A Bluestocking Knits

Thoughts on the Burberry-Inspired Cowl and the "Tie One On" Wrap

This is a gift for a friend, a sort of knitted hug-from-afar.  It's the Burberry-Inspired Cowl from Julianne Smith at The Garter Girl, a simple, quick knit -- yeah, if you don't cut the yarn too short for weaving.  It's cables but isn't cable-y, more just sort of ripples, or in this particular color, kind of like sand dunes --

This is the Filatura di Amigo Cashmere/Seta yarn I got from Joy in Hong Kong umpteen years ago, and made a Backyard Leaves scarf out of not long after.  Still have tons left over.  I remembered how much this yarn stretched, so I worked it a little tighter this time than I might have done, and hoped it would stretch enough to soften and show the cashmere to its best advantage. 

And of course the recycled Kidsilk Haze, this time into nona's "Tie One On" Wrap from Knitty --

I do not like knitting with Kidsilk Haze.  Scratchy and hairy, and with an unpleasant feel almost like very thin wire, not to mention unkind when you make a mistake.  This color is wonderful, though -- "Ghost" -- a very soft purply-grey neutral.

But the pattern is, like the cowl, a quick and satisfying knit, and I think will be pleasant to wear on a cool spring afternoon.  Just be warned that you will not be able to make the ribs line up.

Not sure I will knit much for a while, as summer is rapidly approaching here in Southern California, and although I was wearing wool socks and a slipover just last week, this morning I am in sandals and short sleeves!  But a sewing project is on the cutting board --

Kid Mohair Wrap Post-Mortem

Well, this wanted to be a pretty lace wrap, but -- alas.

It is the Kid Mohair Wrap from Susan Cropper's Pretty Knits: 30 Designs from Loop in London of 2007, reprinted in Canadian Living a year or so ago (there's no date!).  I was a little surprised to find almost no mention of this around the blogosphere, thinking that surely I could not be the only one seduced by the photograph.  I wonder now if knitters just gave up.

As I mentioned before, there are a few errors in the border pattern, not earth-shattering ones, but enough to be worth fixing.

This is a fairly-standard lace edging, found in Martha Waterman's Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls, among others I'm sure, and there called "Ocean Waves".  Here it is written worked in opposite directions on the right and left edges, so that they are mirror images.  The right-side edge has a three-stitch "wave" that swirls upwards towards the left, while as written here in the Kid Mohair Wrap the left-side edge has a two-stitch swirl.  It is not entirely noticeable at this lacy gauge, which is one of the reasons (the other being Kidsilk Haze's resistance to being picked out and re-knitted) that I simply left it there and went on.  The decrease used in the pattern is a left-slanting sl1-K1-psso, but it should be a right-slanting K2tog.  I worked the second repeat this way, and to my eye it looks much better, certainly a mirror image of the right-side border.  After working the second repeat, I realized that the one triple-decrease on the left-side border should be changed as well, from a sl1-K2tog-psso to a K3tog -- you can see the second repeat's sl1-K2tog-psso at the top of the first "swirl", just to the left of the last yarn-over hole, where the triple decrease is leaning the wrong way.  I worked a K3tog instead on the third repeat, along with the line of K2togs, and it looks much tidier.

So my recommendations: In Row 3, change the second sl1-K2tog-psso to K3tog, AND in Rows 5, 7, 9, and 11, change the second "skpo" (i.e. sl1-K1-psso) to a K2tog.  This will also need to be changed in the crossed-eyelet section, thus: In Row 31, change the second sl1-K2tog-psso to K3tog, AND in Rows 33, 35, 37, and 39, change the second "skpo" (i.e. sl1-K1-psso) to a K2tog.  There is another typo in Row 35: after the second "slip marker", K2 should be K3.

There also should be an asterisk in Row 39, after the first "slip marker", but this is only a slight hiccup.

The scarf version apparently simply continues a narrower version of the knot-stitch section all the way up, omitting the crossed-eyelet section -- but a commenter on the Canadian Living version of the pattern notes that Row 28 in the scarf version says to repeat Row 14, ie. Row 4 of the knot-stich pattern, but that this should be Row 2, not Row 4.

