A Bluestocking Knits

Two "New" D.E. Stevensons!

The D.E. Stevenson community has been abuzz for the past few months with the debut of two lost novels, Emily Dennistoun and The Fair Miss Fortune, both published this month by Greyladies of Edinburgh.

Emily Dennistoun was originally titled "Truth is the Strong Thing". There is no date attached to it, but it seems to have been written in the late 1920s, then put away and never published. I have to admit that if I had written this, and then, say, Mrs. Tim of the Regiment, I would have stuck this in a drawer and tried to forget about it as well. It is surprisingly overwrought for a Stevenson, even a serious one -- which she does now and then -- although, to rather curious effect, the dialogue at least often has her usual light touch. The plot is a "typical" Stevenson one in which a quiet, reserved heroine, under the thumb of a tyrannical parent, falls in love unexpectedly and must suffer several changes of fortune and twists of plot until we find out how exactly -- for the outcome is never in doubt -- she is rewarded with happiness in the end. With Stevenson, like Vivaldi, it is the journey, not the arrival, that is what makes things interesting and often compelling. Emily Dennistoun is not, though, I regret to say, Stevenson at her best. There are a number of editorial inconsistencies that I expect would have been fixed if she'd meant to publish it, and the prose is very Mills-and-Boon.

"Emily's soul was in tune with the storm, she suffered with it, suffered as only those can whose art lives upon their nerves like a hungry animal.  Suffered all the more because she was gentle and sweet in every-day life.  She was like the quiet pastoral English country that smiled in the sun.  The storm came to her heart and roused its slumbering rage, changing the familiar scene to a nightmare of madness.  What did it all mean -- where did it come from? Whither was it going?"

I have to say, though, that I did really appreciate that the heroine is not young -- in her early thirties for the main part of the drama -- and that the hero is not some dark and brooding Rochester-type, but tall and ugly with bright red hair. I think that it takes a bit of courage to buck the trends when one is starting out as a novelist, so I give Stevenson credit for that.

The Fair Miss Fortune, however, is classic early Stevenson. It was written around 1937 -- and was rejected by Stevenson's then-publisher as "too old-fashioned". (Stevenson replied bemusedly, "I am old-fashioned.")  Charming heroines -- two of them, identical twins, which was the publisher's kick against the story ("it's been done") -- likeable heroes, characters of both supportive and hindering stripes, misunderstandings, sparkling and easy dialogue, all of Stevenson's hallmarks.  One doesn't like to bandy the word "delightful" about too often, but this one probably deserves it!

And here are two knitting patterns to go with them -- for Emily Dennistoun,

a sensible 1920s jumper, don't remember now where I found this. Plain garter rib, yet with hidden depths in the differently-colored trim....

and for The Fair Miss Fortune, from around 1935, a flirtatious ruffled dress of Moorland Tweeds wool -- with "that English flair" so essential, we think, for a D.E. Stevenson knit-along.

A Princess Rosalina dress

I am very late in posting this, which was a Halloween costume for Laura, but since I want to keep a record of my sewing -- such as it is -- for an Elizabethan costume for myself, I will recap it here.

Some of the boys in Laura's class decided that they wanted to do a mass Super-Mario dress-up for Halloween, and they asked Laura if she could dress as Rosalina (good heavens, there's a whole Super-Mario wiki!).  Laura, still with touching faith in my sewing abilities after the Pilgrim costumes I ran up for her and a classmate in first grade (all straight seams with an elastic casing at the neck, to be covered with already-made white collars), said, "Oh, my mom can do that!" and so after thinking to myself that it would be good practice for the Elizabethan one, I said I would.  Two weeks' notice, mind you!

We went to the fabric store and I chose this pattern to adapt, as the neckline was the closest I could find, and the sleeves would be fairly easy to make a little more bell-like --

I bought swathes of white costume satin for the underskirt and trim, and they happened to have some lovely acqua satin with sparkles -- I was aiming for more costume satin, but as it turned out, this was a lucky find, as the sparkly stuff had much more body to it, and was easier for me to sew, being much less slippery than the costume satin.

I made a full underskirt, not sure why now.  Partly the petticoat effect, certainly, and since I intended all along to make the bodice and skirt with that Empire-effect as in the Rosalina illustration, I figured that it would hang better to have the underskirt go all of the way around.  This would probably have been much easier if I'd had more experience altering patterns, but as it's all a blur to me now, it apparently worked fairly well.  And, well, yes, partly because if the dress had been for me, I would have wanted a full underskirt -- the feel of it is wonderful as you walk!

