A Bluestocking Knits

"When One is Interested in Everything, Distractions Come Easily...."

Progress on the Faire stockings.  I started these over when after a few inches I admitted to myself that my attempt to use dpns for their "historical accuracy" was more trouble than it was worth -- because although at eight inches apiece my steel 2mm set is long enough for all of these stitches, it is also long enough to poke my hands at regular intervals, get caught in my sleeves, require frequent juggling of stitches to avoid a wobbly line between needles, and just be generally cumbersome -- so I gave in and got out my 20th-century circulars. 

I consoled myself by making this button for my historical-knitting projects this year, since apparently I have a weakness for blog buttons and Girl Scout patches.  On the bright side, the circulars increased my knitting speed by as much as 75%!

I found this on my pincushion the other day -- Julia, I suspect.  A cynical child, but with much more sensitivity than she lets on.

I had a bit of a lost weekend, when I discovered last Friday afternoon that FamilySearch has the Pennsylvania probate records microfilm available online.  It took me a bit of time to figure out the indexing system, and I'm still baffled by the page numbers that run not in a single sequence but a series of them with no apparent reason or -- more importantly -- no note at the beginning of the book to tell the searcher where each sequence starts and stops.  ("So is that the first page 1501, or the fourth??")  But, yeah, I looked up and it was Sunday.  I did not, alas, break down a single brick wall, of which I have a number in Pennsylvania, but I found some interesting things.

Here is a dry-fitting of the kitchen dresser for No.16.  The top section is not glued to the bottom yet, as I haven't done the drawers.  To be honest, I think I'm just going to glue the drawer fronts in place, and not fiddle with working drawers -- I can certainly understand the appeal of working drawers, and I'm not ruling them out in future, it's just that I found myself vexingly klutzy gluing the rest of this thing together, and I would rather just have a pleasing finished piece, and I only want to put stuff on the shelves anyway!  David has been in Shanghai for three weeks, so instruction has perforce been by e-mail, which isn't terribly convenient.

I got a very generous gift card from my in-laws for Christmas, and still had enough on it last week to buy these on Ebay --

The candle-stand and fire-screen came in a single lot, minimum bid $3.99.  I was the only bidder, as it happened, but I still hate Ebay auctions.  I can understand the thrill some people get from it, but it's just not for me: my heart started pounding anxiously even as I was only logging in.  (The first auction I lost, I discovered that they send you an e-mail afterwards with the subject line "Got Away!" and the pictures of what you didn't get, like "what a loser you are!")  The Connecticut table was a "buy it now" and although at $13.99 wasn't as triumphal a bargain, it was a much less stressful purchase!

(How can the 1980s be "vintage"?  This is not possible.)

I made a pair of "portraits" -- not for anything, really, just to figure out how it works.  I found images of a husband-and-wife pair from some online auction house, reduced them to about the right size and layered a cutting circle on top to save myself some fiddling, printed, and stuck them on to these purchased charms.  Perhaps I didn't wait long enough for the glue to dry after this photo -- they seemed stuck to the metal fairly well, but although Mister's "glass" went on perfectly, the one for Mrs. slipped a little and of course the picture stuck to the adhesive on the underside, so that now there is a noticeable sliver of silver showing near her hands.  If I can find another set of the charms, I might take the trouble to do them again, as I've got rather fond of the faces -- unknown sitters, unfortunately.

The D.E. Stevenson list is reading Listening Valley, a story that begins in the early 1930s and follows Tonia, a shy girl with a sparkling older sister and indifferent parents, through the next fifteen years or so of her life.  It is not really a major part of the story, but Tonia has some undiagnosed problem with her hands, making her "butter-fingered", by which her parents are uninterestedly mystified but her sister and Nannie make generous allowance for her clumsiness.  A number of Stevenson characters in other books are seen knitting, but I suppose that this problem with her hands would mean that Tonia doesn't knit herself, but surely Nannie would make this jumper for her, because the quiet and withdrawn Tonia wouldn't have chosen zigzags down the front for herself but Nannie would think they add a little sparkle to her cheeks.  This late-thirties tuppenny Stitchcraft pattern leaflet is a scan from the British Library collection, generously available free from The Sunny Stitcher.

Talking of Yahoo lists, I joined the Petitpointers list the other day, which as you might tell from the name, is for needlepointers in smaller gauges.  The carpet above is my first from Frank Cooper's book Oriental Carpets in Miniature, which I got for a song from a used-book seller.  This is the Shirvan 1 -- even though I am reducing it a bit from Cooper's 18-gauge canvas to 22, it's still going to be easily twice the size of any miniature carpet I've done before, but the picture is really lovely, so I'm looking forward to it.  These are Paternayan wools, wh. I haven't used in an age.

