A Bluestocking Knits

Page Six

Page six completed of the "Quaker Virtues" sampler, plus the now-usual overlapping motifs here and there to help me get oriented on the adjacent pages.  I like the words in dark blue -- I would have liked a brown, to be sure, if it had been an easier thing to choose one, but the dark blue has enough contrast to stand out yet not shout, of course, this being a Quaker sampler (!).  I have since rushed ahead to complete "-MONY" as the unfinished motifs don't vex me as much as the half-word ...

Celestial

I've been urging Laura for some time to find a hobby or two, something creative to reduce stress (to which she is prone, poor thing, but she comes by it honest, as my grandma used to say).  Last week she said, out of the blue it seemed, "Mom, I want to do some cross-stitch."  I nearly fell over.  "Okay," I said casually, "do you have something in mind?"  "No," she said, then gently so as not to hurt my feelings, "I'm not really big on alphabets, though."  "Fair enough," I said, "well, there are a lot of free charts of all sorts of things on the internet for you to get your feet wet, as it were."  A few days later, she said, "I found these on the DMC website," two small vignettes of the Earth and Mars, and Jupiter and Saturn.

I had enough threads already for the Earth and Mars, and so she started with that, the only change being that I suggested a shade lighter yellow for the stars (743 instead of 742).  She picked it up satisfyingly quickly, and to the pleasant surprise of both of us she enjoyed it enormously -- she has shown little interest in hobbies, really, not an interest that "takes," at least.

The chart's Jupiter didn't look quite right to my eye, so I offered to tweak it a bit for Laura, and came up with this --

Laura had already looked up, in the middle of Earth and Mars, and said, "I could do all of the planets, and frame them in a group!" and so I took the liberty of making charts for Mercury and Venus, and for Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.  Since the original DMC charts are free, it seems only right to add mine to what's available for the general public, in case anyone else wants the whole solar system! --

• Stars 743 (a change from the original charts' 742)
• Venus beige stripes 754, pink stripes 760
• Mercury light brown 426, medium brown 420

• Stars 743 (a change from the original charts' 742)
• Pluto 800
• Uranus 798, rings 415
• Neptune 799, spots 800

Page 5, Triangles, and a Handful of Samplers

This is page five completed on the "Quaker Virtues" chart, with a bit extra -- I worked most or all of the large motifs that overlap the page breaks, in order to orient myself on the adjoining pages, and most of the smaller motifs.  There are nine pages in the chart, but luckily for me the three along the right-hand side are less than half the width of their neighbors, and I think the ones along the bottom edge aren't full sheets either.  It is not a particularly user-friendly chart, I'm afraid -- I've quickly become used to the modern charts with an overlapping few rows, which mean that you don't have to keep flipping back and forth between two pages, counting and re-counting to make sure that you're in the right place -- nor does this one even have a darker line every ten squares.  I think that pretty soon I will be drawing in the latter myself, having already had to work a couple of these motifs two or three times after counting wrong!

Still -- I'm enjoying it immensely --

This is the first step in the star quilt for Laura.  I admit that I am already getting a-weary of little triangles -- it is very slow-going and fiddly, sewing these together.  I keep reminding myself that once all of the triangles are together, it's straight lines from there on!

I'm having trouble getting hold of a cream solid fabric that more-or-less matches this cream print -- apparently all of the Joann's stores in Southern California are sold out of all Kona Cotton creams and whites so thoroughly that they aren't even offering it online, and although the word on the vaccines is encouraging it still isn't a good time to go traipsing about to quilt shops (much as I'd like to, she said wistfully), so I've ordered a carefully-curated -- cough-guess-cough! -- trio from Hancock's hoping that at least one will be all right.

I got a pair of miniature sampler kits for Christmas and worked one of them last month, the "Heritage XIX" chart by Annelle Ferguson.  I was so pleased with it -- the one at bottom left, "dated" 1798 -- that I resolved to mount and frame the other two that have been sitting in a box for over a year while I wrung my hands over the possibility of any number of things going wrong.  The other two samplers are the "Boston Band" by Nancy Sturgeon at upper right, and on the left "Southern Heritage" also by Annelle Ferguson (which was a NAME souvenir from a decade ago, that one of my club members gave to me).  I tweaked both of these, eliminating the "V" on the "Boston Band" and shifting the "Z" up to join the rest, in order to add faux initials, and switching out the lower-case alphabet on the "Southern" one for a motto and another faux signature.  I had the dickens of a time cutting the moldings, as even a fraction of a millimeter on one piece of the four at this scale can make the frame out of true, and sometimes it was a choice between a true rectangle or a slightly-too-big rectangle -- you might be able to see that at least once I chose "true"! -- but on the whole I'm very pleased with these, mostly because the charts are so charming!

