A Bluestocking Knits

She Still Knits!

(I am regularly amazed and delighted at the generosity of miniaturists, in sharing both their knowledge and their stuff.  The lady who gave me the big Golden Lion Inn a few years back phoned me last month and said she is retiring -- from making miniatures, not admiring or owning them, as I'm pretty sure you don't retire from that! -- and would I like to have her stuff?  Of course I said yes.  Among the little treasures were these three House of Miniatures kits and this figure -- even though I don't "do" dolls generally, I got a big kick out of this one, since she looks a lot like me! even the slightly tired smile.)

But yes, despite the volume of not-knitting stuff on this soi-disant knitting blog, which may be excused lately because of the summer heat, I do have a bit of knitting on the go at last, though I confess that it is not only a pair of very plain socks but is in some wool I've had in a drawer for at least a decade, and was orphaned even then, from a stash that came from a yarn shop that was closing and made the rounds of multiple knitters at David's work but nobody wanted this so he brought it home to me.  (Like Maria's homely dress at the beginning of "The Sound of Music" -- "The poor didn't want this one.")

It has been a very long time since I worked a full-sized piece of cross-stitch, but for my birthday I got two sampler charts --

one of the band sampler designs from Long Dog Samplers, whose catalog is filled with wonderful, and wonderfully quirky, things, and a Quaker-style sampler from ByGone Stitches --

also with sentiments very meaningful to me.  I am starting with the "Froth and Bubble" but I was only able to decide between the two by remembering that I have been mooning over that since the spring, I think, and only recently saw the Quaker one.

These are gigantic compared to my usual petitpoint, and since they will have to be worked on a table frame will not only take quite some time but will not be portable -- unlike knitting on a pair of socks!  A bit of handwork for every situation, as they say.  (Don't they?!)

A Pair of (Miniature) Floral Area Rugs

These had me utterly charmed from start to finish.  I first saw the charts in a book of filet crochet patterns, Le Filet Ancien au Point de Reprise V, at the wonderful Antique Pattern Library, and thought, "well, those look just like needlepoint charts!" -- these are on pages 59 and 60 of the PDF -- and the fact that there was a pair made them irresistible.  Who wouldn't want a pair of French floral area rugs on either side of their dollhouse bed?

(This particular book is in APL's "Filet" section, not the "Filet Crochet" section, I don't know why, but then I don't do filet crochet, so perhaps there is something that I don't understand.  There isn't a date that I can see, but AbeBooks and WorldCat citations indicate ca.1917-1920 for the series of at least eight books.)

The charts had some little eccentricities that I discovered as I worked, some of which I changed -- a random white stitch here and there on the roses chart, and I shifted the daisy bouquet up two stitches within the border to center it a little better and smoothed out an obvious jog in one spot on the outside edge -- and some of which I left as they were -- the ever-so-slightly irregular ovals, which are surprisingly (given how easy it is to mirror design elements on a chart!) not symmetrical.  While the asymmetricality bothered me quite a bit at times, looking at the chart, happily I don't think it detracts from the charm of the finished carpets at all.

I worked them in DMC floss 815 Garnet Medium and 712 Cream, on 40-count silk gauze.  I decided while stitching the set of cushions recently that despite conflicting advice ("always use half-cross stitch" -- "never use half-cross stitch"), I far prefer using continental stitch instead of half-cross. 

Half-cross stitch uses much less thread, as your needle is going only from one hole to an adjacent one either horizontally or vertically, while with continental stitch, your needle is going two holes away and up or down one -- like a knight's move in chess.  The resulting piece of needlepoint is noticeably thinner with half-cross, which in miniature scales can certainly make a difference, even in fine cottons or silks.  On the other hand, for myself I find it rather difficult to secure the beginnings and ends of threads under half-cross, since they tend to "sink" down into the weave of the canvas, especially non-interlock ones, and frankly, again despite some experts' very strong opinions, I find that for me the tension and resulting evenness of my stitching is just enough better in continental for it to be worth the slight extra thickness.  And I suppose it doesn't really matter since unless one is being judged at some competition, the petit-point carpet is always seen from the front, but with continental stitch, it's a bonus that the backs can be very tidy! --

It was also a bit of a revelation to me that rounded petit-point shapes can be edged with an edging stitch, at least on silk gauze at smaller scales.  I had heard that it couldn't be done, that a simple folding-under of the unworked canvas was the only option for a non-rectangular carpet, but after I had worked a few pieces on this gauze, it seemed to me that an edging stitch should actually work pretty well, partly because the silk simply folds more easily and sharply than cotton or linen does, and partly because of the extreme flexibility of the fabric itself.  You can see in the photo above how very easily the square holes realign themselves into parallelograms, and they did this even before I clipped the turning allowance.  This means that while you can't use an edging stitch that proceeds in a regular manner, you can fudge it a little, adjusting as you go to get the line to curve -- you can also see above how my stitches around the curves have a little jog every few stitches, where I followed the curve.  It is possible that you really can't do this on linen or cotton canvas, or on Aida or other non-evenweaves, but it is certainly possible on silk gauze.

The "braid" effect of the long-legged cross stitch edging is lost a bit with the uneven distances, so next time I will try a regular whip-stitch -- the coverage is better with the long-legged cross stitch, which I suspected would help disguise the potential bare spots.  It may not be as tidy as an edging stitch on a straight piece -- though that may also be due to my improvising, and so would get better with practice -- but I'm quite pleased with the results.