A Bluestocking Knits

A, B, C, J --

I was going to shamelessly pinch an idea from Beyond Eden Rock and do an ABC of miscellanea, but found myself with multiple ideas for S (some of which I've redistributed to other letters -- !) and nothing at all for Z, M-N-O, not even for E.  And so rather than leave this post marooned in the Drafts folder while I flail about trying to think of what would work for D, I'll just go with what I've got ...

A = The “Anna Ohman” sampler continues to be a pleasure to work.  (I have since gone back and put in the missing dot on the downward stroke of the R in år, Swedish for "year," florid though it is.)

B = This week's “Bookshelf Traveling for Insane Times” is one of our living-room bookcases.  Most of the one on the right is science fiction and fantasy.  Dedicated shelf-readers might spot in the other case my set of Laura Ingalls Wilder companionably next to my set of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturins, and the Ransomes on the shelf below.  What you do not see is the Golden Lion, aka Hardy House, which has resided in front of these shelves on a pair of sawhorses for the past two years or so.  It was a bit of a wrench to even decide it was time to give it away, let alone do so, but I realized that not only was I not able to devote the time to fixing it up that it deserves, but that it was keeping me from even beginning the project that had got me started in miniatures in the first place.  Luckily for me, its departure was as gentle and sudden as its arrival three years ago.  So -- bless you, dear Lion, and fare well!

C = I asked David to put up some shelves in the closet in our front bedroom -- which we continue to call a bedroom though in the twenty-some years we've lived here has never had a bed in it, but is our family/catch-all room.  All three of our bedrooms still have the original 1929 built-in dressers, but we have added to the shelves that other owners have added, because, really, can you ever have too much storage space?  I had suggested merely a plank resting on the existing 2x4s attached to the walls on either side, and another across the top of the window frame, but David either didn't believe me or knows me too well when I said that there would still be enough light from the window, and so he decided this was a better idea.  Which it probably is, mind you, as I can put my boxes of embroidery floss (just about to perform a sort of meiosis into at least one more box) on the little shelves as the boxes are not heavy and will be quite easily reachable, with the much-larger shelf on top for heavier seasonal things.  I have also made the promise to weed things out as they go into the closet ...

J = I'm very much enjoying my re-read of the Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series -- am on the fourth at the moment, The Mauritius Command.

    [Jack] sighed, smiled, and was about to seal when Stephen walked in, looking mean and pinched.  "Stephen," he said, "I have just written to Sophie.  Have you any message?"
    "Love, of course.  And compliments to Mrs. Williams [Jack's mother-in-law, a tartar]."
    "Lord," cried Jack, writing fast, "thank you for reminding me.  I have explained about Lady Clonfert [a fellow-officer's wife who has begged passage on Jack's new command]," he observed, as he closed the letter up.
    "Then I trust you kept your explanation short," said Stephen.  "Circumstantial details destroy a tale entirely.  The longer, the less credible."
    "I merely stated that she did not appear at the rendezvous, and passed on."
    "Nothing about three o'clock in the morning, the hocus-pocus at the inn, signals disregarded, the boat being made to row as though we were escaping from the Day of Judgement, and the lady ditched?" asked Stephen, with the unpleasant creaking noise that was his nearest approach to a laugh.
    "What a rattle you are, to be sure," said Jack.

L = Two lace samples from an 1849 lace collar pattern that I'm trying to figure out from the both complex and somewhat cryptic period instructions.  These are the two choices for edgings once the collar is knitted -- I did these in crochet cotton at a much-larger gauge, just to get it worked out before I started the real thing.  As it happened, I recognized both of them after a few repeats -- the bottom one is  a variation of the "Hearth and Home Lace" edging and the top one a variation of the "Clover Leaf Lace" found in Nancie Wiseman's Lace from the Attic, and probably numerous other Shetland edgings sources.  I started knitting the collar in no.80 tatting cotton on the smallest needles I have, but got interrupted enough times by Julia wanting another length of the cotton for her elaborate bobbin lace project that I decided it would be better to just give her the rest of the spool and start again with a fresh one! which I haven't got hold of yet.

Q = I had already heard, around the internet and from the local needlework shop owner, that if you work cross-stitch with overdyed thread, you should do it in the "English style" and not the "Danish," which is making each X before going on to the next, instead of a line of //// as long as necessary then returning to work the \\\\.  Why "English" and "Danish"?  I don't know! but the reason is that because, unlike in the days when unevenly-dyed thread was something to be disguised, now we celebrate it, and making all of the strokes in one direction then coming back to finish the Xs tends to even out the variations, whereas making the whole X at once keeps them prominent.  It seems that I have been working Danish-style all my life without knowing it (also "left-handed" with my right hand, though that's another story)!  Because I wasn't sure if I could go back and forth between the two methods without driving myself crazy, or if concentrating hard on making sure that I was keeping to one or the other would spoil my enjoyment of both projects, I decided that a bit of prudence was in order and I will set the “Quaker Virtues” aside -- but not very far -- for the much-smaller "Anna Ohman".