Knitting in the Movies and TV: "All Creatures Great and Small" (2020)

I am finding the new "All Creatures Great and Small" series a fairly solid B- -- adding in backstories etc. for characters like Mrs. Hall is all right, but a few points off for non-period dialogue that's full of pesky Americanisms (why on earth don't the older folks in the production crew let the writers know that you didn't "call" people in Britain of the 1930s, not even in Britain of the 1980s, you "rang" them?!), and even more points off for rewriting scenes from the book and taking much of the sparkle out of them.  But the cast is excellent, the scenery is gorgeous of course, and in most respects the production values are very good.  And there are lots of knits, many of them handmade! there is that, of course.

Helen (Rachel Shenton) and James (Nicholas Ralph), pretending they aren't flirting.

Tristan (Callum Woodhouse) looking quite louche, as one might expect!

Mrs. Hall's knitting is alarmingly chunky for the 1930s.  Points off for letting her wool roll about on the floor, which I don't think any self-respecting Yorkshire housekeeper would do, but points back for the crochet squares on the table.  I was a bit alarmed that her right hand is over the needle when so very many English ladies at this time and for some years later held their right hand under the needle, but apparently that was a "posh" thing, and so it seems quite likely after all that a country woman would have held it the way Anna Madeley is doing.

Tristan seems to get the lion's share of the hand-knitted slipovers!

Well, this is actually a pretty characteristic thing for book-Tristan, actually ...

A truly splendid Fair Isle-style scarf, in gorgeous colors too!

I don't really know why barmaid Maggie (Mollie Winnard) should be holding a donkey on a rope halter, but perhaps that will be explained later -- what I am interested in at the moment is those very fetching Scandinavian-star fingerless gloves!

I am enjoying watching 1930s and 40s programs while I knit on the Rae slipover for Julia, so it's all good.  The Palette is loosely-spun and a bit splitty, but I'm hoping that most of the inconsistencies come out in the wash -- and it is surprisingly soft even still on the needles.  These are some of the craziest "Fair Isle" patterns I've ever seen, but there is no question about it not being "1940s"!

I couldn't get enough of the "Oregon Coast" in the same dyelot, and I also had a bit of trouble matching the gauge of the single-color bands to the gauge of the two-color ones, so I solved both issues at once by working the single-color bands with two balls of the same color but one each from the different dyelots.  I don't think the difference between the two is quite as apparent in real life as it is in the photo, or perhaps the random-ish alternation is working its magic.

And for a bonus, a flashback to the original series, here with a very young Peter Davison as Tristan -- now that I look at it, the slipover has a rather 1980s look to it in gauge and length! but it is still very charming --

Decisions

As it happened, I went in a different direction from what I had originally planned, which was some shade of brown for the words and letters in the "Quaker Virtues" sampler -- I think it was the little "m" that made me think of just going with the next-lightest and next-darkest shades of blue to the 931 that I'm using for the motifs.  This will make it a bit more Delft or willow-ware like than I was picturing in my mind, but that's not a bad thing by any means.

With the spring weather here seems to come more decisiveness for me -- I felt good about changing my mind to a rather-simpler quilt for our bed, but since there is a lot less solid fabric in a half-square-triangle block than in (proportionately) a Cross and Crown, I had to get more fabrics, which meant rearranging the layout I had already started.  Oh, well -- I'm really happy with the new fabrics.  Like the "Quaker Virtues," this has changed the whole look of the thing, but I think for the better.

I had been putting this off for months, unsure of how well it would work, and -- surprisingly -- dreading having to work with teeny-tiny molding, but the other day I told myself, "Right! get on with it!"  I wanted to make framed "vintage" photographs for my 1:12 carpet shop, but of course they should be glazed, so how to do that ...?  I printed out a selection of photographs to a good size, then glued them face-down to some clear plastic cut from either a box of croissants from Costco or a box of spinach (I tried it more than once).  The glue is just outside each photo, so that it doesn't show.  I painted some tiny cove molding, then cut it to fit each picture, then glued that to the plastic "glazing" with the photo underneath.  After the glue dried, I trimmed away the extra plastic and touched up the cut edges with black paint to hide them.

They turned out pretty well, and the slightly decrepit bits here and there are on a par with the rest of the shop!

And I managed to choose fabrics online! -- always a gamble -- for Laura's star quilt --

Fine Art Funnies

David sent me a ton of these, so I thought I'd share a few -- we could all use some humor these days!