But the biggest problem for me is that two balls of Kidsilk Haze is not enough by some way to complete a 30x60-inch wrap.  I pin-blocked what I had worked so far to a 30-inch/76cm width, which to me looked far too stretched, so I repinned it to what looked good, which was 28 inches (71 cm) wide -- although certainly this was not proper blocking, and the results may have been different, but I suspect not much.  The result was a 28x22-inch piece, which of course with only one more ball of Kidsilk Haze would not have made a wrap that measured 60 inches by any means.

So, well -- it's pretty, but the yarn is now well on its way to becoming nona's Tie One On after all ...

Works-in-Progress

This is the sand-dune-y landscape of a Burberry-Inspired Cowl, which unfortunately got stalled when I cut the ends of wool just too short to graft together, so that I am now resigning myself to ripping out the last balls' worth in order not to have to splice in yet another length.  The good news is that the whole thing took only a few hours to knit, so once I get up the nerve to pull the needles out, it shouldn't take long to actually finish.

Another work-in-progress is the Brahms German Requiem, which we started rehearsing the week before last.  How very lucky I was to be able to sing this in high school -- how lucky I still am, to be a part of it again.

This is a lovely version, a yummy Romantic tempo, and the parts are beautifully balanced.  It's interesting, the different perspectives you get, from the chorus or from the audience; I have to not look at the video at times, as it can be distracting, although educational.  That is some serious stink-eye Nikolaus Harnoncourt gives even before he lifts up his hands!  Rather consoling, in a way, to see that even the Vienna State Opera Choir has trouble with getting their eyes off of their music.

I'm currently reading a "medieval noir" that I found on the new-book shelf at the library the other day.  I think I've got spoiled by Ellis Peters, as I find this one more than a little anachronistic in vocabulary -- "décolletage" for example, a late-Victorian word at the earliest, or even more jarring, "gifted" (in the sense of having presented something as a gift), at the same time that the characters say things like "'How fares your good wife?'" and "'Is that the weapon that committed this most foul deed?'".  There certainly can be a good argument for writing a historical novel in the modern vernacular, since at the time period of said historical novel, the way that people commonly talked was in fact "modern" -- compare, for example, the 1920s Charles Archer translation of Kristin Lavransdatter with the 1990s one by Tiina Nunnally.  And there can be an argument that people in the Middle Ages talked more like the Wife of Bath than like Brother Cadfael, too, I suppose.  Still, there it is.

I went to the library, in fact, for the omnibus Mapp and Lucia volume, thinking that I wanted something terribly, terribly English and 1930s. Have not read any of them before.

I'm also reading one of D.E. Stevenson's "lost" novels again, Emily Dennistoun, the current book of the Stevenson discussion list at Yahoo.  The more I think about it, the more I think this was not only an early work of Stevenson's, but a very early work, and one that she may have not bothered to dig out of the drawer because the things she wrote later were so very much better.  Anyway, here is my choice of something late-1920s for my virtual Stevenson "knitalong" --

I think that Emily Dennistoun would be rather shocked to think that her underwear might be discussed in public, but it is not at all unlikely that she would have actually knitted such things herself.  I was surprised at first to see the number of patterns for "vests and shorts" out there -- this is one of dozens from The Vintage Knitting Lady.  I had not in fact given much thought to knitted underthings, but upon reflection suspect that in Scotland at least, where this novel is set, one might want such things more often than not.

As for "real" knitting, I did start the Kid Mohair Wrap the other day.  Found a number of mistakes in the pattern right off, but once that settled down it has gone very quickly, so quickly that I am rapidly nearing the end of the first ball of Kidsilk Haze and at the same time am becoming increasingly alarmed that I will not finish nine repeats of the crossed-eyelet section, as the pattern assures me I can do, before I get there.

Well, we shall see!

"It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade"

(Might be about time to read Great Expectations again ....)

Finished The Shakespeare Thefts by Eric Rasmussen, a blithely quick read, but interesting.  The title is somewhat misleading, as there is not really much theft involved -- it is about a project to trace all known copies of Shakespeare's First Folio, the famous 1623 first "collected works" of Shakespeare.  There were 750 copies in the run, of which only 232 are known to still exist, so Rasmussen has made it something of a life's work of his to not only find them all but to examine them minutely, even to the marginalia scribbled by innumerable hands down the centuries, partly just for the fun of it, but partly also so that in the very-real possibility of theft not only the books themselves but the individual pages are identifiable.  He has a light, breezy style that sits somewhat oddly, to my mind, with such a scholarly obsession, but it certainly makes for a good popular introduction to the subject.

