A Bluestocking Knits

Remaking the Green Jerkin

This morning I finished replacing the sleeves of David's Tudor jerkin with wings.  When I made this three years ago, I didn't think to put in some extra ease to accommodate the shirt sleeves, which are rather voluminous -- so the jerkin was always snug in the arms, which was not only a little less than comfortable in itself, but a little warmer in Southern-California-Elizabethan climes than David quite liked.  He didn't complain, as it happens, but when I offered to remake the jerkin, he said, "Yes, please!"

First, I carefully picked out all of the stitching and removed the sleeves.

Since I needed just the one pattern piece and I am still not very good at drawing curves freehand, I scanned the pattern from the Tudor Tailor book, cropped it to the surrounding gridlines, then resized the image so that each square was more-or-less one inch, and printed it out.  Luckily, I had scraps of the same fabric exactly the right size!

I folded and pressed the new wings, pinned them into place -- made sure they were symmetrical -- and sewed them to the armholes.

I graded the seam allowances this time, which I hadn't before as it was only the one turning of the outer fabric and lining each, but now it's three layers of the outer.  Since I'd clipped the lining quite a lot around the armhole curves, I had to press all of the little resulting tabs, because they were more than a little wonky after three Faires and laundering, but I wanted to understitch the lining, and so it needed to be fairly smooth.

That was the easy part -- then I pinned the lining and outer fabric back together at the original fold lines, with a lot of pins, and sewed it all up by hand.

The wings look a bit newer than the rest of the jerkin, but I'm sure this won't last long!

Understitching was a must, since despite a thorough pre-washing, the unbleached muslin I used as a lining fabric shrank more after sewing, and some of the hems are pooching rather unattractively.

I couldn't seem to find any information about historical methods of understitching, so I just worked a line in a zig-zag, so that what is visible are the zags, as it were -- thought it might hold down all of the little clips in the lining seam allowance better than just a straight line, but also I rather like the little slants!

There will be some more fiddling with this jerkin, as the Venetian hose (sort of ur-trousers) stay up not with a belt but with "points" or ties to the inside waist of the jerkin -- I'm not sure yet if I'm going to just tack on this eyelet-infused lacing strip or take the waist apart altogether to sew it in, and take the opportunity to fix that saggy hem at the same time.

What is the difference between a doublet and a jerkin?  Not much, to be honest, but the Tudor Tailor calls this a jerkin, in both of its forms, viz. with sleeves or without.  The Renaissance Tailor says that a jerkin is much less fitted than a doublet, which makes sense in light both of the Tudor Tailor's pattern's shape and in the jerkin's frequent appearance in period clothing as a garment worn over a doublet.

Woollen Caps ("Muts") Worn by Dutch Whalers at Smeerenburg, 17th century

From 1979-1981, an archaeological expedition at Smeerenburg, on Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, uncovered the remains of a nearly-mythological Dutch whaling station in operation from 1619 to about 1657.  The expedition was apparently somewhat deflated to find that the station was no larger than about sixteen houses and eight blubber-boiling stations, not the bustling metropolis of 10,000 residents with shops, churches, and (of course) brothels they had been led to expect (Nansen apparently had much to do with the exaggerated claims of Smeerenburg's size) -- but there was, poignantly, a cemetery with a hundred or so graves, and I suppose due to the conditions so far north, much of the clothing of the occupants was very well-preserved.  Here are ten knitted caps from Smeerenburg graves, which caps are all on view in the Rijksmuseum today.

Above, NG-2006-110-2, ca.1650-1700, about 61 cm x 30 cm h.  Knitted cap, double, in striped wool with ear flaps and a folded edge.

"The Whale-Oil Refinery near the Village of Smeerenburg" (1639) by Cornelis de Man (accession no. SK-A-235).  De Man did not actually travel much farther north than Denmark, but created this painting of Smeerenburg (literally "blubber-town") in his studio at home from a Danish painting of a Svalbard whaling station and from other images.  (Here, a whale is being carved into smaller pieces and rendered in vats on the beach at left, and the men's barracks can be seen at right in the background.)  Perhaps tellingly in light of the fact that de Man was never at Spitsbergen, few if any of the men in his painting are wearing caps like the ones found in the graveyard --

-- but there is certainly a wide variety here as well, from black burgher's hats to the rather-Mongolian one on the portly fellow in the foreground at right.