I'm also taking another FutureLearn course, entitled "Literature and Mental Health".  Jonathan Bate and Paula Byrne are teaming up to explore "how poems, plays and novels can help us understand and cope with deep emotional strain".  I enjoyed immensely Bate's "Shakespeare and His World" course -- he's an engaging and level-headed instructor -- and there are already lots of interesting discussions going on in the comments, plus with this first-run course the instructors are commenting and responding to comments as well, which makes it even more appealing.  There was a sort of attempt at the beginning to maintain an air of academic neutrality about the subject, but of course anyone who reads a lot will already feel, fairly strongly I suspect, that literature is a balm in times of stress or depression, so the outcome is already a foregone conclusion.  I didn't know beforehand that the professors would be talking to such luminaries as Ian McKellen and Stephen Fry, among numerous others, so that's a bonus!  I had to rush through another course, finishing six weeks' worth in less than three, in order to clear my slate for the Mental Health one, but I'm glad I did, as it is rather intense and deeply thoughtful at times, even in the first week.

 

Adlestrop

Yes. I remember Adlestrop --
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop -- only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

-- Edward Thomas, 1917

In Which We Go to a Miniatures Show

Julia and I went to our first miniatures show today, since it was quite close to home.  I don't know whether it was big or small compared to the average show, but there were nearly fifty vendors over sixty-some tables, so that it took us a good hour of exploring to look at everything before deciding what to spend our wodge of cash on.  (I had an envelope with me, on the strict admonition that that was all of the budget!)  I bought this charming basket and filled it with mushrooms from Twin Heart, and the Provence-style plate from Hemy & Laura's Miniatures.  The blue-and-white plate was from a "grab bag" bin at a vendor who didn't put a name on her receipts.  Hemy & Laura unfortunately do not have a website, but they have a range of really lovely decorated porcelain plates.

Two copper pans -- inadvertently similar shapes, but the one on the left was from the dollar bins! (“it’s only a dollar! get it, it’s only a dollar!” I kept hearing Julia murmur to herself as she poked through the bins) -- and a mismatched pair of copper tankards, also from the dollar bin.  The pan on the right is from Lilliput Land.

A mash-up from the dollar bin, a tall brass pedestal with the original white plastic bowl discarded and replaced with a clear-blue glass globe also from the dollar bin.  It's about as long as my little finger, so rather tall for a mantel tchotchke but amusing, and a lovely color.

A set of glass jars from Vegas Airs, to be filled with preserves or some such later, and two tiny crocheted dishcloths from an Italian lady at Vilia Miniature (who also has an Etsy shop).  These are only about the size of my thumbnail! they must be made from sewing thread!

The big blue jug in the back is from Rhea Strange, and the two brown ones from Itty Bitty Builder/Betty and Larry Herman.  There was surprisingly little at the show that was not the usual general-Victorian-era, but these I think will work well for my Elizabethan house-to-be.

A charming hand-woven "rag" rug from Jane Graber, and a pair of (non-working) embroidery scissors from the dollar bin, with Julia's pair of full-sized ones for scale.  The rugs were lovely, lots of different colors available, and I could have happily bought more -- this was the smallest one.  Graber also does really lovely hand-thrown stoneware and redware, but apparently sells directly only at shows and by post -- so I will start saving up for next year!

A Small-Patterned Holbein Carpet in Miniature

I haven't been knitting much, I confess, but that is because I've been so charmed by this little beauty, from the wonderful Making Miniature Oriental Rugs & Carpets by Meik and Ian McNaughton.  The style of carpet, which dates from the 15th century, is named after Holbein not because he had anything to do with them particularly, but apparently just because they feature quite a lot in his portraits, such as this one --

which is "Georg Giese" of 1532.

I decided not to fringe my own carpet once I'd seen this 15th-century original, at the MFA website --

which if it isn't the inspiration for the McNaughtons' version, then certainly must be a typical example of the small-patterned type.

I tried the edging stitch that the McNaughtons use, but wasn't very happy with the result, so I worked the long-legged cross-stitch I've used on previous miniature carpets -- but since I know already that in my room setting-to-be, the carpet will be laid over a table, which is how they were used in the Tudor and Elizabethan periods, it needed to be not only as flexible as possible, but to have no canvas showing at the back.  The McNaughtons' plaited edging is worked on the cut edge of the canvas, thus has no extra layer of folded hem, so would have been ideal if I had managed to figure out how to work it, but alas, in lieu of that I had to deal with the hem left by the long-legged cross-stitch, which I did by whipping over and thus covering the narrow but turned-under hem.  This was, I thought, only partly successful, but much of that I suspect is due to my having to fake it, instead of getting the original plaited edging to work perfectly the first time.  Other than that, I'm actually quite pleased with the back, which for a first effort in wool looks nicely tidy to my eye!

