A Bluestocking Knits

A Suit for Bel

Oh, it's been so long since I've knitted that I completely forgot to participate in my own virtual knitalong!  Here, then -- better late than never -- is my newest contribution to "Knitting with D.E. Stevenson," for my recent re-read of Fletchers End.  The book was published in 1962, and I had to take some time finding a pattern that would suit the classic "shrinking violet" character of Bel Brownlee, née Lamington.  I doubt that Bel -- unlike, perhaps, her friend Louise -- would throw herself into Swinging Sixties fashions much, and so this modest-yet-au-courant suit works rather well for her.  (I don't think that a metallic Christmas tree is at all Bel's thing, though, so to that fellow leaning out of the window we'll just have to say, sorry, that will not do!)

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!

Summer Reading

I was sitting here some weeks ago thinking suddenly, I need to read more, and so I pondered for a while what to choose.  I decided that it was time, after a great many years, to reread the Narnia books, and though I finished Prince Caspian with a sigh of pleasure and my hand was reaching, metaphorically, for Dawn Treader, it occurred to me that there were six volumes of Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" series on my shelf still utterly unread.  I had picked up Swallows and Amazons at our beloved local children's bookstore, and enjoyed it very much, enough that when the owner decided to retire and was selling off her stock at half-price, I went over and bought all of the rest of the series that she had -- and yet, there they sat on the shelf, for years.  And so I thought now that they would be just the thing right now, in these difficult times when one wants children's stories with plenty of adventure but the assurance of a safe homecoming at the end.  It had been long enough that I thought I should read the first book again, just to get the sail filled, as it were, and I enjoyed it just as much as the first time around.  But I have to say that, while the first book is certainly good, Ransome really hit his stride as he went on.  He clearly knows his stuff, both boats and the Lake District in which many of the stories are set, and better still, he has that rather rare ability to write from a child's perspective that makes you forget that he isn't one himself -- as I say, I love the Narnia stories, but it is always clear that they are being told to you by an adult, where Ransome reminds me quite a lot in this respect of Elizabeth Enright's Melendy family series, a different sort of story but with that same feeling of immediacy, of being immersed in it yourself, this is what it's like. 

I read, in rapid succession, Swallowdale, Winter Holiday, Pigeon Post, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, Secret Water, and Great Northern?, coming suddenly to the end of my collection with a sigh of dismay.  They are all, of course, boat-related but the focus is on different things in each, and new characters come in here and there, so that each book is quite different -- especially, I thought, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, as throughout the series there are adventures and risky situations of course, but, perhaps because I'm a parent now and long past being the same age as the Walker children, the very real danger they are in at being literally swept out to sea was more than unsettling.  (This one contains the only mention in the whole series of one of the children being seasick, and the physical reality of it comes as quite a shock.)  But, as I say, I enjoyed the series immensely, and can see why so many readers still think of them as beloved favorites.  I am amazed only at the fact that I had never heard of them before!

(The photograph is a still from the 2016 movie version of the first book.  I haven't seen it -- I found out about it not long after I finished the book the second time, but after reading in reviews that the writers felt it necessary to insert a completely new subplot about real spies, I thought, "oh no!"  Hearing that Susan has been turned into a whiny bumbler who can't even manage to cook a fish made me shriek -- apparently Peter has also been made "more real".  Why, why, why take classics that generations of children have loved passionately, and change them??  Oh, well -- it looks beautiful, at least.  Sigh.)

The D.E. Stevenson list is reading Amberwell, and this time around I volunteered to lead a section, offering a summary of each chapter and some discussion questions.  Mine turned out to be quite early in the book, chapters 4-6, which I estimate to be taking place around 1930.  The Ayrton family live in a fine old estate on the west coast of Scotland -- the story begins a few centuries earlier with the building of the house and the establishment of the Ayrtons, but by chapter 4 the main characters of the "present day" have been introduced, Mr. and Mrs. Ayrton, his two sons from his first marriage, and three daughters from this second, which daughters are all still under ten and in the care of their Nannie.  One of the central events of this section, and a recurring motif in the story, is the dedication of Mr. Ayrton's contribution to the estate -- others in the generations before him were a walled garden, a bowling-green, a stone terrace, and so on -- Mr. Ayrton has decided upon a fountain with the statue of a little mermaid. On the day of the ceremonial Turning on the Fountain, the girls are sitting on rugs on the bowling-green in their best dresses and the boys in their kilts, waiting for the festivities, and Nannie is nearby keeping an eye on them, and knitting.  This seems too good and opportunity to pass up, to choose something for my "Knitting with DES" virtual knit-along -- so what might Nannie be knitting, I asked myself.

