all of the fabrics herself -- I merely pointed out a few that were pretty, and that a few others were a bit loud (a neon yellow and lime tie-dye, for instance), and laid them all out on a table so that she could judge the effect -- and she got some duplicates of those she liked especially.  She loves bright colors, but still says that her favorite color is purple, so I was amused to see that that is generally the effect here.  Wish me luck!

Knitting the "Knitter's Almanac": A Shawl, Good Travel Knitting

July is not, I'm afraid, Travel-Month for us -- but I can see, as Elizabeth makes a point of telling us in this month's Knitter's Almanac chapter, that shawls make good travel knitting.  "First of all, fine wool takes up little space, but affords plenty of actual knitting.  Secondly, a circular needle can hardly get lost unless you pull it out by main force and cast if from you."  You can even store the current ball of yarn in the little "bag" made by the growing shawl on a circular needle!

The Pi Shawl is possibly Elizabeth Zimmermann's most well-known design -- a quick internet search yields 47,500 hits, from projects on individual knitting blogs to knitalongs to kits from dozens of vendors.  Based, of course, on the geometric relationship of the circumference of a circle to its radius, the Pi Shawl is one of those things that seems so obvious that you wonder why no-one had ever done it before.  The circumference of a circle doubles as its radius doubles -- thus, doubling both the number of stitches and the number of rows between increase rounds will get you a shawl that shapes itself neatly and efficiently into an ever-larger circle.  Brilliant, and brilliantly simple.

"Need it be said that the first and most important step is to choose the best material available?"

Mine is Koigu KPPPM in shade P305, a rather sedate (for Koigu) blend of lavendars, purples, and greys.  It was a coincidence that it matches this month's Project Spectrum palette, but a happy one, to be sure!  I ordered it late last summer, when I first thought of doing the Almanac -- it's the month I've most looked forward to, in fact.  I like both of Elizabeth's versions, but although the one in the top picture is pretty (for those, like me, to whom it would matter, there is a slightly different version in Knitter's Magazine Shawls and Scarves, in which the diamond and petal patterns are straightened out to align symmetrically), I thought that the concentric-circles would be more interesting with this Koigu colorway.

One of the nice things about working from the center outwards is that in gratifyingly short order, you've really gotten somewhere!