I can't seem to find much readily-available on the archaeological finds at Smeerenburg, only a brief mention in the Wikipedia article on the archaeology of Svalbard as a whole, except for a distractingly-interesting article from ScienceNordic, and another from the Basement Geographer.  But knitted caps, that's what I was talking about.

"Muts" is specifically a knitted or crocheted cap in Dutch.  Many of these Smeerenburg caps are knitted in two layers -- obviously for warmth, although the Dutch whalers only rarely wintered there, and apparently not in great numbers even then.  It is pretty cold in Svalbard, with average high-summer temperatures of 3 to 7° C (37.4 to 44.6° F) -- the Rijksmuseum writes in each of their captions that the men were bundled up so tightly against the cold that "[they] recognized one another only by the pattern of stripes on the caps".  It isn't clear, though, from the descriptions, if the caps are double-knitted or simply knitted and then doubled.  Most of the caps are fulled to some extent, which certainly would make them thicker and warmer.  The variety even among these ten is impressive, though there is definitely a "family resemblance" among some.

By the way, a number of these ten caps are noted as having "earflaps" but not a single photo shows what I would call earflaps, so it isn't clear what is meant, and images from various travelers' blogs of the caps on display, on short hat-stands, show nothing more than what is in the photos here, so if anyone can elaborate, I would be grateful!  Presumably they are something like the ones on a cap at the V&A (acc. no.1570-1901) ca.1500-1550, which could be folded up inside the cap.

NG-2006-110-10 ca.1650-1800, about 58 cm x 23 cm h.  Knitted cap, dark blue with horizontal stripes, in chunky wool.  At the bottom edge, the stitches are reversed, so that the right-side of the stitches shows when the brim is folded (bij de rand is de procedure omgedraaid en zitten de tricot-steken aan de binnenkant).

NG-2006-110-5, ca.1650-1800, about 60 cm x 25 cm h.  Knitted cap with double ear-flaps (sic) and folded brim, in fine dark-brown wool, with a small "tail" at the top.

NG-2006-110-12, ca.1600-1800, about 48 cm x 24 cm h.  Knitted cap in green wool with horizontal stripes and blocks in dark and light brown, with ear flaps.  The turned-up edge is about 5 cm deep.

NG-2006-110-3, ca.1700-1800, about 60 cm x 28 cm h.  Knitted cap in fine wool, with ear flaps, striped in red, blue, green, black and light brown, with an inner cap also striped.  "Each part [i.e. the outer and inner caps] has been cut at the top and sewn together" (elk deel is aan de bovenkant ingeknipt en vastgenaaid).  The gauge is 45 rows per 10 cm, presumably after fulling.

NG-2006-110-6, ca.1650-1800, about 60 cm x 24 cm h.  Knitted cap, double, with ear-flaps, in a chunky ikat-striping wool.

NG-2006-110-8, ca.1740-1760, about 64 cm x 33 cm h x 29 cm d.  Knitted cap in fine wool with horizontal stripes in red, green, blue, yellow, and white, lined with a (much thicker) light brown knitted cap.  The inner cap is apparently much smaller than the finer outer one, so that the top of the outer one falls to one side "and the whole therefore looks a bit like a nightcap" (en het geheel lijkt daarom een beetje op een slaapmuts).  The gauge of the outer cap is 55 sts and 100 rows per ten cm, and it was cut and sewn from a piece of flat knitting.

It isn't clear if the Rijksmuseum dates these from other evidence in the burials or from the caps themselves; this one is obviously a step above some of the rougher of these caps, but I don't know if that can be assigned to improved manufacturing techniques or fashion changes, or simply because this one was brought from home where, say, the ikat-striped one above was knitted perhaps by the whaler himself.  (Nor does the museum explain how a whaling station that was abandoned by 1657 could have a grave with goods dated a full century later, though other sources admit that some of the Rijksmuseum caps may have come from another Dutch station.)

NG-2006-110-14, ca.1642-1800 [sic], about 65 cm x 23 cm h.  Knitted cap in fine light-brown wool, double, with ear-flaps and a folded brim.  The brim is about 4 cm, 2 cm when folded, and has two blue stripes on the inside.

