A Bluestocking Knits

Red, White, and Blue

We're off to Girl Scout Day Camp -- the theme this year is "The Red, White, and Blue"!  See you next week!

Mountain Garland Redux

Marie asked in a comment the other day what the whole mountain garland plant looks like -- pictures being worth a thousand words and all, here is one.  It does spring from the ground in a single long stem, not a clump.  Now that it's getting bigger -- nearly knee-high -- new stems are branching out from the main stem.  It's a lovely, willowy thing, tall and slender, with the flowers held high above the leaves -- so pretty in a mass, I would think.

Speaking of a thousand, Marie's comment was the thousandth on this blog!  Many congratulations, and a little something will be winging its way to her shortly!

Thoughts on Roza's Socks

Done! she cries in triumph.  These took a month exactly to knit, but for some reason it felt like forever.  Perhaps it was that I set them aside in despair for a week, after I misplaced my notes -- found as I was beginning the second toe, behind the couch, which was not where I'd left them, I assure you.

I modified the pattern somewhat, to accommodate a larger foot than in the original -- I added an extra brioche rib repeat, so there were 6 more sts to contend with when it got down to the heel.  This wasn't terribly difficult, but I did also have to realign the placement of the brioche rib on the instep as well, since 3 of those extra 6 sts had to go on the bottom of the foot and it didn't line up the same way as the original.  I also worked the leg to 7 inches, instead of the 8 specified, as the rib at the top was very tight even just one inch higher (the brioche is much stretchier than the plain rib), and I lengthened the heel flap to fit better on a high instep.  The toe seems rather narrow as written -- I would (will?) change this for my own pair.

All in all, I like the pattern very much and will add it to the list of things to make for myself!  Hope my sockpal is pleased, too --

Sazor socks -- Rozas inside-out!

Field of Flowers

We have a very large pine tree in our backyard, planted smack in the middle some seventy years ago, now about eighty feet tall and home to various squirrels, birds, and perhaps a possum or two, as well as a deliriously long-reaching swing.  The drawbacks of it are, obviously, pine tar spots on the deck and unsuspecting bare feet, a constant carpet of needles, and that the canopy reaches literally from one side of our property to the other.  But when I saw this seed packet at the market a few months ago, I thought, "Shade? we've got that!"

The girls and I had a grand time, then, poking holes in the earth and dropping a pinch of seed into each -- by the time we'd gotten about halfway through the large packet, I thought, "oh, well!" and simply flung them into the air to fall where they would.  I haven't done a thing to them since, except for watering now and then in a dry spell, and we've been rewarded with a veritable flower meadow.

We haven't seen the forget-me-not and baby-blue-eyes varieties yet, nor I think much of the self-heal and blue pimpernel -- curiously enough, all blue -- nor the foxgloves, but the yellow button daisies (Chrysanthemum multicaule) are just starting to open -- you can see the yellow dots in the top photo -- and about two-thirds of the others are well in evidence.

These charming things, which I'd never heard of before, are mountain garland (Clarkia unguiculata), in a variety of purple and pink shades.  Lots of the sweet alyssum (Lobularia maritima) in the background, freely reseeding itself for the past few years -- patches of dichondra (D. micrantha), too, amusingly, from some long-forgotten lawn I suppose.

The packet says only Shirley poppies (Papaver rhoeas), although the red one hasn't got the black underpinnings of the Shirleys, and there are many more colors than simply red.

The bees are happy to see them, too.

Toadflax or "baby snapdragon" (Linaria maroccana) --

and tiny columbines (Aquilegia hybrida).

I probably should thin things a bit, as they are living in each other's pockets, as it were, but the charm is the accidental posies, here with some of the pale blue Virginia stock (Malcomia maritima) just underneath.

Booking Through Thursday: Encore

Booking Through Thursday asks this week,

Almost everyone can name at least one author that you would love just ONE more book from. Either because they’re dead, not being published any more, not writing more, not producing new work for whatever reason . . . or they’ve aged and aren’t writing to their old standards any more . . . For whatever reason, there just hasn’t been anything new (or worth reading) of theirs and isn’t likely to be.