(You can see that I was working the red background in the center any-old-way for a while -- on the right here -- then settled into a rhythm, and things got tidier!)

This carpet is worked in Appleton's crewel wool on 28-count Monaco canvas, which is a bit finer than the 26-count canvas in the original instructions.  It is fairly flexible, as needlepoint on canvas goes, but it will need a bit of help to drape realistically over a table, I suspect.

I did not have enough blue wool by quite a ways, and barely enough red, so for future reference, two skeins would be safer of each color than one, especially if working it in the original scale; one skein was plenty of the other three colors.  I used about half of a second blue skein, in fact.  But I'm really pleased with the results -- it's a handsome, well-balanced design in soberly harmonious colors.

There is an interesting article here about the Giese portrait and Holbein and Oriental carpets, filled with interesting tidbits about their history, about which I knew next-to-nothing before this!

Woolly Pretty Things

I suppose that someone has already done a time-lapse series of a needlepoint piece being worked -- anyway, I obviously didn't take a daily photo, but it amused me to imagine the piece just sort of filling itself in, as though it were being worked in the middle of the night by elves or something.

I picked up my "Small-patterned Holbein" carpet after some months of neglect (plus somehow losing the ball of red wool and having to wait for a replacement), and took it with me to a Fourth of July do at a friend's house, and worked on it while keeping an eye on the kids in the pool.  The top photo is the results of that day, which was a pleasing improvement on where it had been since I'd picked it up last, but then I got into the rhythm of it and didn't have to keep looking at the chart, and got quite far.  I've just now finished the first "border" around the center section -- that solid line in a sort of brownish-purple.  There are two patterned borders to come.

The canvas is just a little too small for this wool, as I have to tug rather firmly sometimes to pull it through, and my stitches do not lie as smoothly as I'd like, though that may just be me.  I hope that a good blocking will take care of at least some of that -- I'm afraid the canvas is stretching dreadfully.  On the other hand, much as I'd like to, I can't take all of the responsibility for uneven coverage, when Appleton's provides this:

Oh well.  The colors are a bit deeper in real life -- it is already quite lovely, and will make a somberly beautiful little carpet.

Queen Mary's Other Doll's House

Of course I've known about the famous Queen Mary's Doll's House for quite a long time -- but I didn't know that she had another house -- properly "Queen Mary's Rooms" -- which is now at the V&A.  Far more intimate, this two-room house was made, the museum says, in 1920-24 by David Allan, who was responsible for the textiles and upholstery at Buckingham Palace.  Queen Mary gave the house to the Museum of Childhood in 1924.

The "big" house is amazing and splendid, but to my mind this little one is far more charming!  It's very beautifully made, too, -- look at all of the mouldings around the tops of the walls, and the mitered corners of the sitting-room floor.  I keep finding new details in these photos -- of which there are more on the museum website -- like the family portraits on the folding screen, and the hot water bottle, and the lorgnette on the desk....

Beginning a 15th-century Carpet

I haven't been doing much knitting since the last pair of socks, since I got distracted by this, which is the "Small-patterned Holbein" carpet from Meik and Ian McNaughton's Making Miniature Oriental Rugs and Carpets.  I was a little concerned about it being too big (!) for my Tudor house-to-be, so I'm working it on 28-count evenweave instead of the 24-count of the book -- it's a bit more fiddly, and I have a hard time seeing it sometimes, especially now that the pattern is really filling in, but the more I look at the design and the colors, the more I like it.

This is the first miniature piece I've worked in wool -- of course it will have a different feel to it, but I didn't realize quite how much.  I guess at this gauge the linen is even harder on the wool fibers than a 24-count would be -- I have to be unusually stingy when cutting a length, as it can get worn down to just a few hairs very quickly!

Here are two new things for No.16 that I impulsively put on my wish list, and got for my birthday -- thanks, Mom!  The fishbowl looks a bit odd in close-up because of the bubble in the "water" but it's very charming in real life.  Now I need to get started on a kitchen dresser for the new dishes!

I Finished TWO Socks Yesterday!