I did make a muslin before cutting the satin.  I still always get that "oh, I don't need to take all of that time" feeling in addition to "what a waste of fabric!", but it's really worth it, especially with such extensive alterations of a pattern.  I did the muslin hip-length, though, with no fastenings at the back other than pins and marks to myself where the zipper would go.

All of the seams are French.  This took more time, but I think was worth it as the satin would have frayed quite a lot otherwise, especially the plain one.  I didn't finish the edges at the zipper and they look dreadful on the inside already!  (In fact, you can see a little poof of it in the photo of the back below.)

The collar is a complete invention, done mostly free-hand, with the neck edge following the bodice pattern.  It is doubled for more body.

The cuffs were comparatively simple, done free-hand following the pattern for the sleeve edge after adjusting for a fairly emphatic bell shape.  I doubled the satin like the collar for more body, and also so that the hem wouldn't show as much; if I'd been a better seamstress, I would have turned the side seam to the inside, but that would have involved a) planning further ahead, b) more time, and c) hand-finishing, so I didn't.

The bodice was very difficult to get to lie flat, and I had to take it out and re-sew it more than once.  I'm still not entirely pleased with it, but time was running out.

The trim around the bottom was theoretically fairly simple, but proved to be quite a hassle.  The satin was very slippery, and despite careful measuring I still managed to cut it wrong, so that some of the turnings were hair's-breadth close.  I sewed the upper edge to the skirt with the machine, turned it under at the bottom hem, and finished it by hand.  The inverted-V at the front never did lie flat, even with heavy pressing.

After that, the accessories were easy.  The bodice pin is sparkly stiff white felt from Michael's, with a big jewel on the front and a safety pin glued to the back.  The sceptre is yellow craft foam glued to a piece of dowel painted white, with more jewels.  The crown is the same sparkly white felt -- double thickness both for stability and to have a place for the seams to be glued to -- with large gems all around.

I have to say that Laura looked a picture of loveliness.  The color suits her very well, and she is tall and slender, so that the line of the skirt was very regal on her.  Plus of course it twirls!

Now --

Girl Scout quilt

Here is my first batted quilt -- I finished (eventually) two "Turning Twenty" quilts for the girls (to be blogged shortly) without batting so that they could be used year-round here in sunny Southern California.

These fabrics are from the Girl Scout collection by Robert Kaufman -- last year's assortment from Hancock's, or possibly the year before (oof).  I was going to make another "Turning Twenty" but the fat quarters shrunk so much that it wasn't possible with the bundle I had to get the right size blocks out of them, so I just cut everything into 4x4 squares.  I was a little intimidated by the batting, but it actually went together very easily, and I machine-quilted along the seam lines so that the fabric shows off better.

I don't know why now that I got it into my head that I could save time and fabric by making the back and binding in one piece, but I did -- I cut the back a few inches wider all around than the top, folded the hem edge under, then wrapped the "binding" around and top-stitched it down (finishing the mitered corners by hand).  It did go fairly easily, but since I didn't have a very big quilt in the end, I was being a bit miserly and folded the "binding" a little too skimpily, and the top has been popping out in places, necessitating hand-mending.

But it has seen a week of day-camping and an overnight weekend and sailed through without a scratch, so I'm quite pleased!

Gymkhana Bag

I've made I think four of these tote bags already, very simple and handy.  This is one of matching bags (one has black webbing handles and the other brown) for the girls, who are horse-crazy, in two fabrics from Makower UK, Gymkhana Showground on the outside and Gymkhana Rosettes for the lining.  Big enough to take for a a sleepover at Grandma's.

Blackwork Sampler

I finished my blackwork sampler from the class at the Renaissance Faire. 

I have worked needlepoint and cross-stitch before, so the fact that you work blackwork motifs in segments was not entirely unfamiliar to me.  You want to do this because if you work each motif, say the little "wishbones" in my sampler, on its own, the thread will lie in different directions.  (For knitters, this is the same principle behind not only the obvious K2tog vs. SSK, but also in the more subtle variations on how to work the SSK, the loops lying differently depending on the way that it is worked.)  So with blackwork, basically, you work all of the little dashes along one edge of your pattern, turn the work around, do the next line of dashes, perhaps the angled ones this time, turn the work, do the next segment, and so on.  Medallion motifs and so on are on the same principle, although with more pieces of the pattern worked before you go on to the next step.

The class was pretty good, especially because I was the only one signed up that day and thus got the instructor's undivided attention.  For your thousand pence (because, marry, it's the Ren Faire), you get a square of 11-count Aida cloth to work practice stitches, needle and thread, the sampler backing in 18-count Aida (a bookmark kit by Charles Craft from Jo-Ann's), and a hand-out, plus of course the instructor for an hour to get you started.