I am now working through the four "historical" novels of Joanna Trollope that my public library has -- I say historical in quotes to distinquish them from her "modern" ones, called somewhat disparagingly "Aga sagas" by some.  I pay that no mind, as I've always found her to be an interesting writer, serious yet not at all without humor, and some of her novels I count among those I have reread a number of times.  I did not, I regret to say, much like the first of these historicals I read, Eliza Stanhope, which I thought more than a little formulaic and with little to distinguish it from any other Regency romance writer except perhaps a good ear for dialogue.  I was a little relieved to find out that it was her very first novel.  The Taverners' Place was an engrossing multi-generational family saga, stretching from the 1870s to the 1930s, which I quite enjoyed, although I was rather depressed to realize towards the end that very few of the many marriages were happy.  The third one I read -- because I had (characteristically, I suppose) arranged them in chronological order by historical period -- was the Boer War drama The Steps of the Sun, about which I had very mixed feelings, thinking it well-written but finding it surprisingly difficult to tell the main characters apart -- although in Trollope's defense, this may have been only because I seemed to have the time this past week to read only in three- or four-page bursts, and therefore could never really get involved in the story.  I am now in the middle of The Brass Dolphin, set in World-War-II-era Malta, and am much involved in it, interested in the characters and appreciating Trollope's easy hand at describing the Mediterranean beauty of the island.

Knitting?  Well, yeah, I'm thinking about it, actually.  Got two balls of Kidsilk Haze yearning to cover my shoulders this spring.  Only two.

Nona's Tie One On from knitty?

Plain-but-pretty, probably a quick knit.  Useful too -- and I mean that in the best way, in that the trapezoid shape will actually stay on your shoulders.

Or the Kid Mohair Wrap from Susan Cropper's Pretty Knits, excerpted in Canadian Living?

Perhaps a little impractical? can you actually do anything with this fallng off of your shoulders all the time?  But rather spectacular, certainly, and a lot of wow for only two balls of Kidsilk Haze.

"Rescued by Rover"

This little gem -- "Rescued by Rover", a 1905 film by Cecil Hepworth -- was posted to the HistoricKnitting list recently, because of the hap shawl the beggar woman is wearing in the very first scene.  It is worth watching for that, although knitters might shed a tear over the ragged state of the shawl, but the whole thing is full of interesting details.  It's obviously a little moral lesson on the evils of smoking and hanging about with soldiers, as well as the evils of drink, and more positively on the benefits of having a family dog.

I love that the father puts on his topper before dashing out to follow Rover --

Many of the details are hilarious now -- that the maid pulls the baby carriage instead of pushes it (because of course if she did it properly she would see the beggar-woman snatching the baby), that both the dog and the father completely ignore the nearby bridge and instead either swim or row across the stream -- but imagine how amazing this would have been in 1905, to people who had literally never seen a moving-picture.  Apparently the film was so popular that not only did Hepworth (who played the father as well as directing) have to reshoot it twice because the negative actually wore out making so many copies, but it also started a trend for the name Rover for family dogs, and for canine movie stars such as Rin Tin Tin and Lassie.  (I wonder if the Lassie directors ever saw this.  "What is it, Lassie? Timmy fell down a well?!")

Thoughts on the Gaia Shoulder Hug

Rain? did I say rain? It's pouring. 

Apparently I managed to grab the only bit of sunshine yesterday afternoon, so there is no "action shot" of this, which is of course the Gaia Shoulder Hug, a free pattern by Anne Carroll Gilmour that I first saw over at Mason-Dixon Knitting.

This is Noro's Taiyo, another of their new-ish sock yarns; it has exactly the same yardage as the Kureyon Sock recommended in the pattern.  My label says very clearly "color 5", though it doesn't look anything like any of the 5s I can find online. 

I don't think I would ever use this yarn for socks, as it feels like I'm knitting with quilting thread, although in all fairness I'm also working those mitts in Rowan 4-Ply Soft at the same time, which in comparison is like knitting with cloud fluff.  I've come to the conclusion that I just don't like Noro that much.  The thick/thin goes beyond slubbiness, the twist makes it worm at times uncontrollably, and it doesn't feel particularly pleasant next to the skin -- yeah, the colors are what get you.  I don’t buy it with any sort of irresistible enchantment, only a sigh of “well, maybe this time it will be different.”  But it never is.