This is a bit later than ca.1930, by about a decade, but how could I possibly resist three little girls in matching boleros? and just the right ages!  This is in the Bestway 749 booklet, this pattern available for a small fee from FabForties.co.uk (who seems to have changed her name recently from The Vintage Knitting Lady, perhaps to specialize in the 1940s?).

(The house in the photo above, by the way, is Inchmarlo, not on the west coast as in the story but in Aberdeenshire.  My Scottish-immigrant ancestors worked there, according to the 1840 census!  The descriptions of Stevenson's Amberwell and a number of the dust-jacket illustrations in the book's long publishing history remind me of Inchmarlo, and so I was delighted to find this photo available for Creative Commons use at Geograph.uk -- this one is by Stanley Howe.)

"Swallows and Amazons" leads quite naturally to a grown-up sea adventure, and I picked up Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander after many years -- too long!  I've only just finished the second in the series, Post Captain, enjoying every moment.  O'Brian's prose is so complex yet wonderfully fluid that it is a pleasure to read, and his flashes of wit and deft characterizations are sheer genius.

(The photo -- from Wikimedia Commons -- is the stern of the Surprise built for the 2003 movie and now at the Maritime Museum of San Diego.)

It's been too hot lately for snuggling-under-a-blanket reading, so I just made one instead, and gave it away as a house-warming present -- it is the simple-but-effective "Modern Granny Stitch Blanket" by Jess of Make & Do Crew.  I used the recommended Lion Brand "Heartland" yarn, in "Glacier Bay", "Hot Springs", "Olympic", "Mount Rainier", and "Kings Canyon" (for a lark, try guessing which is which! I think I got only one right). 

I ran out of "Olympic" just a little over two rows short -- there had been only one skein of it in the store, so I bought a sixth color but decided that I'd risk looking for another skein somewhere else.  And rather surprisingly, because it's 100% acrylic and therefore produced by recipe that isn't subject to the whims and eccentricities of natural fibers, the dye lots of "Olympic" at least are noticeably, even disappointingly, different.  There is much less of the black in the second skein, leaving the color rather dull and flat -- oh, well.

I'm not generally a huge fan of acrylics, but this is quite pleasant to work with, and I must say it makes yummy tassels!

In Which I Come Home from the Public Library with a Stack of Books

I went to the public library a while back to pick up the audio-book of The Clock-Maker's Daughter I'd put on reserve after reading a review, and of course I cast an eye over the new-books shelf (as one does), and picked up Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce.  The premise sounded fun -- an aspiring journalist in 1940 London get a job that she thinks will be her first step to becoming a Lady War Correspondent but turns out is mostly just typing up letters for the agony aunt of a second-rate women's magazine.  From the beginning, the book feels like a screwball comedy, with Emmy's tendency to speak in capital letters, her light-hearted dialogue with her best friend and flatmate, her larger-than-life boss (who would doubtless Take Umbrage at the term "agony aunt"), and the increasingly-sticky situations she finds herself in when she begins to secretly reply to the desperate letters that Mrs. Bird refuses to even consider.  But because Emmy's sympathy for the unfortunate letter-writers is genuine, the serious turns that the plot takes once she is deeply embroiled are wholly believable.  Pearce's writing is deft and intelligent, and aside from a very few slips ("on Such-and-such Street" or "called me on the phone") has a real 1940s ring to it, which surely is much of the book's strength, that despite it tottering at times on the brink of farce, it feels, like Emmy, very genuine.