S = Yeah, I also needed a knitting project, because the gauges are small enough on the samplers that it's easier for me to work them without my glasses or contacts.  I can't watch television without my glasses, obviously, so having a knitting project means that I can watch the new season of the "Bake Off" or "The Good Place" while I knit! and save the samplers for the quiet hour after my usually-early breakfast, before anyone else gets up.  The S is for Savannah cashmere/nylon/superwash merino, wonderfully soft, which is on its way to becoming the “Copilot” cowl.

T = Skillet Turkey Chili from Smitten Kitchen -- impressively delicious for something so quick and so simple!

Watching the Paint Dry

This is the tea-room-to-be, almost ready to glue together.  I painted it with milk paints in a previous life, which I had tested on a little bedside table I made and really liked (the paint I mean, the table was an object lesson in using a right-angle jig for gluing!) --

but I painted a first coat on the shop and wasn't happy, then painted a second coat and was even less happy -- the blue is pretty but far too dark, but the yellow while lovely on my sample (and in the upstairs room in Hardy House) was dismayingly blotchy on the shop front -- so I put it away in despair and felt sad about it for I'm afraid almost a full year.  I had bought some more paint samples from Home Depot around Christmas, I think, but only put a coat of primer on, which looked awful, to be honest, and I didn't touch it again until ... well, until I had some extra time on my hands.  You know.  Anyway, I gave myself a mental smack and took all four walls out to the garage and went at them with the palm sander and other bits of sand paper in various grades until I felt better.

The new paints are "English Hollyhock" (the blue) and "Candlewick" (the pale yellow), both from Behr.  The yellow isn't as Farrow-&-Ball as I had pictured in my mind, but there it is -- it is quite pretty in itself.

In the boxes of stuff that my benefactress gave me (how nice, to think of having a benefactress!) was this Houseworks "French door" which I thought would be perfect for a tea shop, as the most convenient route to the kitchen would surely be a swinging door!  The frame was glued together rather crookedly, so after a previous successful experiment with a hair dryer, warming the glue and gently prying the joins apart with the thin blade of a craft knife, I took it apart and sanded it a bit and glued it more straightly.  When I dry-fitted it, though, I thought the door looked a bit stingy somehow, with no room for a push plate, so David helped me to trim off the innermost section of the jamb.  I will play around with cutting a push plate from a model-maker's brass strip that I've got.

After looking at innumerable shop fronts, both English and American colonial-esque, for design ideas, I thought I'd like to try tiling the bottom part of this bay window.  I had such fun with my previous faux tiles that that method was high on my list, and I had accumulated quite a lot of paint chips in various colors by that time, so I tested it out and decided to go for it.  These are cut in 1cm squares, slightly smaller than the more-obvious half-inch because I felt that an odd number of rows would look better.  At first, I simply marked the rows on the back of the paint chip with a ruler and pencil, but quickly realized that as good as I thought my measuring eye was, in 1:12 scale being only slightly off makes a huge difference!  So I printed out a piece of 1cm graph paper, stuck it on to the back of the paint chips, and got them cut much more accurately.

Alas, this gorgeous blue and black is only the artists medium still in its opaque wet stage, and the faux tiles have since dried quite black -- which is what I wanted, after all.  This would have been a happy accident, indeed.

The paint-chip base gave somewhat different results from the watercolor paper I've used previously -- for some reason, the gloss medium didn't level off as much, but more importantly, either I didn't notice that there were more bubbles in the bottle (or perhaps from the brush I was using) or the black underneath made them much more apparent, but the first batch I did was unusable.  I had wild thoughts of dashing in to Home Depot, corona-virus be damned, grabbing some paint chips, and dashing back out again, but of course that wasn't very sensible since I have family at home, and so I resigned myself to the challenge of eking out enough squares from the wonky batch I'd cut by eye from the first chip.  I think I have enough, though I may have to use some of the slightly-bubbled ones.

(My shops, by the way, are set in a vaguely contemporary time, which to me means that one could have a chip credit-card reader and another a rotary phone.  And even though the possible inspiration for the designs is American, the 1:12 shops look thoroughly English to my Southern-California eye, so it's difficult not to lean pretty far in that direction, though I'm actually trying to be ambiguous.  A friend asked me not long ago, "Are they English or American?" so I said, "Yes.")

Even after re-gluing the inner-door frame, the warping was was so much, after who-knows-how-long sitting in its box (it wouldn't surprise me if it was ten or twenty years), that it promptly snapped back into pieces when I set it into the opening, twice, and so the only thing to do was glue it into place in sections, first the top and then the two sides!  It was a bit of a puzzle figuring out how to clamp it, but luckily that giant rubber band came in handy again!  I did have to spackle a relatively huge bow, but with one of the teeny-tiny tools in the stash I now have, this went surprisingly well.  If the warp had been sideways, I probably would have simply chucked the whole assembly, but since it is outwards, you can't see it from most of the angles that will be visible when the room-box is put together.  (More "subsidence -- from the bombing"!)

