A Bluestocking Knits

Reading Days

Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was a strange and wonderful delight of a book, that as massive as it is I did not want to end but for that if it didn't I would never know what happened.  Her new book is different, and yet the same in that it seems be of a world in which time moves differently.

To my surprise, I don't think I'd ever read this -- Ancient Egypt and Agatha Christie!  It should come as no surprise that both the mystery and the setting are well-done.  The reading is also excellent, by Emilia Fox, who deftly conveys the different characters with individual voices and in some cases accents, that are natural and clear.

Read by the lovely Juliet Stevenson.  I suppose the only "problem" with this edition, other than the dislocation of picturing Mrs. Elton telling Emma's story (!), is that it is too short.  Did I know that it was abridged when I bought it?  I don't remember!

An old favorite, as delightful the umpteenth time as it was the first!

Again, I was looking for old friends, so found myself dipping into this, a few entries before bed.  She sounds very young in 1915.  I'm glad I have the Hogarth edition instead of the simple but rather dull American one -- the jacket illustration just seems to fit so much better.

For something completely different, an old paperback copy of one of Peters' "other" series heroines (not Amelia Peabody, I mean!).  Her writing is a bit pedestrian at times, perhaps, but you read it for the madcap adventures, really, and the almost ever-present archaeology!

To my pleasant surprise, I found when starting this for the DES list discussion recently, that I had not read it before!  It is noticeably more cheerful than the book it follows (Amberwell of 1955), which made it all the more pleasing for me to read, wanting some "comfort books" lately!

And for my "Knitting With D.E. Stevenson" virtual knitalong, here is a Shetland-type shawl from Patons Australia of an undated but pre-decimal vintage at least, free, written out and re-charted in modern terms.  To say more about its presence in the story would give away a plot point, so I won't!

I haven't listened to LibriVox recordings before, but am delving into various options while access to the public library is limited.  I had a hankering for some "Golden Age" mysteries, so chose this one from 1908 (!).  It's a bit disconcerting to find that different readers have recorded different chapters, apparently at random -- I was quite startled to hear, in an American novel set in a small East-Coast village with moneyed summer homes, the "maiden aunt narrator" suddenly cry out in broad Glaswegian tones, and male ones to boot, "'Och, Halsey, whaur ha'e ye bean?!'"  But I find it satisfying to knit or stitch while listening to an audio-book, so shall just remark on the absurdity and carry on!

Knitting Days

Because there is still some knitting going on chez Bluestocking ...

It will shortly be Miss Watts's "Figured Comforter" Mark 2, though, as the first one, while handsome, is far too small.  Miss Watts unfortunately gives no indication of what weight of wool, so I picked a rather fine one -- too fine, obviously.  But I like the pattern stitch, so re-making it is not an effort.

This is FibraNatura's "Shepherd's Own", formerly in its natural cream color, dyed multiple times with Kool-Aid until I got a red that I liked -- unfortunately it took so very many times that I nearly despaired and now I've forgotten which colors I used.  I'm quite pleased with the three skeins above, though a bit puzzled by the marling (marled-ness??) of the one on the left below, and the certainly-not-100%-natural-wool intrusion in the one on the right.  I think I can pick it out without ill effect, though ...

Sewing Days

Now that Laura's quilt is finished, I've picked up the one that was for me, a simple half-square triangles in a selection of rather soft colors, not quite Georgian but nearly.  I have been taken for some years with the quilt in a scene from one of my favorite Jane Austen movies, the 1995 "Persuasion," that little scene where Anne, having just met Captain Wentworth again seven years after she turned him down, is sitting on her bed cut to the quick after hearing that he had said she was so altered he would hardly have known her.  The scene is almost heart-breaking, with Amanda Root's little gesture of touching her face, seven years older, tired and worn-out by her heartless family -- but indeed, I have also noticed the quilt on the bed, a simple thing of patterned triangles alternating with cream ones.  Mine now is even simpler, with its half-square triangles -- and one in Anne's day would no doubt have been paper-pieced instead -- but I shall call this "Persuasion I" nevertheless.  I've got most of the rows sewn, and some of the rows sewn in pairs -- a fairly simple matter, so pleasantly day-dreamy.