As for the Gaia pattern, it is fairly simple and easy-to-follow, although I did have a  patch towards the end in which I somehow kept coming up short on the stitch count, and could not for the life of me find where I'd muffed it, so had to rip it back more than once, an unpleasant chore with clingy Noro.  I do like the little wings-of-Horus curls at the tips, I must say.

Dimensions approx. 49 in./125 cm across the long edge, 20 1/2 in./52 cm down the line of increases -- a good neck-scarf size, though not particularly generous.

I had the dickens of a time with this "3-st picot-point bind-off", though, and puzzled over it much of the morning.  I don't know if it was my brain that was still trying to wrap itself around the knit-back-backwards concept and thus got stuck on anything and everything, or if the wording in the instructions was unclear, but from the very start I was having problems.  I wasn't so sure that the KBB instructions I could find online (as directed in the pattern) were particularly clear either.

(In desperation, I looked at the Swedish translation, thinking that it might somehow make more sense, but the translator avoided the whole issue and included only the knitted bind-off.  Insert mild oath in Swedish here.)

I ended up figuring it out by craning over to watch the RS as I worked a few purls on the wrong side -- "okay, so that goes here, that goes there," etc. etc. etc.  And, lo and behold, the KBB is a neat little trick: Insert LN into back of last st on RN, wrap yarn around LN from back to front, then catch yarn with tip of LN and bring it through the st (you may have to use your left index finger to pull down on the yarn a little and make it easier to catch), and remove RN from prev st.

Here is Gilmour's version of the 3-st picot bind-off: "k2, b/o 1st st, [k 3x (fbf) into yo, sl1 as to kbb, kbb 2 sts, b/o 3 sts, k 1, b/o 1] repeat between brackets to final st".  And here is how I read this:

K2, pass 1st st over 2nd, *K3 into next st (which here will always be the YO of the previous row), sl last st on RN tbl to LN, KBB2, BO next 4 sts (including st currently on RN, and here ending with the K2tog of the previous row), rep from * to last st, cut yarn and draw through last st.  Since the sequence on the Gaia actually ends with the 2 K sts of the border, and not the yarn-overs, I worked the end with a K2tog just before the last st to get it to lie a little more smoothly.

Rainy Days and Mondays

Well, it's actually Tuesday, of course, but still.  It's a suprisingly grey one, as it happens -- good thing I took this photo already as there is almost no light, even in the middle of the morning.  This is a Serpentine Mitt in progress, atop a Gaia shawl ditto.  Both fairly simple knits, although taking a long time, it seems, as I keep getting distracted by other things.

And in my literary travels, I am venturing a little further south, reading Krabat by Otfried Preussler, a German children's fantasy novel from the early 1970s, based it seems on a much-older tale.  It's a strange little story, of an evil miller and of the boy who becomes his apprentice, and thereby unwittingly a pupil in the miller's school of sorcery, and how the boy -- sort of an ur-Harry Potter -- eventually learns to overcome his master and escape the dark mill in the fen of Kosel. 

More Mish-Mash

This is another mish-mash post, all of the little bits and bobs that separately don't make up much of a post!

I finished knitting the Hug-Me-Tight a month and a half or so ago, and sewed it all together -- unfortunately the result is a resounding "meh".  Am not really sure if I simply made it too big (this is the larger size) or if the drape of the Cashsoft is too lazy to show it off much, or if blocking would help -- but it resides on the top of the end table still.

It looks even worse on me than it does on Laura.  Not sure yet whether or not I'm going to rip it out or block it and hope for the best -- I'm inclining towards the former, as I suspect that the Cashsoft won't block much.  The larger border is curling I think because it is basically a circle, so that the outer edge is simply stretched too far.  It may just be a matter of the wrong yarn for the project.  Sigh.

Also on the needles are an Elizabethan-of-sorts stocking, and a generic sock in Paton's Kroy "Camo Colors" -- huge gauge, it seems! so it's working up gratifyingly quickly as I pass the time during various dentist appointments and piano lessons.

Last week I went to Michael's for a piece of embroidery fabric, and started a blackwork sampler.  I was so amazed that my local public library actually had two books on blackwork (three, really, although apparently one is missing, as my request for it is still hanging in the ether somewhere), that, really, I could hardly not.