Okay, so it was two different socks, not one pair.  My self-congratulation is tempered with annoyance at my losing not one but both sets of notes as to the modifications that I made in transit, so that now I must re-create my own work.  Sigh.

The first was sock 1 of my "Baltic Sea" toe-up Charades, with an only partly-successful attempt to avoid the tight cast-off by working the rib top-down and grafting it to the leg (!).  The photo is also only partly-successful in capturing the color and general air of the sock, which is actually quite pleasing -- I'm afraid I am less and less happy with the Canon PowerShot.

The second is sock 1 of a gussetted-foot school sock using the foot part of the "Barnim-Style Stocking" by Anne DesMoines in the Spring 2014 issue of "Knitting Traditions".  I was using yarn from my stash, so didn't have enough to make the full-length stockings -- hence the "school sock" designation.  Apparently this foot is very like something that Elizabeth Zimmermann came up with on her own, I mean without knowing that there was the historical sock in existence -- pretty clever -- though it seems she didn't use it much after that.  I can't think why, as it's quite comfortable.

Gosh, it's difficult to take a photo of the bottom of your own foot!

In other news, I just got from the library The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton -- was wondering not long ago atal if there are any novels about dolls' houses, and here one is.  It's an imagining of the newly-married Petronella Oortman and the mystery surrounding the cabinet house her rich merchant husband gives her -- the book is inspired, obviously, by the real house, which is now at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  I've not gotten very far into the book yet, but here are some pictures of the house, and a 1710 painting of it by Jacob Appel -- all of the images are from the Rijksmuseum except the painting, which is from the Dutch Wikipedia.  The museum dates the house c.1686-c.1710, so the painting is I assume what the house looked like a little before Petronella's death at the age of sixty in 1716.

 

The "state" kitchen, with its display of blue-and-white china, and the humbler working kitchen.

The "tapestry room".

The reception room, and hall.

The lying-in room, for the mother and newly-born baby to receive visitors; this room was a common feature of Dutch dolls' houses of the period.

The maids' room, with linens hanging from the rods on the ceiling.  Apparently the little room at the center is a peat loft -- for storing, and keeping dry, I suppose?

The bedroom.

"It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!"

Hurray!  School starts next week!  Maybe I'll actually manage find the time to post on my blog!

Well, I can't blame it all on being busy, though that's a big part of it.  The weather has been so awful and hot and humid that when we're not running around to tennis camp and Girl Scout service projects and clarinet lessons and whatnot, we collapse in sodden little heaps on the floor in front of the nearest fan.

So what have I done this summer?

I picked up a long-neglected pair of socks, and thought I was doing really well, but set it down one day and promptly forgot all about it.  Love the yarn, though -- Shepherd Sock in "Baltic Sea," alternating strands on every other row so that it absolutely will not flash or pool.

I made a set of puzzle blocks for No.16, to instructions in Christiane Berridge's Victorian Dolls' House Projects.  Mine aren't quite as successful as they might have been, because although I love the Rackham illustrations, the detail in them at this scale tends to get lost.  I tried to pick simpler ones I thought would reduce well, but there it is.  Anne Shirley is just getting started with Rapunzel, it looks like, but she's got a block wrong at the top.

I read Miss Buncle's Book, and chose for my "Knitting with D.E. Stevenson" virtual knitalong, this pretty 1930s jumper from Dee's etsy shop nostalgiarules -- it's perhaps a little more Elizabeth Wade than Barbara Buncle, with the frivolous ties! but I can see her wearing this while lunching with Mr. Abbott.

Laura decided that she wanted to go out for tennis in her upcoming freshman year in high school, so she's been taking lessons at the local tennis center.  She's had really only a month to prepare -- after never having played tennis at all bar lobbing a few balls around with a friend -- so she was a bit dismayed when the high school's tennis camp started and she began to realize how much farther ahead most of the other kids are, but good for her, she's sticking with it.  We had borrowed a racket until she decided whether or not she was really interested, but bought a fairly-new used one on consignment at the tennis center, just at the same time that Grandpa dug out his old rackets from the basement.  Grandpa's basement is tidier than most people's houses, certainly ours, so the rackets are in great shape for being thirty or forty years old, but isn't it interesting to see how much they've changed over the years?!

I took the girls on a tour of the big Goodwill facility in Santa Ana, as part of the Good Turn for Goodwill service project that is new here in Orange County.  It was really amazing -- I had no idea of the sheer scale of it.  What a great opportunity for the girls to see what a service project really can do for their community -- not only how their donations get resold or recycled, but that the people working there, the ones that smiled at us and said hello every time we passed, are some of the ones that Goodwill is actually helping, right there, right now.