(I have bemoaned a number of times before about the inexplicable tendency of a number of historical novelists to set their books in a period about which they seem to have done little research, about which they seem not even to care very much.  Why do they bother, if they don't know, or care, why people did the things they did, behaved the way they behaved, talked the way they talked in a given period of history?  Pearce, though, clearly does care about this late 1930s/early 1940s period, and it shows in her novel and in its characters, who are both believably 1940s Britons and people that we understand ninety-some years later, because they too have to deal with love and loss and friendship and uncertainties.  If there is a period about which a novelist feels compelled to write, then the story needs be thoroughly rooted in that period, however universal its themes, or it makes no sense to set it there and then.  This can be done with manners and behavior, with clothing -- the much-vaunted attention to detail in "Downtown Abbey" comes to mind, even though it is film and not a book -- but language is also an important part of this.  (It is also one of the things that "Downtown Abbey" fell strangely short on.)  As I said above, Pearce's diction in Dear Mrs. Bird had a few anachronisms that leapt out at me,

but on the whole succeeded very well.  I applaud, for example, Pearce's deliberate use of the word "gay," as in "the conversation became gay," which would doubtless cause many a snicker now among schoolchildren, but was an entirely appropriate, even ordinary, thing for someone to say in 1940, probably even the first word they would think of in that context.)

(Google n-grams -- how cool is that?)

I also picked up no less than three of Alexander McCall Smith's novels -- A Distant View of Everything, My Italian Bulldozer, and The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse, all of which I enjoyed.  The composer Vivaldi has been accused of "writing the same concerto five hundred times," which could be said also of McCall Smith and his books, but it would be doing both an injustice.  There is much about his books that is "predictable," for want of a better word -- in the the Isabel Dalhousie series, she meets someone, either again or for the first time, she thinks of something which reminds her of something else, she talks with Jamie, she thinks of something else that reminds her of something else, she has dinner, and this one was pretty much just that, but I found it all charming and endlessly absorbing.  The second book is one of his "farcical" stand-alones, with an absurd situation -- here, while on holiday in Italy, a rental-car snafu lands the main character driving not a Fiat but a bulldozer to his Tuscan destination -- gradually turning almost surreal, yet in McCall Smith's gentle hands it is still somehow not quite unbelievable.  And the third is one of his "serious" stand-alones, still with all of his hallmarks -- interesting characters, intelligent and thoughtful writing, some plot twists, and an ending that is if not entirely happy still utterly right.

And last but not least was The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton, in an audio version read by Joanne Froggatt, who I think was pretty much perfectly suited to this novel.  The story uses multiple viewpoints and historical periods to tell the story of what happens after a small circle of artists centered around the young Edward Radcliffe (who is not unlike the Pre-Raphaelites in his passion to reinvent art and design) spend the summer of 1862 at Radcliffe's country house on the idyllic upper reaches of the Thames -- his fiancée is murdered, ostensibly during a break-in, and someone else is missing, and afterwards the broken-hearted Edward never paints again.  Pieces of the story gradually emerge through the voice of Edward's younger sister, who grows up to inherit the house and turns it into a girls' school, through the voice of Edward's model and muse and lover, a girl from the London slums, and the voice of a young archivist in the present day who discovers an old leather satchel containing an artist's sketch-book with a drawing of a house by a river, and an old photograph of a strikingly beautiful young woman.  There are other voices as well, other storylines, and I think the fact that I never lost hold of the different threads was in part due to Joanne Froggatt's excellent reading -- she used, even more literally, different voices for each, sometimes varying only the timbre of her voice, sometimes her accent as well -- from upper- and lower-class English to American to Australian, always beautifully judged. 

