A Bluestocking Knits

Queen Stitch ad Infinitum

Carrying on with the Border of Endless Queen Stitches.  They look quite pretty, once they're done. (Sigh!)  The title of the previous post made me dig out The Serial Garden, wh. I had bought (without ever having read it myself) for the girls years ago on the recommendation of some list of quirky books for children -- Laura apparently wasn't interested at the time, and Julia, who I would have thought more likely to appreciate the sang froid with which the Armitage family, especially siblings Mark and Harriet, meet the surreal events that occur -- usually on Mondays, "but not always Mondays, and not only Mondays, or that would get a bit dull" -- read a few stories and put it down in favor of something else, and was never again tempted to pick it back up.  I thought that the book had been weeded from the girls' shelf -- and I had read only the first couple of stories! -- having searched high and low for it to no avail.  I was quite relieved to find just recently that it hadn't after all, and have been enjoying the rest of the stories very much over the past week or so.  (I already had a fond memory of Aiken because of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, which I now must dig out and re-read ....)

Yes, But Today's Tuesday

This band of the "Virtue" sampler is getting worked in stages, a few threads of each color at a time: first the light-green "arcade" and adjoining leaves as I come to them, then the very-dark green ditto, adding the stems and tendrils, then the purplish grapes, and lastly filling in every other grape (why every other? I don't know, I've been tempted now and then to fill all of them ...), with queen stitches.  Darlene O'Steen is the queen of queen stitches -- strewth, there are queen stitches all over this piece!  Grapes, flowers in the central field, dividing bands worked horizontally, that border -- thirty-nine flowers, each made of forty-five queen stitches!  I don't even want to do the math.  I like the way the finished queen stitch looks, but it's a bit of a pain to work, as for me it takes two hands to get it to lie flat.  Oh well -- this is one of my favorite charts ever.  (Not that I'm resistant to a bit of tweaking.  I came to that dividing band between the two parts of the small alphabet and thought, "wait, just crosses? Darlene O'Steen did a dividing band in plain old cross stitch?!" and I worked it in Montenegrin, because there isn't any in this chart at all!)

These are O'Steen's original colors, all DMC, though I must say they look noticeably darker in real life than in the photograph on the cover of the chart!  I like the fabric a lot -- there was no suggestion for it, and so I chose this 32-count “Milk Chocolate” from xJudesign, a lovely soft brown with a bit of depth from that hint of mottling.

I have not given up knitting, though it may seem so at times from the lack of it here -- it occurred to me not long ago that I am actually running short on knitted socks (!), and so I dug out some KnitPicks Stroll in "Mountain Pass" that was a years-ago gift (thanks, mom!), and cast on for "Petty Harbour".  The pattern is fairly simple, though I admit that the dark-green of the yarn makes it hard to see which row I'm on, and I'm having to check off each row as I go.

A Quaker Pin Keep Ornament

I'm embarrassed to say that I've had these photos for a year and not written up the post -- so here it is. 

I wanted to make something for my choir director -- she quilts, and so I didn't want to quilt something for her just yet ... and so I thought of these Quaker-style pin-keeps that quietly show up around the interwebs now and again.  It didn't need to be all from my stash, but it turned out that I could, and so it was frugal as well as plain -- also very Quaker.  This seemed an entirely fitting quotation for a choir director and musician --

This was testing colors.  The "Shepard's Blue" has a lot of purple in it (pretty, but not the effect I wanted), and "Blue Jeans" is a handsome mid-range blue, but I went with "Brethren Blue" (the wrapped one).  "Collards" and "Schneckley" were my first choices for green and gold, respectively.  "Lancaster Red" is definitely more scarlet than "Williamsburg Red," which has a slightly muted note to it, but I went with "Old Brick" since it played well with the other very-saturated choices.

The assembly is a bit fiddly, but fairly straightforward.  Between the mat-board round and the needlework are two layers of cotton batting, just to give it a bit of softness.  The needlework is gathered around the edges with small stitches, then inveigled onto the mat-board round, and stitched across the opening to keep it in place.  I don't much like the idea of glue on needlework, and so I whip-stitched the two rounds together.  The stitches are covered with a narrow ribbon, and glass-headed pins stuck in at regular intervals to hold the ribbon in place.  (Historically, you could actually use this as a pin cushion, lining them up all around the edges.)

I was very pleased with how this turned out -- although I would rather that it was a bit smaller, this was the fabric I had, and the design and the beautiful colors are very pleasing.

I'm happy to share this chart, which also has finishing instructions (though without pictures) -- Download Pin Keep 1 (Make a Joyful Noise)