NG-2006-110-1, ca.1650-1700, about 52 cm x 22 cm h.  Knitted cap in light, fine wool with a folded hem and a small "button" at the top. 

NG-2006-110-4, ca.1700-1800, about 30 cm x 26 cm h.  Knitted cap with earflaps, knitted in fine multi-colored self-striping wool.  Much repaired.  The inner cap is knitted in light brown, and the two parts are sewn together.

I find it really charming that each of these caps has a unique character, and yet poignant at the same time to think that the caps were buried with their wearers, who must have each had as unique a character as his cap.

Mount TBR

I noticed the other day that the stack of books by my bedside is almost all either books I haven't even started to read yet, or got only part of the way into before something -- something bookish, something parental, something woolly, I don't know -- distracted me.  So I decided, thinking it would be amusing, to walk through the house making a list of the books that I own that I haven't actually read yet.  Of course I've heard the joking reference to "Mount To-Be-Read", but this morning I'm rather ashamed to find that my personal mountain is less like the photograph above, and more like this one --

There are all sorts of excuses, of course -- I've added a number of free titles from the Gutenberg Project and others of that ilk to my Kindle faster than I can read them, I pick up things that look interesting from the remainder shelf, I buy up series from going-out-of-business sales, I buy titles from authors I've read previously and like, I get Christmas and birthday presents, I just have lots of interests.  A good portion of the books on my list were for essays in college, when I was taking classes about women artists and Victorian literature and doing my senior project on feminist literary criticism -- a number of the books I browsed and made use of, but did not actually read from start to finish.  Some on my list are related to family history -- the Swedish history, obviously, but also the coal one and the German villages one.  One at least -- the O'Brian -- I keep wistfully putting off because I want there to be an Aubrey/Maturin story I haven't read already.

It's somewhat comforting to find that I am not the only one with a massive stack of unread books -- there is even an ongoing challenge (in its fourth year, so you can see how perpetual it is) at Bev's blog "My Reader's Block" with different mountainous attainments for however many books you want to finish --

Pike's Peak: Read 12 books from your TBR pile
Mount Blanc: Read 24 books from your TBR pile
Mt. Vancouver: Read 36 books from your TBR pile
Mt. Ararat: Read 48 books from your TBR pile
Mt. Kilimanjaro: Read 60 books from your TBR pile
El Toro: Read 75 books from your TBR pile
Mt. Everest: Read 100 books from your TBR pile
Mount Olympus: Read 150+ books from your TBR pile

I am somewhat consoled to find that my own list of a hundred and seventeen books is, though high, at least not at the very top, but as Bertie Wooster would say, I hardly know whether to laugh or weep.  Does it put things into perspective that 117 is probably less than a tenth of the books in the house?