During the listening of this, I finished up a miniature carpet that I had started some time ago, playing around with a skein of new-to-me DMC Coloris, the familiar six-stranded embroidery floss but in variegated colors.  This one is 4515, also known for some reason as "Paris" -- some of the colorways are rather vivid, but this one is beautifully subtle.  I decided to make a sort of "rag rug" just to see how the colors worked on a large field, so this is simply basketweave stitch, which is said to be good for covering large areas of canvas since it distorts less than continental or tent stitches.  (Basketweave, and even more so basketweave-plus-Coloris, is also, not coincidentally, a great choice for listening to a suspenseful audio-book, as you don't need to pay much attention to the stitching! no changing colors or counting!)  I'm not entirely sure about the "good coverage" part as there were frequently strange diagonal streaks of canvas visible across multiple rows, but in this case it worked out all right as the canvas (as many of the cotton ones do) shrank a bit in the blocking, thereby tightening the stitches.  I used shade 931 to edge the carpet with long-legged cross-stitch -- according to the chart Mary Corbet gives at Needle 'n Thread, the component blues are 930 and 932, but 930 seemed a bit too dark to edge this, and 932 too light, so I used the one in between.  You can see that it's ever-so-slightly darker than the light blue in the Coloris, but it's a good compromise between the darker and the lighter ones.

One of these days, I might try working the wrong side of the basketweave stitch on the right side -- it has a fascinating "woven" texture that I'd like to see without all of the worked-in thread ends!

And last but not least, though not actually from the library as it is on my Kindle, the D.E. Stevenson list is currently reading Mrs. Tim Gets a Job, the 1947 continuation of Hester Christie's diary.  Here, with Tim off with the Army in Egypt and their children heading to boarding school, Hester finds herself unexpectedly accepting a job offer as the assistant to a woman who has turned her Scottish country home into a small hotel.  Hester is a thoroughly engaging character, like many diary-keepers rather reserved in public but with so much to say in her diary that you quickly warm to her, even though if you thought about it, she would be one of those people in the corner of the train carriage of whom you are often vaguely aware but don't really notice.  The diary format is unique among Stevenson's novels to Mrs. Tim, but like all of Stevenson's books, it is full of her quiet intelligence, humor, and philosophy that everything works out pretty much all right in the end.

I usually try to make at least some effort in choosing a pattern for my D.E. Stevenson virtual knitalong, not wanting to just take the first old thing that pops up, but this was the very first one and suited in at least three ways.  It's charming, obviously, that is certainly a plus!  But the story is set in Scotland in the very early spring, and while the weather is glorious, and gloriously described, often enough for us to feel Stevenson's love for her native land, it cannot be denied that Scotland in March and April, even southern Scotland, can be somewhat, well, let's say bracing -- according to a chart of average temperatures, perhaps only towards the end of the latter month does it get up to a high in the mid-50s F (10 C).  One would be glad of a few jumpers, I expect!  And this one is immensely practical in the post-war time of continuing clothing rations too -- the title is in fact "A Fair Isle to Use Up Your Small Scraps of Yarn".  The list of recommended colors of wool brings up an uncomfortable reminder of the casual usage of certain words in the 1940s that today make us shudder -- curiously, but thank goodness, the abbreviation in the instructions is just B for brown. The first pattern of open and solid diamonds is brown on yellow; the second pattern of diamonds is saxe blue on white (I had to look it up); the third is red on turquoise (!); the fourth is green on white; then a bit more plain yellow ground, and the pattern repeats from there.  (I very much hope that that diamond just under the opening-point of the collar is centered ....)  Amusingly, Sirdar's "Super Shetland" is the same wool that the Victory Jumper uses, my choice for the previous Mrs. Tim book! 

This pattern is available free courtesy The Sunny Stitcher at the Vintage Knitting Pattern Archive.

Talking of libraries, I very much enjoyed the short piece "From Bag End to Babel: Top 10 Libraries in Fiction" in "The Guardian" --

A Rose by Any Other Name

I have in fact finished the No.467 wrap-front vest I've been plugging away at since January, but despite the numerous re-workings I did of the angles for the front edges, which in the end turned out pretty well, the vest as a whole is unfortunately just too big for me.  Clearly, I should have tried it on and considered it for a while before I worked the crocheted armhole edging.  It's possible that at a previous point in my life I would have worn it anyway, but now, well, I want it to look good, I want it to be close-fitting like the original would, and although it was an awful lot of rather dull garter stitch, I'm prepared to rip it out -- after some careful measuring and note-taking, of course -- and re-knit it, but I think I might have to change its name to the Penelope vest, for patiently ripping it out so very many times.

