A Bluestocking Knits

Kurdistan Prayer Rug in Miniature

I have been utterly delighted with this piece from start to finish, I admit.  It has always been one of my favorites in Frank Cooper's book -- Oriental Carpets in Miniature -- and so it was a pleasure to add it to my queue at last, and then to work it, and even better, to have something charming to make in these worrisome times.

Here again is the late 18th-early 19th century original now in the McMullan Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (accession no.1970.302.8) --

I think Cooper did a fine job here, reducing and (necessarily) simplyfing the design without losing any of its charm.  It is my good luck that he worked his version on 18-count canvas, and that converting that to 40-count silk gauze -- which was only a matter of my using a different fiber, one strand of DMC floss instead of Paternayan crewel wool, and converting the colors -- makes the rug a more-delicate scale for 1:12 miniatures, and very like the original proportions of a prayer rug.

For colors, I used these --

• dark blue 3750
• medium blue 931
• light blue 3752
• ivory 3033
• red 815
• green 523
• gold 680
• yellow 422
• coral 3722

The green and light blue are very pretty but together their value is so similar that it isn't easy to distinguish them, so perhaps a darker green might have been better -- though on the whole, I don't think it spoils the effect at all.

I worked mine in continental stitch, which I find makes a neater back and an all-around more pleasant experience than working half-cross in tiny scales!

This has always been meant to have pride of place in the carpet shop, so the next thing is to install it!

On the Needles

This is the back of the DROPS 118-26 vest/waistcoat/sleeveless cardigan/thingy, for which I decided to use the Knitpicks Palette that my mom decided she didn't want any more.  I started this a while ago, then waffled about it, then decided the other day to carry on.  I got down to the lower edge of the armscyes, shushing the inner voice that said "it's too small, something isn't right," then laid it out like this and knew at once that it is indeed far too small.   Part of that, to be sure, is that between "a while ago" and "the other day" I forgot which hook I used to work my gauge swatch, and then picked up the wrong one -- smaller, of course -- but part was that the instructions do indeed tell you to work 5cm before beginning the increases for the bottom of the armscye, when clearly 5cm is nothing in the world of armscyes.  I decided that, joy of joys, I am confident enough to adjust a crochet pattern to fit me, and so in looking around for some advice about shaping armscyes and coming across Elinor Brown's article and the calculator linked therein, I worked out that I need to have 5 inches, not cm, before (because it is worked top-down) beginning the increases.

And so the piece in the above photo was ripped out and re-worked into this -- which is the right front, instead of the back, being a smaller piece to work before I judge whether the alterations will be sufficient --

I figured that since I was ripping it out to modify the pattern anyway, I might as well shape the shoulder while I'm at it, so I worked a graduated set of SC, HDC, DC, and TC across the 17 sts of the first row (to be worked in the opposite order for the corresponding back shoulder). 

And in knitting news -- because, glory be on this knitting blog, there is some -- David asked for a ski-helmet liner for his birthday, so I've got the beginning of one on the needles.  I can hardly bear to confess how many stitches I've had to ladder and pick back up in the proper direction because I'd purled instead of knitted here and there, but it was a lot.  Oh well, dark green wool in distracting times! there it is.

Tiled Shop Front

Well, I'm much happier with this! 

Per my experiment, the tiles are made of watercolor paper painted with FolkArt Milk Paint ("Pirate Black," rather unsuitably!), "glazed" with Mod Podge in the satin finish.  They aren't perfect, obviously, but a great improvement on the previous attempts.  The tiles are individually glued to a piece of drawing paper, pre-folded and trimmed to fit over the corners and molding, then the whole assembly glued in place.  I didn't get the edges quite as flat as I would have liked, but there it is -- perhaps from a bit further away than these photos are, it won't be so apparent!

I will probably age it a bit, though not as much as the carpet shop as that is meant to look somewhat run-down, while this is "newer"!  Still, it should probably have a bit of dirt here and there ...

I am amused to find that I am becoming much more nonchalant about re-making miniatures -- I wanted to put a fireplace on one wall of the tea shop, and fell in love with the shape and reasonable price (especially with a coupon!) of this Tudor-esque one --

which has a very simple-yet-handsome arch, but wasn't quite what I had seen in my mind's eye.

Not that a Georgian-ish/early-Victorian shop would originally have had an Elizabethan fireplace, of course, but let's say some recent owner of the shop was loitering around an architectural salvage yard (as one does) and came across a small one, either Elizabethan or Revival, that would fit in a tiny shop -- well, I would buy it!  I didn't really care for the Houseworks fireplace's sandstone color, when what I was picturing was more limestone, like Little Moreton's above, or even better Dorney Court's, and so I decided to paint it. 

The best grey I had turned out to be the same one I had used on the interior of the carpet shop, with some aging and soot in dove grey, brown, and black.  I might actually put a bit more "smoke" on it.

(The pink vase looks huge, but actually it is the fireplace that is really very small -- you can tell by the relative size of the 1:12 chair!)

Granny Square Sampler Afghan!

I just realized that I haven't written this up yet, so I "borrowed" the lawn next door for a quick photo session this morning, and here it is!  This is of course the Granny Square Sampler Afghan, following the project led by Blair Stocker in 2012.  (There is also a Flickr group, for more inspiration.)  I really enjoyed this, and learned a lot about crochet -- which was the point, after all. 

There are two different join-as-you-go methods here -- one (demonstrated here by Annette of My Rose Valley)  that is more-or-less adding another round of granny clusters to a square but instead of working a chain st or two in between, reaching up to work one of those ch sts through the ch space in the square you are joining to, and another method (demonstrated here at Carina's Craftblog) in which you work another row of granny clusters but alternate attaching it to the bottom square or the top square, essentially flipping every other cluster "upside down".  I like both of these methods, but I think that with my "crazy" layout, the "flipping" one was much more efficient, and so after joining two sets of four squares with the former, I found myself using the latter method for pretty much everything else.  I think I made it a bit harder on myself by joining the squares free-form, as there are a number of slight wobbles all over, due to fiddling the number (or size!) of clusters, but wool, bless it, blocking disguises any number of irregularities.  If I do another of these -- and why not, it's a great stash-buster, and would certainly never be boring -- I will probably use Adaiha's tutorial for joining squares of different sizes.

I didn't use one of the squares Blair did, and added in some, including "Nana's Latte Square", which I will definitely use again (I love the soft neutrals in solid squares, in the photo from PDKlein on the Ravelry page). I really liked the Granny Wheel Square, so much that I made two in quick succession -- it's interesting how a color change can give a quite different effect.  The "little bit of white" in single crochet on my first one (now towards the upper right corner) isn't really enough, but the speckly line is not uninteresting.  The other "new" square is Granny On Point.  Inadvertently, I didn't really follow the instructions, because I was looking at a photo of someone else's square in the Granny Sampler photo pool at Flickr at the same time, and found myself, to my later amazement -- I don't crochet! really! -- following the photo as though it were a chart of instructions.  It's that light-bulb moment, when after months of not understanding what you are doing or quite what you're looking at when you've done it ("is that a double-crochet or a triple? wait, how do you make a half-double, where's my cheat sheet ...") things finally begin to make sense.  I used different borders on each of them, because I could.

For the edging on my afghan, I used the brilliantly simple variation on granny clusters by Jacquie at Bunny Mummy, which she calls Double V Edging.