I first worked a simple all-over pattern from Rosemary Drysdale's The Art of Blackwork Embroidery (Scribner, 1975), and then jumped in to the two patterns from Jane Pemberton's smock, charted here by Kirrily Robert, aka "Lady Katherine Rowberd" of the SCA.  Here is the original Holbein miniature again -- this picture isn't as detailed as the one I posted before, but I love the little pearls (or water sapphires?) on the frame, which isn't included in most of the images of the miniature:

Wikipedia reports that her name was Jane Pemberton, later Jane Small, daughter of a Northamptonshire gentleman and later wife of a London cloth merchant, and dates the miniature to around 1540.

And just because I get such a kick out of it, here is the back of the miniature:

These two blackwork patterns are worked mostly in Holbein (or "double running") stitch.

I made a slight modification to the collar pattern as given by Rowberd in that I eliminated the little bar across the end of the Celtic-like ribbonwork between the diamonds -- I thought this made the ribbonwork a little more obvious.  It made the set-up more difficult, in that I couldn't simply work the main diagonals straight across but had to count out where to leave off those stitches.  This picture is how the diagonals look before working the fiddly bits:

I still haven't figured out the "right" way to do blackwork -- if there is only one -- I found another photo of this pattern in progress by someone who worked each section separately.  There is much to be said for that method, as it isn't nearly so nerve-wracking wondering if you've left enough room or counted correctly.  (In fact, you can see in the above photo where I assumed that the diagonal I was working would "bounce"off of the top margin, and I had to pick it out.)  If you get the set-up right, though, it is usually progressively easier to work each element, because you can see where each one sits, as well as how it fits in with the previous elements.

This, by the way, is worked on 28-count Monaco cotton with one strand of black floss, over two threads per square of the chart.  Ragnvaeig's scarlet piece is obviously worked with at least two strands, and is therefore much denser, but I think that color on white linen is just gorgeous.

Here is mine with some of the ribbonwork completed and one on the third of its four passes:

I'm not sure yet if the wobbliness of the lines is due to my amateurishness, or just the nature of the thing, that sometimes the thread gets crowded in the hole of the fabric and sits differently. Luckily, from a distance, you can hardly tell....

And here are the finished collar and cuff patterns:

I actually don't like the cuff pattern much (it looks a bit choppy, I guess), and upon reflection would probably work a line of the ribbonwork on its own for the cuff.  Rowberd details her re-creation of Mistress Pemberton's smock here -- alas, though, without a photo of the finished garment.

And for those who are tired of blackwork, a paper crane that Julia folded one afternoon, to my astonishment and delight --

Here and There

I am currently in the middle of the Lacy Hug-Me-Tight from Tracey Ullmann's and Mel Clark's Knit Two Together.  I have at last got past the Rib of Eternity, and into the fussy bit -- ah me, ordinarily I like lace, and I like knitting lace, but I'm very tired lately, dragged down with an ear/sinus infection, so that it took me 45 minutes last night to do one 12-row repeat, as I kept knitting a row in a kind of stupor and coming out with the wrong number of stitches at the end and having to shake myself and unpick and recount, and in the end I just set it down thinking I might do some colorful fingerless mitts instead, or a sock.

Well, at least I have the liberty of knitting or not, of saying to myself, "oh, I'll just do something quick and pretty!" --

This is Michelle Williams and Shirley Henderson in a scene from "Meek's Cutoff", just out this month.  I've long been fascinated by the Oregon Trail, and this movie looks interesting because of that, because it gives more of a woman's perspective on the journey -- not just the adventure, the Indians, but the long hard slog, the difficulty of preparing meals for your family, of keeping them clean, keeping them safe.  The image has stayed with me for years of a rocking chair left behind at the side of the trail because the wagon is too heavy.

"Olympia"

I found this new-ish Lion Brand yarn at Michael's not long ago -- wasn't sure I liked the feel of it much, being a bit rough, but frankly the dreariness of this colorway appealed to me in its subtlety, sort of greys with a bit of grey-blue here and there like a stormy sky, a bit of grey-green, a bit of grey-brown. I thought almost at once of the Multidirectional Diagonal Scarf, and found that they suited each other very well.  I had to go around to a number of different stores looking for another ball when I realized that two was not enough -- the Pasadena store had two as well, so I finished the scarf with one and now have one left over.

I have not really captured the color to my satisfaction, even outdoors in natural light, but it does seem very elusive even to the eye, so I can't really blame the camera. 

My first thought upon seeing the name of the colorway was this,

which I have to admit seems unlikely.  Possibly this,

although upon reflection it is probably this,