David has become very intrigued by hemp fabric, its ecological soundness, and so we bought some pieces and samples from Hemp Traders in Los Angeles -- this is their H-P4 hemp linen (4.6 oz.).  I was thinking that I'd make a shirt for him, though when the fabric arrived I remembered why I dread sewing with linen fabric -- I love the feel and look of good linen, but it's so slippery and wiggly that I feel hopeless at even cutting it, let alone sewing it -- so I made a pillowcase.  I made up for my cowardice by sewing the hem with the newly-discovered triple zig-zag stitch on my 1980s machine.  On the bright side, the pillowcase is very nice, and already softening up with laundering.  I think I will get some linen/cotton blend for that shirt ...

For a long time, I've kept my sewing threads in one of those plastic spindle boxes, which has vexed me the whole time for not being able to accommodate different sizes of spools.  The photo on the box looks so organized with all of those slim Gütermann spools, but I have the fatter Gütermanns too, not to mention the Coats ones and assorted oddities.  If I put one of the larger spools on a spindle, then at least four of the spindles next to it can't be used, which is remarkably inefficient for a thread storage box.  One day last summer, as I shifted things around yet again to accommodate a new spool, a thought slowly dawned on me that a storage rack like a kitchen spice drawer insert would be just the thing -- it could accommodate different sizes of spools, which if you got a new spool would simply slide over to make room for the new one.

He fiddled around in the garage for a while and came up with a prototype, fiddled some more after consultations, then came up with this, which fits in one of the drawers in our tall Chinese chest-of-drawers, home of my yarn stash.  There is a little lip at the front of each tier to keep the spools in place, and the tiers are tilted at just the angle to get both maximum visibility and maximum capacity.

It gives me a very librarian-ish pleasure, I must say, to open the drawer and see the neat rows!

Page 8

Finished page 8 of the "Quaker Virtues" sampler this morning!  The line runs down the center of that big motif just below "SIMPLICITY", with the top of the page through the word itself -- which isn't crooked, I assure you, the fabric is just a little stretched there!  I'm finding a rather surprising number of mistakes in the chart, and not just subjective things like spacing (which I admit to having tweaked here and there), but missing or extra stitches, one of which took me quite a bit of picking-out to fix, since the error was near where I started the particular motif, and I didn't realize it until I got to the next cardinal point.  Oh well.  I'm still enjoying the piece immensely!

Being so very near to finishing Laura's quilt (!), I felt justified the other day in starting a small knitting project (!!) -- having had a conversation with Brittany by way of the comments about Stephen Maturin's comforter, I thought, "well, I must have some suitable wool, let's just see what one of these 'comforters' looks like, eh?"  This one will be the "Figured Comforter" from the 1840 edition of Miss Watts's 1837 book -- about twenty-five years after the events of Desolation Island, but presumably things didn't change overmuch between.  This particular comforter's shape will narrow a bit where it rests at the back of the wearer's neck, then widen out again at the other end.  (I was a bit concerned at first that it wasn't going to lie flat, but once it got a bit of heft behind it, as it were, it settled down nicely.)

This miniature sampler was finished some weeks ago, and again I put off making the frame, had trouble with same, etc. etc. etc.  The chart is the "Heritage VI" by Annelle Ferguson -- I lightened all of the colors by one step, which result usually pleases me very much though in this case I suspect wasn't quite successful, but there it is.  I had great difficulty getting the picture-frame molding mitered properly, so rather than keep wasting it I ended up using plain strip wood (this is 1/8 x 1/4") and "scratch carving" a simple line around the opening to make it look like a home-made frame.  This didn't turn out too badly -- it looks old-ish, at any rate!

I have been reading quite a lot -- I keep meaning to write about that, then find myself absorbed in yet another book --