Ackroyd, Peter. London : the biography.
Ackroyd, Peter. The Tudors.
Bailey, Anthony. Standing in the sun : a life of J.M.W. Turner.
Beauman, Nicola. A very great profession : the woman's novel, 1914-1939.
Benjamin, Melanie. Alice I have been.
Benson, Clara. The mystery at Underwood House. (Kindle)
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare : the invention of the human.
Brownstein, Rachel M. Why Jane Austen?
Burney, Fanny. Evelina, or, The history of a young lady’s entrance into the world. (Kindle)
Browne, Ray B., and Kreiser, Lawrence A. Jr. The detective as historian : history and art in historical crime fiction.
Brook, Timothy. Vermeer’s hat : the seventeenth century and the dawn of the global world.
Chesterton, G.K. The complete Father Brown. (Kindle)
Christiansen, Rupert. The Victorian visitors : culture shock in nineteenth-century Britain.
Crosby, Alfred W. The measure of reality : quantification and western society, 1250-1600.
Cunnington, C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington. The history of underclothes.
Delaney, Frank. Ireland : a novel.
Dickens, Monica. The house at World’s End.
Dickens, Monica. Summer at World’s End.
Ekirch, A. Roger. At day’s close : night in times past.
Englund, Peter. The beauty and the sorrow : an intimate history of the First World War.
Finlay, Victoria. Color, a natural history of the palette.
Fossier, Robert. The axe and the oath : ordinary life in the Middle Ages.
Freese, Barbara. Coal, a human history.
Gaskell, Mrs. Ruth. (Kindle)
Gaskell, Mrs. Sylvia’s lovers.
Gaskell, Mrs. Wives and daughters. (Kindle)
Gladwell, Malcolm. David and Goliath.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespeare’s freedom.
Greer, Germaine. The obstacle race : the fortunes of women painters and their works.
Greer, Germaine. Shakespeare : a brief insight.
Griffin, Susan. A chorus of stones : the private life of war.
Grudin, Robert. The grace of great things : creativity and innovation.
Hardy, Thomas. A pair of blue eyes. (Kindle)
Henry, O. Selected stories of O. Henry.
Heyer, Georgette. The black moth. (Kindle)
Hutton, Olwen. The prospect before her : a history of women in Western Europe, 1500-1800.
Ilich, Ivan, and Barry Sanders. A b c : the alphabetization of the popular mind.
James, M.R. Ghost stories of an antiquary. (Kindle)
Jekyll, Gertrude. Old English household life.
Juster, Norman. A woman’s place : yesterday’s women in rural America.
Kennedy, Annie E. and Bidwell, John. Dear General : the private letters.
King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance.
Kingsnorth, Paul. The wake.
Kohn, Alfie. The brighter side of human nature.
Kurlansky, Mark. Salt.
Lendon, J.E. Song of wrath : the Peloponnesian War begins.
Lerley, Merritt. The comforts of home : the American house and the evolution of modern convenience.
Levi, Primo. Other people’s trades : essays.
Lorénzen, Lilly. Of Swedish ways.
MacArthur, T.E. The volcano lady : volume 1, a fearful storm gathering.
Macdonald, Anne L. No idle hands : the social history of American knitting.
MacGregor, Neil. Shakespeare’s restless world.
Marshall, H.E. Our island story.
Masterson, Martha Gay. One woman’s west : recollections of the Oregon Trail.
McCall Smith, Alexander. The novel habits of happiness. (Kindle)
McCall Smith, Alexander. The revolving door of life. (Kindle)
Moberg, Vilhelm. A history of the Swedish people. (2 vols.)
Mortimer, Ian. The time traveler’s guide to Elizabethan England.
Mortimer, Ian. The time traveler’s guide to medieval England.
Morton, Kate. The forgotten garden.
Muir, Frank. An irreverent and thoroughly incomplete history of everything.
Novik, Naomi. Uprooted.
O’Brian, Patrick. 21.
Pargeter, Elizabeth. The brothers of Gwynedd. (Kindle)
Porter, Roy. English society in the 18th century.
Potter, Lois. The life of William Shakespeare : a critical biography.
Power, J. Tracy. Lee’s miserables : life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox.
Ransome, Arthur. Great Northern?
Ransome, Arthur. Pigeon post.
Ransome, Arthur. Secret water.
Ransome, Arthur. Swallowdale.
Ransome, Arthur. We didn’t mean to go to sea.
Ransome, Arthur. Winter holiday.
Richardson, Henry Handel. The getting of wisdom. (Kindle)
Ruck, Berta. The boy with wings. (Kindle)
Ruck, Berta. The disturbing charm. (Kindle)
Rybczynski, Witold. Home : a short history of an idea.
Sackville-West, V. Country notes in wartime. (Kindle)
Schama, Simon. Dead certainties : unwarranted speculations.
Schama, Simon. A history of Britain, vols, 2 and 3.
Scheer, Teva J. Our daily bread : German village life, 1500-1850.
Schlink, Bernhard. The weekend.
Schultz, Gladys Denny. Lady from Savannah : the life of Juliette Low.
Scott, Franklin Daniel. Sweden, the nation’s history.
Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz.
Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, marriage, and the law in Victorian England.
Shapiro, James. 1599 : a year in the life of William Shakespeare.
Smiley, Jane. Charles Dickens.
Spufford, Francis. I may be some time : ice and the English imagination.
Stabiner, Karen. My girl : adventures with a teen in training.
Stevenson, D.E. Five windows.
Stevenson, D.E. Found in the attic.
Tanner, Tony. Prefaces to Shakespeare.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity fair.
Thirkell, Angela. Pomfret Towers.
Thompson, Flora. The illustrated “Lark Rise to Candleford”.
Tillyard, E.M.W. The Elizabethan world picture.
Tinagli, Paola. Women in Renaissance art.
Tomalin, Claire. Samuel Pepys.
Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers. (Kindle)
Trollope, Anthony. Dr Thorne.
Trollope, Anthony. The last chronicle of Barsetshire.
Trollope, Anthony. The warden. (Kindle)
Turner, Thomas. The diary of Thomas Turner, 1754-1765.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. The age of homespun.
Unsworth, Barry. The songs of the kings.
Ustinov, Peter. Dear me : a memoir.
Vickery, Amanda. Behind closed doors : at home in Georgian England.
Vickery, Amanda. The gentleman’s daughter : women’s lives in Georgian England.
Visser, Margaret. The rituals of dinner.
Wainwright, Alfred. Westmoreland heritage.
Warner, Marina. Monuments and maidens : the allegory of the female form.
Welty, Eudora, and Ross Macdonald. Meanwhile there are letters.
Wickersham, Joan. The news from Spain : stories.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little house in the Ozarks : rediscovered writings.
Wiley, Bell I. The life of Johnny Reb, and The life of Billy Yank.
Wilson, A.N. The Victorians.