There are actually two different kinds of blackwork: one is the counted kind, worked in short, straight segments which result in a geometric angularity to the design, and free-stitched black work, with a more curvilinear look, and which is really simply embroidery in a single color, usually black.

The first picture is my sampler as it was when I came home:

There are two separate strands of thread because the instructor had me stop working the second angled leg, and start adding in the last straight leg, so that I could see how the pattern would look.

I worked the second border and then picked a center pattern that would fit between the two.

I had a very difficult time figuring out how to read the chart.  It has numbers all over it, obviously some sort of sequence, but with numbers missing.  I had had a little introduction to these charts from the instructor at the Renaissance Faire, but in my case a little education was probably worse than none at all.  Although there is plenty of information on how to do blackwork on the internet, these numbered charts don't seem to be standard, and there is apparently nothing on how to read them.  After no little time of trying to understand what went where and how, and not getting it at all, I gave up in frustration and went off to do something else.  Some time later, I thought of my old "Golden Hands" set, and looked up blackwork.  There was a single two-page spread, which was actually not much help as the project was "easy to work from the photograph" and had no chart at all, but the diagrams somehow sort of began to make sense, and so I picked up the numbered chart again.

Apparently -- and someone please correct me if I'm wrong! -- you simply assume some of the numbers, that some are, as it were, "innies" and some "outies" and you only get the "outies" numbers.  Believe it or not, this way of looking at it actually helped, and while I may not have been working it "correctly", I got into the swing of it fairly quickly after that.  It certainly looks like the illustration! so I can't be too far off.

Here I have worked the first half of the center motif -- again, you work part of it to the end, then turn around and work your way back, sometimes three or four times.  The "wishbone" border took five passes, although (amusingly) the more complicated lozenge pattern only two, but with back-stitches.  Here I accidentally left off the extra lines on the first star and didn't notice until two or three along, so I left it in as a "design element", planning to make the last one to match.

But then when I got to the end of the first pass, I found that I had badly estimated the spacing, and it was unbalanced enough to disappoint me greatly, so I picked it all out and did it again, also fixing the first star.  "If it's worth doing", and all.  I got this far the second time when I saw the mistake which positively leaps out at me now.  First person to spot it gets a prize -- oh, I know, two virtual weeks at the Royal School of Needlework!

So I finished the thing, and carefully snipped the black thread in the middle of the mistake and picked out four or five stitches on either side of it, and reworked them with new thread.  You'd never know.

Here is the back, in all its sorry glory.  The border at the bottom is the one I worked at the Faire -- you can see that for one thing, once I got home I didn't remember in what order I'd done the parts of the "wishbones", and for another, it was much better the second time regardless, and I got into a good rhythm.  (The wobbly lines in the top border are the woven-in ends, and at the right is when I careened off the reverse for a moment until I got my balance again.)  I found that it was a lot like knitting lace, that I was kind of humming to myself "over two, under three -- over two, under three -- over two, under three" on down the row.  The lozenge motif started off very awkwardly and the back was all over the place, but it actually didn't take me very long to see how it was fitting together -- I'm still not at all sure I understand the numbered chart, but after a while I didn't really need it -- all that knitted colorwork stood me in good stead, I guess.  The back of the blackwork here is the second try, of course, so it looks much tidier.

The instructor recommended Donna Kooler's Encyclopedia of Needlework for an introduction to blackwork as well as dozens of other different kinds of embroidery, and Mary Gostelow's Blackwork and Rosemary Drysdale's The Art of Blackwork Embroidery for more in-depth stitches and patterns.  Online, the Blackwork Embroidery Archives has many lovely patterns for free, but little how-to information for the utter novice.

And because I can't resist, here are some contemporary examples of blackwork:

Jane Seymour, by Holbein, ca.1537.  Rather restrained blackwork at the cuff edges of her smock.  I wonder if the little black dashes around the neck are some kind of blackwork edging?

Jane Seymour again, by the workshop of Holbein (apparently a copy of the first portrait but with a different smock and undersleeves).  Even more restrained blackwork than the other, but look at that pleating on the undersleeves!

Bess of Hardwick by a follower of Hans Eworth, ca.1550s, and no, I don't know why it says "Maria Regina" as this certainly isn't the pinch-faced Mary.  Red blackwork, and lots of it -- even on the ruffles!

The only commoner here, Mrs. Pemberton, whoever she is, by Holbein, ca.1535-40.  A pretty blackwork collar and cuffs on her smock.  Someone has worked out a chart for this smock and made a lovely copy.

Mary Tudor, by someone called "Master John".  The blackwork is not especially clear in this image, but it is apparently the freehand kind, not counted like all of the above examples.

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.