Even weeks after writing about the Victory jumper as my choice for the D.E. Stevenson knitalong while reading Spring Magic, I found myself still thinking about it, wondering if the Knitpicks Palette I had somewhere in my stash would work ....  I think it will, but the larger gauge (!) and the single relatively-tiny size of the original will require a number of adjustments to accommodate the Palette, and of course a rather reserved color like this (which is "Mist") would alone make it unlike the original jumper, whose most salient characteristic is probably its distinctive and celebratory scallopy stripes.  So perhaps a "Spring Magic" jumper?!

A Bit of War-time Knitting in "Mrs. Tim Carries On" and "Spring Magic"

The D.E. Stevenson group is reading the "Mrs. Tim" series, interspersed with related DES titles, and we have just finished Mrs. Tim Carries On (1941) and started Spring Magic (1942).  Being wartime, of course there is knitting for one's menfolk and others in the armed forces sprinkled throughout, especially in Mrs. Tim Carries On, but since there are so very many patterns available for "soldiers' comforts" and really, how many variations can there be on plain, dark socks, I chose for my virtual "Knitting with D.E. Stevenson" project the girl's socks in this late-1930s/early-1940s Bairnswear leaflet available in reproduction from The Vintage Knitting Lady. The photo reminds me not a little of Hester's young daughter Betty who likes dolls and girlish things, to be sure, but doesn't stick at climbing trees as well.  As a knitter, I like how these particular socks have different kinds of heels, too -- I know it's comfortable to knit something that one is familiar with, but it's also pleasing to have different options.

Thanks to the wonderful folks at Dean Street Press -- especially Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow, whose Furrowed Middlebrow colophon debuted there a few years ago and specializes in "works by lesser-known British women novelists and memoirists" -- three of the four Mrs. Tim books are now available in e-book format (the first was reprinted some years ago by the Bloomsbury Group), as well as Spring Magic and 1935's Smouldering Fire, of which more in another post.  I have been very much looking forward to the group read of Spring Magic, as it is one of my favorites.  We've only just started, and already have had interesting discussions about books a sheltered child might have read (a child such as Frances, though she is now at 25 not sheltered so much as trapped), the idiom "doing the messages" (which may or may not involve actual messages, depending on whether one is north or south of Hadrian's Wall ...), horsehair mattresses (and sofas), the Pioneer Corps, and potential inspirations for the setting's Scottish fishing village -- not to mention sidetracks like April Fool pranks and plagiarism.

But knitting, that's what I was talking about.  In one scene in the book, during a rather terrifying air raid -- this isn't London, mind you, it's a fishing village on the west coast of Scotland -- the ladies of the inn where Frances is staying are knitting -- who could sleep? -- and Annie offers to share a knitting pattern.  "It's quite an easy pattern," she says, "you slip one and knit one and pass the slipped stitch over.  I'll give you the pattern tomorrow if you would like it --"  In searching the internet hopefully for "lacy knitting pattern 1940s", I came across this one --

which is available free from the V&A (here's the Ravelry link) as part of a page about 1940s knitting patterns (huzzah!).  The lace stitch is a simple two-row one with a familiar "sl1, K1, psso" maneuver that combined with K2tog and judicious yarn-overs produces the pretty scallop effect, here in patriotic red, white, and blue -- so it seems particularly appropriate for my Spring Magic choice!  I've used the Ravelry link instead of going straight to the pattern itself so that you can see some examples of how changing the colors or simply changing the number of rows of red, white, or blue can vary the effect of the jumper.

"Mrs. Tim of the Regiment"

"Second June.  Spend the morning lying in a deck chair in the garden pretending to knit.  How glorious to have nothing to do!"