Well -- I don't think I will actually sign up for a challenge officially -- I think I know myself too well for that -- but now that I can see them all written down like this, I will make a concerted effort to read a good many of these before the year is out.  (I was going to say, "before I buy any more" but, well, I think I know myself too well for that!)  I also must say that I don't really like the idea of churning through a list simply to be able to cross things off, and so I am in no hurry.  Besides, I am already in the middle of two new books, Ruth Goodman's How to be a Tudor and Helen Simonson's The summer before the war -- but after that, I know there is a lot of good stuff on this list, so I've no reason to put it off any longer.  I have a bit of a hankering for something funny, so perhaps Frank Muir?  (Does anyone else sorely miss "My Word" on the radio?)  Though I must admit that both Pepys and Turner are very tempting, since I already know that their biographers are excellent writers, and I've been looking forward to reading these ever since they landed on my shelves....

The two photos are "Stack of Books" from the Ann Arbor Public Library, and "Books in a Stack" by Evan Lawrence Bench, both reusable under Creative Commons with credit.

A Banner Day

I took the time from David's Faire stocking this morning to sew up a banner for our Girl Scout International Day (a.k.a. Thinking Day) this weekend.  Our girls are putting it all on this year, from planning to clean-up, and as the hosts they are representing not a country but the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, or WAGGGS for short.  I was astonished to find that there is apparently no such thing as a WAGGGS banner for sale, not even for ready money, so homemade felt banner it is.  After ten years (ten years!) of summer day camp, I've had a bit of experience with glued-felt banners and, while they're great for a week, they can get a bit ratty-looking after a while, and you can't really store them easily as the glued areas are difficult to fold, and so I offered to sew it, so that the banner can be re-used year after year.

I got an outline image of the logo, and made a "poster" in Publisher, with "WAGGGS" underneath, and printed it out for the pattern, then the girls cut out all of the felt pieces and pinned them into place.  I used felt from a bolt for the blue background and the trefoil symbol, as I wanted them to be all one piece.  I sewed the inner trefoil pieces to the blue circle, then the large yellow outline to both the blue circle and the black banner, since it was so much easier to sew the fiddly pieces to a comparatively small piece than to the big banner.  It took most of the morning to sew, and that's without mistakes (!), but to be honest, this was much quicker than I expected it to be!

(The wobbly bits are the girls' pinning, and the ripples are mine.  I certainly have more respect now for people who can appliqué circles!  Even with felt, the pieces tended to wander under the presser foot.)

As for knitting, I'm afraid that I could have been a lot further along with this stocking if I hadn't been so charmed by that miniature Shirvan carpet!  Since David is away again to Shanghai in a few days, I turned the needlepoint face-down and resolved to knit like billy-o this past weekend -- as a result, I turned the heel yesterday afternoon, and am now about two inches into the foot gusset.  I decided on the so-called Barnim foot, as I like the pair I made for myself, and this type of stocking foot was known in Scandinavia in the early 1600s, so that if David wants a Faire persona, he can stick with the Swedish soldier.  I can get more knitting in while I wait for Julia at the orthodontist's this afternoon ...