A Bluestocking Knits

Patience, Indeed ...

This is the "Patience" sampler by Homespun Samplar, which I saw one day not long ago on a Pinterest list called something like "100 Best Samplers of All Time" -- a rather sweeping claim, to be sure! -- and I fell for it instantly.  The blackwork, certainly, and something about the over-the-top-ness of the letters just spoke to me!  The original shade of linen is still available (a Zweigart standard, happily for me), so I managed to get a piece, marked the center, put it in my frame, and dove in.  It wasn't until I was well along the next line of the alphabet that I realized what I had done ...

Long Time, No See

Oh dear, it has been a very long time indeed since I posted anything.  In my defense, my computer -- which was at least ten years old -- has been fading fast this past year, and around Christmas-time the top row of the keyboard just stopped working.  I debated with myself whether to try writing posts without using those letters, and in my younger days I might have enjoyed the challenge, but, well ... no, I just couldn't face it!  (No "e"!  That alone is 12% of the words in English!)  I then got a lovely new laptop that seemed every day to have some different bug -- I still can't print anything double-sided -- and didn't have any photo-editing program.  On the bright side, I was extraordinarily happy in the meantime stitching the "Pomegranate" sampler, despite some at-the-time-horrendous mistakes on my part, and so I was quite content to stitch and make sympathetic noises while David fussed over the new computer.

It wasn't until the third row of the blue alphabet, for instance, that I realized it was supposed to be eyelet stitch, not cross-stitch, so I had to pick it out and do it again.  More poignantly, I had been so very pleased with the overdyed threads, and as it turned out, almost one by one, I thought, "no, that color just isn't working" or "well, there's a bit too much variation in the overdye there," and ended up using only two of the eleven that I had chosen.  I took the above photo just after I decided that the color of the "green" pomegranates was too bright -- and too blue -- and so I picked out one of them and tried a different color --

-- which I liked much better. 

One of the intriguing things about this particular sampler was the satin-stitch border -- quite unusual.  I had a slightly different color of linen than the original, and it seemed to me that the original color was getting a bit lost, and so at the same time that I auditioned some similar shades I also tried O'Steen's tip -- from her book, not unfortunately from the chart for this sampler -- to work it with a single thread run through twice, instead of a double thread, because the two-at-a-time threads have a tendency to twist and overlap each other as you work.  You can see this in the section at the bottom (which is worked in the original color) --

Each of these four satin-stitch areas has two threads per hole, but the bottom one is worked with both of the threads in the needle at the same time, while the other three are worked with a single thread, working essentially two stitches in each hole.  This takes twice as long to do, obviously, but the result was clearly so much tidier that there was no question about which to do!

It surprises me that I haven't taken pictures of the finished sampler yet, but I will do that soon and make a separate post.  In the meantime ...

I said to Julia one afternoon not long ago, "Let me teach you some basic crochet, so that you will always be able to make yourself a supply of dishcloths," and to my pleasant surprise, she agreed.  ("Someday I might want to do some Irish crochet," she said thoughtfully.)  I couldn't find the hook I usually use for dishcloths, so she had to use a size smaller -- I went smaller rather than larger just because the cloths tend to stretch out a bit when they get wet, and we tend to like them a bit snug.  The first one, at the bottom, is single crochet, and the others are double and half-double.  It's kind of funny, because I remember the girls' bits of knitting -- fifteen years ago! -- that were all wobbly and full of holes, and Julia I think didn't even get an inch knitted before she decided that she wasn't interested at all, and now she worked a row or two with me showing her what to do, then she went off by herself and focused intently on it, after a few wobbles at the start keeping the stitches perfectly uniform.  That is what a year or two of making bobbin lace can do for one's concentration and standards!

(That, by the way, is pretty much exactly how I learned to knit, getting the basics from my mom, then going off by myself to work at it until I figured out how to get it all going smoothly!)

My New Year's resolution this year -- yes, the only one -- is to finish my three 1:12 shops.  I don't know why I was so uninterested in them the past few years -- well, not uninterested, it was just that other things were more interesting, I guess -- but there it is.  But to that end, I bought a few new-to-me things to inspire myself, including these little charmers for the tea shop, which are from Old Bell Pottery -- I love that the teapot even has that little steam hole in the lid! --