Mrs. Tim of the Regiment always seems to me like the "first" D.E. Stevenson novel, though it was neither the first one she published nor the first one I read.  But it is so indelibly and characteristically Stevenson that it is difficult not to think of it as such.  As it happens, this "diary of a officer's wife" was actually based on Stevenson's own, so that I'm sure we can take much of Hester Christie's character and sense of humor as very like Stevenson's own as well.  Mrs. Tim's diary -- there are four books, spanning the early 1930s to the early 1950s -- are rather like the Provincial Lady's, whom Jilly Cooper calls "gentle, disaster-prone, yet curiously dry-witted," though probably less of the last two than the Provincial Lady's, especially if you read the P.L.'s humor as more often than not verging on the satirical.  Mrs. Tim, though an army wife and therefore subject to the whims of the Service, has many of the same things to deal with as the Provincial Lady, being of a similar age and situation -- running a household, raising children, managing servants and an occasionally obtuse husband, and observing the quirks of those around her -- which last Mrs. Tim for the most part enjoys, I think in a warmer manner than Delafield's heroine.  That, I think, is one of Stevenson's salient characteristics, and Mrs. Tim's humor and good-nature I think keep her from seeming to us as caustic and near to the razor's edge as the Provincial Lady occasionally can.  Mrs. Tim seems to enjoy life much more than her contemporary.  One of the chief delights of both, however, is that wonderfully English -- British, I must say, for Stevenson was a Scot -- understated self-deprecation.

"I've heard a lot about Mrs. Christie from some friends of hers staying at the hotel -- Mr. and Mrs. McTurk," [says Mr. Baker to Mrs. Loudon.]
     I try to explain that I don't know them very well, but Mr. Baker does not listen.  "Very nice friends to have, Mrs. Christie, especially the lady.  She's always saying how sorry she is at you leaving Kiltwinkle.  It must be a bit trying for a lady like you not to have a settled home of your own, isn't it now?"
     This statement is often made to me, and it always annoys me, chiefly, I think, because it is true.  But some time ago I found a quotation which seemed to meet the case, and I always make use of it on these occasions.
     "'To a resolved mind his home is everywhere,'" I reply sententiously.

For my virtual D.E Stevenson Knitalong, I couldn't decide between two patterns from "Patons Specialty Knitting Book No.33" by Patons Australia, the "Faith" jumper, above, originally in blue bouclé with one of the ties in a contrasting grey, or

the "Amy" originally in Paton's Rose wool (a fingering weight) in "Kenya Red" -- I wonder what shade that is?!  Interesting that we would certainly call that a cardigan now, where in the early 1930s or so when this came out it was a "coat" -- there are three other front-buttoning garments in this particular book, two of which are called coats and one which is, strangely, called a "jumper-cardigan" though it clearly has two front pieces buttoning up in the middle.  They both seem very "Mrs. Tim" to me -- sensible, not too frivolous or youthful but still not at all dowdy (the frivolity would come with the hat, no doubt!), practical yet appealing.

(This Paton's book is indexed at Ravelry, though the patterns are not available there; the entire booklet has been scanned and is available here courtesy Bex of Subversive Femme.)

Actually, I'm strongly tempted to knit one or both of these!

"Five Windows"

I'm starting my first venture as a book-discussion leader today, in a section of D.E. Stevenson's Five Windows (1953) on the Stevenson Yahoo list.  I've really enjoyed reading this book -- this is my second read, having galloped through it last year when I picked up a copy almost as soon as it was reprinted by Greyladies.  Nobody seems to know why this particular title of Stevenson's is so difficult to find -- certainly in part because it was never issued in paperback, but why?  It's a charming and gentle story of a boy growing up, first in a little village in Scotland and then as a young man on his own in London -- the "windows" of the title are five places in his life that are especially significant.

Despite the fact that Five Windows is classic Stevenson, and I like it very much, I am nevertheless finding it rather difficult to come up with discussion questions, and so I'm dawdling a little, I confess, by looking for a suitable pattern for my virtual DES knitalong!  David's mother knits a pair of socks for the local shepherd when he goes off to war, so surely she would also knit something for her son, living on his own for the first time in a top-floor flat miles from home -- perhaps this thick but simple cabled slipover? Perfect for those early-morning walks around Covent Garden market!

