A Bluestocking Knits

Night Light

"Night Light" quilt, designed by Joy Hoffman (the pattern seems to be more-easily found under its original title of "Shimmer").  I used fabrics from Pam Buda's "Forevermore" and Jeanne Horton's "Country Soiree" collections, augmented by a blue and cream print I had in my stash, and Kona Cotton solids in Delft and Cadet blues, and Bone for the solid stars.  It was both a challenge and fun to make, sometimes both together, and after I settled into a rhythm, I quite enjoyed my first experience of hand-quilting (which is a simple outline of the stars and along-the-seams). 

I think if I were to make this again -- and I wouldn't write off that possibility -- I would be daring enough to try working out how to make that set of star points that uses a pair of half-rectangle triangles with one piece of the patterned fabric, so that there isn't a seam through the middle of it.  I almost wish that the smaller stars were "wonky" too ...

Experimenting PS (!)

I had the niggling feeling that there was some "experimenting" that I was leaving out of yesterday's post, and this morning I remembered two things.

Some time ago I bought a copy of Diana Boston's The Patchworks of Lucy Boston, and admired the quilts -- of course -- but put aside the thought of paper piecing as just too labor-intensive.  Imagine my amused contrition when not long ago I browsed through the book again and thought, "You know, self, I think I'd like to try that after all ...."  It was partly the capability of using "oddly-shaped" pieces that aren't particularly easy to do when machine-piecing (though "odd shapes" aren't usually something that appeals to me), but more just the intrinsically-pleasing effect of Mrs. Boston's quilts that spoke to me, as well as the pleasure that I am taking more and more in "slow" needlework.  You can't really do this kind of quilting by machine.  And so I ordered a small stash of paper shapes, deciding to start with a simple table runner using some William Morris fabric reprints I bought years ago. 

This kind of paper-piecing really is as labor-intensive as it sounds -- you have to baste the fabric to the paper shape, stitch two basted shapes together, then add more shapes one at a time, all by hand -- though it is more the tedious kind of intensiveness, not the exhausting kind.  I must admit, though, that I'm very impressed with the tidiness of the results -- the intersections where my four tumbler blocks meet are pretty much perfect, even from a novice such as myself!  So we will see how it goes ...

There are varying opinions about whether it's okay to dye fabric with coffee and/or tea -- the thought is that the acids in coffee and tea will eventually degrade the fibers in the fabric, and popular knowledge says specifically that tea-dyed cotton will begin to degrade in 30 to 40 years, and coffee-dyed in 75 to 100 years.  On the other hand, some dyers such as R&R Reproductions say that it isn't a problem, that "the acid content in coffee and espresso specifically] has been tested and approved by museums all over the U.S."  Of course, "degrading" is not only subjective in itself -- is that a bit of fuzz here and there, or does the whole thing just dissolve into a mass of loose fibers?! -- but much I'm sure depends on the conditions in which the fabric is kept -- framed (under glass or not), acid-free storage or not, etc. etc. etc.  Anyway, I thought I'd try it on some fabrics intended for samplers and see what the results look like.

This is Cashel cotton on the left and linen at the bottom, both from Zweigart (with its distinctive red selvedge).  Both were dyed in the same batch of cold brew made with Seattle's Best house blend, though with slightly different methods and times, so it was interesting to see that although the linen was in the coffee bath for about a half-hour it is darker than the cotton, which soaked for at least ninety minutes!  Both are a fairly unexceptional ecru in real life, so I suspect that in future I will leave the dyeing to the professionals or at least the more-dedicated-to-it than I!

Experimenting

Well, we might be heading at what feels these days like breakneck speed towards normality, what with now-readily-available vaccinations here in California, but I am still stress-crafting, clearly.  I rarely have less than a half-dozen things going at once, some of them new to me or mostly-new.  Some are things that I've been thinking about for a while, others are admittedly impulsive but no less fascinating.

These two skeins of yarn have been sitting on my dresser since Christmas, caressed now and then while I pondered what to make with them.  I was amused to see the differences in the look of this yarn from skein to ball to knitted fabric -- it is "Gluttony Sock" superwash merino/nylond blend from Forbidden Fiber Co. in the "When Presents Explode" colorway.  I have no idea what these colors have to do with exploding presents, but there it is.

It is now becoming a modified "Camptown Races" cowl -- "modified" because I don't need to change colors, of course!

This is the first time I have encountered "print on demand" fabrics -- it's a bit disconcerting, to be honest, but one must move with the times I suppose, at least occasionally.  This particular selection, from Spoonflower, came out a bit more turquoise than I was expecting, but I was certainly looking for midcentury-modern prints, that is true.  I like them all, but the two on the far left at least are too big for the quilt I have in mind, so that the design would get lost.  I'm definitely interested in the three on the right, but will have to see how they work with screen-printed fabrics, as the feel is noticeably different.

David built two more "Victory Garden" beds this spring, in the patch of sunlight made by cutting down an old tree (both decrepit and vile) in our backyard, and I planted them with vegetables, and at the recent tomato sale at our local arboretum, managed to score five young tomato plants, now residing in our sunny front garden.  This one is "Uluru Ochre".  I haven't had much luck with tomatoes in previous years, thanks to an inordinate amount of suburban wild- and semi-wildlife, but we're trying some (non-chemical, of course) methods of protection, so we'll see how it goes!

The Furrowed Middlebrow imprint of Dean Street Press has just reissued a spate of previously-long-out-of-print Molly Clavering books from the 1930s.  I splurged on three of them, since I had enjoyed Mrs. Lorimer's Quiet Summer and perhaps even more, Near Neighbours (which was a few years ago reprinted by Greyladies, alas now gone from their catalog, though I believe some copies are still available from Anglophile Books).  These new editions themselves are handsomely put-together with covers featuring details from artwork contemporary-ish to the novels -- my only quibble is that, since the text has been re-set, presumably to conserve space, the gutters are very narrow, meaning that to actually read the book puts the reader at risk of breaking the spine, certainly of distorting the covers.  But it's what's inside that counts the most, of course -- so I'm off to read for a bit --