Elizabethan Squares

Here is another miniature carpet, called "Elizabethan Squares"; like the Long Flowers Panel, it is from Sandra Whitehead's book Celtic, Medieval and Tudor Wall Hangings in 1/12 Scale Needlepoint, but with three major modifications, one Whitehead's suggestion and the others mine.  I wanted a carpet instead of a wall hanging, since it isn't for my Tudor-house-to-be (because they didn't have carpets on the floors at that period), so I added in another pattern repeat at one end to make it longer, and I used Whitehead's alternative color scheme instead of the original pinks and creams.  The other modification was to work it in cross stitch instead of tent, as I generally feel that single-stitch diagonal lines in tent stitch always look a bit off to me, unsymmetrical, whereas in cross stitch they look the same whether they are heading upwards or downwards -- the strong black diagonal lines in this seemed to want more symmetry to my eye.

I made only one permanent mistake on the chart, on some of the 0 shapes inside the squares, but by the time I noticed it, it became a design element (!).

The fringe is a side-by-side Turkish knot one -- I used the chart in Meik and Ian McNaughton's Making Miniature Oriental Rugs & Carpets, which is essentially the same as the side-by-side knots here.

On 28-count Monaco, this carpet as modified works up to a finished size of 4 3/8 x 3 inches (11 x 7.5 cm), not counting the fringe.

I wasn't quite as successful with the long-legged cross-stitch edging this time -- I don't know why.  Maybe just because the white canvas stands out more between the navy threads?

I also tried something different with the hem, using mitered corners instead of folded ones.  Not sure if this is the best way of going about it, but I really love mitered corners, so I just get a kick out of it.  They didn't fold quite as well as I would have liked, but the Turkish knot edging needed a little bit of cheating on the turn to lie flat, and I suppose that canvas isn't as helpful as something lighter would be.

I enjoyed working this carpet very much -- the original colorway is very pretty, but the stronger blue-and-ginger really speaks to me.

Tiles and Some Shelves

I thought this corner of the kitchen in No.16 looked very bare even with the new sink, so the other day I made a tile backsplash using a wonderfully simple tutorial from Eliza at Wasting Gold Paper.  You print out on watercolor paper the appropriately resized pictures of the tiles you want, cut them out, apply artists' gloss medium, then install where you want them.  The hardest part was just getting my printer to feed the watercolor paper through!

I was thinking Delft, of course, then saw this Mexican Talavera tile somewhere and kept coming back to it.  I did lighten the color about ten percent, to keep it from jarring too much, but one of the reasons I like it is that I think it cuts the sweetness of the rest of the house a bit.  It's easy to get too cute with all of that Victorian pink. 

I didn't make a dedicated gluing board like Eliza did, but used a long 5/16x5/16 inch piece of scrap wood which I stuck to the kitchen table with reusable putty, then stuck the tiles-to-be onto the stick with a small ball of putty each.  This worked perfectly, holding everything firmly then went back into the jar/scrap bin for another time.

At 0.67 inch, these tiles are slightly larger than true 1/12 scale, but this way they fit the space perfectly.  I cut a piece of watercolor paper to size -- made sure that it fit -- then glued the tiles to the paper, before "installing" it above the sink.

You can see how the watercolor paper adds a bit of texture to the tiles.  I was a little worried at first that they would be perfectly smooth, since when I brushed it on, the medium self-levelled after a few moments -- you can see this starting to happen in the photo of the tiles on the stick -- but as it dried, the medium took on some of the texture of the watercolor paper.

This was so fun and worked so perfectly that I want to make hundreds -- thousands! -- of tiles now.

The shelves are from instructions in Venus and Martin Dodge's The New Dolls' House Do-It-Yourself book, where the house itself is from.  The one above the sink is obviously very simple, a piece of wood the right size and two pieces of the cornice moulding left over from building the house.  (A lot of things in the dollhouse fell over in the earthquake we had a few weeks ago, and now I'm a little heavy-handed with the museum putty, I see!)

The second is a little hanging shelf, which I'm pleased to say that I cut all myself, except for the curve which David did on the bandsaw, free hand.  I stained the plank shelf with some very ancient Minwax I found in a corner of the garage, and painted the hanging shelf with FolkArt acrylic paint in Sterling Blue.

The preserves are from Timeless Minis, which I got through KitKraft a few years ago.

Here is the sitting room, now with some things I got in Hong Kong -- two large jars and a folding screen -- and a few more pieces of furniture, with the Anne Shirley doll from Avonlea Traditions --