If you could have just ONE more book from an author you love . . . a book that would be as good any of their best (while we’re dreaming) . . . something that would round out a series, or finish their last work, or just be something NEW . . . Who would the author be, and why? Jane Austen? Shakespeare? Laurie Colwin? Kurt Vonnegut?

David asked me last night, "Where are your mystery books?" and I pointed to a shelf in the living room.  He was gone for some moments, then came back with not a mystery but Master and Commander, the first in the novels by Patrick O'Brian chronicling the adventures of Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin in the early 19th-century English navy, and basis for the brilliantly atmospheric if somewhat hodge-podge movie of the same name.  We sat together for a while, David reading and I knitting, but I kept glancing over at his book, and before long put my knitting away and picked up The Nutmeg of Consolation, fourteenth in the series.  Why I've left it so long, I can't say -- it's been two years at least since I read the previous book.  What was I thinking?

I was rewarded nearly at once by this, as the marooned sailors take a respite, from their hard work of building a schooner from the wreckage of their frigate, in a game of cricket:

"What Stephen did not fully appreciate was the degree of pleasure that Jack took in this particular ceremony.  As a captain Aubrey was exceedingly worried by the shortage of food and marine stores, particularly cordage, by the near absence of powder, and by the coming total absence of arrack and tobacco; but as a cricketer he knew that close concentration was necessary on any pitch, above all on one like this, which more closely resembled a stretch of white concrete than any Christian meadow, and when he came in second wicket down, the yeoman of the sheets having been bowled by the sergeant of the Marines for a creditable sixteen, he took centre and looked about him with an eager, piercing, predatory eye, tapping the block-hole with his bat, wholly taken up with the matter at hand." (p.11)

A masterful paragraph.  It conveys something of Jack's charisma as a leader, his dedication to his men, his attention to detail (when it concerns his ship, at least) and his sportsmanship and raw energy, with a nice touch of humor, and also something of Stephen's obtuseness when it comes to cricket (shadowed by his even greater denseness when confronted with naval terminology, which despite knowing umpteen languages and impossibly arcane minutiae of medical and zoological terminology, not to mention having spent by this time some dozen years at sea with Jack, remains a blank to him).  And it is of course, bar the opening line, all one sentence.

("Nutmeg of Consolation" is an honorific carried by the Sultan of Pulo Prabang (in the South China Sea), who features in the previous book, whose title is borrowed by Jack to christen his newest vessel, "a tight, sweet, newly-coppered, broad-buttocked little ship, a solace to any man's heart" (p.80).)

Patrick O'Brian died, alas, in 2000, and I am reading the fourteenth book in a series of twenty (twenty-one, if you count the one unfinished at his death), but even though I can console myself with the thought that I can certainly read the whole canon over again from the beginning once I've finished, there is a certain wistfulness that there are no more to be had.  One of the things I appreciate most about these novels is that despite the nearly-interminable amount of naval jargon, it isn't really necessary to know much of it.  One can infer from context that a topgallants are a kind of sail, and so on -- and more information can be found at The Gunroom and the aptly-named Guide for the Perplexed, or in any number of O'Brian lexicons -- and quite a lot is explained to Stephen as things go along! -- but even lubbers such as myself can simply enjoy such passages as this, "Royal masts were sent up and their sails were set upon them, very fine and delicate canvas too; and since the wind, a good steady topgallant breeze, was now abaft the beam, studdingsails too made their charming appearance, four on the weather side of the foremast and two on the main, with a crowd of staysails; spritsail and spritsail topsail, of course, with all the jibs that would stand, a noble array.  Presently skysails flashed out above the royals, and all hands watched the water rise high at the bows, sink to the copper abaft the forechains and then race hissing along her side, leaving a broad wake behind, stretching straight and true to the west by south" (p.110), which creates a fine picture in the mind's eye but does not hinder the storyline if rigging is a mystery.

Well, I could go on, but this post is quite long enough already, I suspect!  Suffice it to say that I recommend these books highly as brilliant and entertaining historical novels, with great depth of characterization and elegant prose.  Cracking good reads, too.  Give you joy, as Stephen Maturin might say, if you've yet to discover them!

Progress --

The first rule about adapting a sock pattern to a different size is to keep extensive notes about the changes you make, so that you can repeat them exactly for the other sock.

The second rule is not to lose your notes.