This image is from The Vintage Knitting Lady, and a copy of the pattern can be had for a mere £1.50!  Yes, that is a very young Roger Moore, who did quite a lot of modeling early in his career.

(Oh, ha-ha!  I see that my immediately-previous Knitalong with DES post was also for Five Windows, in my first read just a little over a year ago!  Glad to see I chose something completely different to "knit" this time ....)

This and That

I had this old sleeveless pullover in a drawer that I'd knitted up from some of that lovely red Araucania Nature Wool, but it pilled so much from the moment I first put it on, that I dreaded wearing it -- except for the color, of course.  So the other day I remembered that I only have five of the felted placemats I made from the rest of the Nature Wool, and I want to have at least six -- and so I spent a day ripping out the pullover, another day winding it all into skeins (wh. wasn't easy as I'd knitted it double), another few days waiting for it to dry after I washed it, another day winding it all into balls -- and now I am knitting with it.  I don't know yet how far it will go -- we'll see.  I didn't notice how much of a color variation there is in the latest stretch of knitting -- luckily it is a little less obvious in real life than in the camera, for some reason!

Yes, another petit point miniature carpet!  Couldn't resist.  This is another one from Frank Cooper's book, one he identifies as a Bergama.  The chart is much more reliable than the Shirvan I worked this past spring and summer -- but this time, because I converted it from Paternayan wools to Appleton's (with a reduction in canvas gauge as well), I really had no idea of how much wool to buy, and I have just run out of the golden-brown.  You can see that I'm nowhere near being finished with golden-brown, either.  I'm going to hobble along for a while without it, and see if anything else looks like running short ...

If you have read much D.E. Stevenson, you will know somehow that her 1953 book Five Windows is for some reason extremely difficult to find.  There are rarely many copies available, and those few are priced well into the hundreds of dollars.  Why?  I have no idea -- she was already a well-established and popular author by the early 1950s, so I'd be surprised if her publishers didn't issue a large run.  But for those of us who, not for lack of trying, have never seen a copy, Greyladies recently reissued Five Windows in paperback.  The story has one of her fairly rare first-person narratives, and one of her even-more-rare male main characters, but for all that it is a charming story in which nothing terribly dramatic happens, but you like the characters and you want them to be happy.  I suppose David Kirke's mother might have knitted him a jumper or a scarf before he went off to London from his little home in the Scottish Borders, though there was no mention of it, but I thought I would look for something that reminded me of young Janet Lorimer, and I was rather surprised, in Googling "1950s misses knitting pattern" to find that most of the things that came up were either matronly or with models more suited to Parisian scenes with their bent wrists and their lipstick -- not fresh-faced Scottish lasses at all!  So I was delighted when this one came up to see not only a girl one wouldn't mind sitting next to on a train but one with a Fair Isle jersey as well!  This booklet is from the 1940s, and the pattern itself is available for free at The Vintage Pattern Files.  Enjoy!

Shirvan Home Stretch, Etc.

I'm enjoying working this carpet, but it does seem to be taking a very long time! But it's apparent even to me now that it's nearly done.  The border figures are surprisingly easy to get wrong, so that I find I still have to count, and so every so often I work a strand of that last bit of navy-blue background in the center for some mindless filling-in.

I have been knitting too -- finished David's Elizabethan stockings but as it happened we didn't get to go to the Renaissance Faire this year, so it didn't really matter that I hadn't finished his Venetian hose.  Must photograph these and write them up.  I also find myself making another Svalbard hat, with a set of long posts accompanying, but the hat is as yet still on the needles.

I have been reading quite a lot, though.  And three of them are on my TBR list! -- so I am a quarter of the way up "Pike's Peak," as it were.  I read -- and very much enjoyed -- the two new Alexander McCall Smiths, The Revolving Door of Life from the "44 Scotland Street" series and The Novel Habits of Happiness from the Isabel Dalhousie series, and D.E. Stevenson's Found in the Attic.  If you haven't read and enjoyed the major novels, this last would not be as interesting as it might otherwise, but as a curiosity, being a collection of short stories, poems, one-act plays, and talks given by Stevenson, it is a pleasant sidelight on her non-novel writings.

So for my virtual "D.E. Stevenson Knitalong," here is a girl's three-piece suit -- collared jumper, cardigan, and pleated skirt -- from the 1930s of, what else, "Scotch Wool" (pattern image from The Vintage Knitting Lady, who adds "I had one of these for school in grey and yellow in the early 1950s!").  I was looking for a "sensible cardigan" like the one Stevenson herself is wearing in the photo on the cover of Found in the Attic, of her writing on a sofa, but "sensible cardies" are in rather short supply, I find -- I guess most people already had a pattern for those in the 1930s, and wanted something with a bit more S.A.

So as it happened most of the books I've read recently were not on my TBR list, so technically I don't think those count towards knocking off my list.  I read Helen Simonson's long-awaited second novel, The Summer Before the War, which I am reluctant to say left me feeling rather flat -- not sure why.  I wasn't sure what to expect, after Major Pettigrew's Last Stand which went (as it seemed to me) from quiet romance to farce, and this seemed to go from farce to brutal, shocking carnage, though, really, one shouldn't expect anything else from a novel set during the Great War, which of course the reader knows very well is coming.  I hope Simonson writes more, as this just felt like a "sophomore" book, and I'm looking forward to her really hitting her stride.

I have long had a soft spot for Celia Johnson, whose quiet humor and, well, Englishness I find appealing.  She never wrote an autobiography, she said, "because I never had an affair with Frank Sinatra, and if I had had, I wouldn't tell anyone," wh. I think really captures much of her personality.  Her daughter Kate Fleming did write a biography after Celia's death, and I found a second-hand copy recently and, although it did -- because Celia was reserved and in that way of 1930s Englishwomen didn't fuss much -- tend to fall into the "Celia played bridge with X, Y, and Z on Tuesday, Celia went to the theatre with L, M, and O on Friday", it was nevertheless a gentle and fond portrait.

There was a very complimentary review of Philip Norman's new biography of Paul McCartney somewhere a while back, and somehow I found myself the very first on the list for it at the public library.  I was won over by Norman's admission at the very beginning that he'd always rather disliked Paul, and after many years -- and many years of resisting it -- had come to the realization that Paul had got a lot of bad press.  Well, this goodwill towards Norman carried me through the book, which on the whole I thought was good though perhaps not great, but I can understand that it's difficult to really get hold of a person's character when that person is, despite being familiar to millions around the world and having the minutiae of his life examined by many of those millions, a master at keeping things close.  I was disappointed, though, at some of the typos and infelicities, including a reference to Isaac Azimov -- and why does Norman feel the need to explain to us that "Apple Corps." is a pun ("pronounced 'core'")?

(I was charmed to see a photo of Paul around the time of "Magical Mystery Tour" wearing a granny-square vest -- very 1967! --

This is a different photo than in the book, but it's about the vest here, so it's a "better" one in that respect!  It was not a surprise, though, it being Paul McCartney, that more than one person has already re-created it, so here is a free pattern for a similar one.)

At the same time as I borrowed the McCartney book, I also took home from the new-books shelf at the library David Mitchell's latest, Slade House, wh. did not "creep the pants off me" as some reviewer assured me that it would, as I found it far more camp than creepy, and Judith Flanders's second murder mystery, A Bed of Scorpions, which zipped along like nobody's business, though I must admit I found the brassiness of the heroine a bit tiring.  I was very sorry to find, though this isn't really Flanders's fault, that bar the odd reference to, say, Tottenham Court Road tube station or Highgate, most English novelists now sound pretty much like Americans -- a pity.

So that's what I've been doing lately and not blogging about, and we are just about to start day 2 of Girl Scout day camp, so I suspect I will not be doing much of anything else for the rest of the week either -- one of my high-school aides said yesterday "it's like trying to get eighteen cats into a box!" wh. sums it up pretty well -- so keep your fingers crossed that the weather stays cool for us!