I took the time to paint new chimney pots for Hardy House, since every single one is chipped or broken, the old clay (maybe plaster of Paris?) being dry and brittle after forty years.  The new ones are of course those little wooden "candle holders" that are in I think every single craft store's "woodworking" aisle.  (Candle holders?  Well, I can see how they would fit, but who would actually use them for holding candles?  They look like they'd fall right over and set your tablecloth on fire.)  They barely needed sanding, so after a cursory rub I gave them two undercoats of black, then two top coats of terra cotta paint, dry-brushed a bit of black and gray "soot" around the rims, and finished with a coat of matte varnish.

I had decided to save a bit of money and get only a matte pot of the blue for the inside of the shop, and use the gloss varnish that I already have to put a shine on the trim.  This is fairly successful, though it does take a bit of sanding between coats to get both the paint and the gloss looking smooth enough to create the illusion.  It occurred to me about halfway through this that there really ought to be a frame around the inside of the bay window, so I dug out some plain pieces and glued them in place.  It will rarely be visible, but I'll know it's there.

Finishing this part will now start overlapping with the interior decoration! --

Miniatures Monday

I decided some time ago that I wanted to try stenciling on the breakfast room walls in Hardy House, and found one in an all-over pattern that looked as though it could have been from the 1920s or 30s, maybe even 40s, so just right for what I'm doing with the house.  I knew ahead of time that I would have to cut the stencil to get it to fit around the door and window frames, so it required some planning to do the larger swatches first, then trim off strips for above the doors and window, and so on, in increasingly-smaller segments.  It didn't work quite as easily as I might have liked, as while I "dry-fitted" the stencil around the various obstructions, I didn't double-check the width of the back wall itself, and ended up having to decide between wider-spaced columns or a partial column in the back left corner!

But I think it's busy enough that while noticeable it doesn't really leap out at you, and once the furniture and pictures are in place, those distract the eye a bit too.

The stencil is an ArtMinds one -- that sort of leafy/feathery swag might be useful later, too.  My stenciling technique is far from polished, I know, and on top of that it was fairly awkward reaching into the room without being able to brace my hand much, or sometimes even see beyond it!  I can understand even better now why people say it's much easier to paint etc. before you even build, but of course I don't have that option here.  I was hoping that the stencil color would be a bit lighter, and therefore more subtle, but I didn't have the skill to daub more gently, nor certainly the confidence to thin the paint at all.  Still, I do like the way it turned out on the whole, so there is that.

(Haven't decided whether I should try to sand off the daubs that got onto the woodwork, or to paint over them with a similar "wood" color ...)

I haven't yet found a fabric I like for curtains, so that is still on the to-do list.  Maybe just a solid color (blue?), or faux damask, as there is a lot of pattern in the room now!  I think it also needs some more paintings on the wall, certainly one just beyond the door that leads to the kitchen-to-be, on the left here.

Two kits from Nancy Enge -- travel journals and echeverias, very pleasing to look at even in kit form --

I was noodling around with the US9 steel hook and some no.10 cotton, and came up with this improvised rug in double-crochet.  I was marvelously impressed with the "mock invisible join" developed by Mrs. Micawber, which took me some time to wrap my head around, as it were -- reading the instructions first was like blah-blah-blah-blah for me, but once I actually started to do it, it began to make sense, and indeed worked beautifully.  It didn't, however, work -- or possibly more accurately, I don't know how to make it work -- on the faggoting rounds, so I began looking around for yet another alternative, and ended up using a "no-chain starting double crochet" as detailed at by Hannah at Not Your Average Crochet.  It seems to me that if you didn't see the join there at the top of the outer two rounds, the places where I earlier worked the NSDC would be almost undetectable.

My current miniature carpet, this from a Berlin-work chart that is apparently floating around Pinterest like the Flying Dutchman, with no actual source.  It is dated 1903, in Russian.  It has a charmingly improvisational air to it that somehow works really well with that imperious diagonal -- the moment I saw the chart, I was besotted with it, and it jumped the queue over a number of other projects!

"S" -- and a 10th Update

Here is the "S" for my ABChallenge -- a miniature fall-front secretary.  Somebody was giving this away at my miniatures group a while back -- "it needs a bit of TLC," she admitted, as the lid was broken where the pin hinges were, but I managed to get enough wood-filler in that I could make it hold together again.  It doesn't really want to lie flat when open, but maybe I can either weight it down with something or just leave it closed.  Susan D and I had been exchanging e-mails around that time about making miniature books, so I did these blocks --

They are a bit wobbly along the tops and bottoms, but I put the best one in the middle, so that with the doors closed, most of the wobbliness is hidden!

And the rest of my "10th of the month" miniatures update --

A very sweet enameled tea pot that was originally a bracelet charm, but surely is meant to be on a tea tray somewhere!

Someone was giving this away, too, at another minis meeting a few months ago -- I could hardly resist "Railroad Depot Bench," could I!

It went together fairly easily, though the back piece was slightly chipped on one corner -- I wanted it to look old anyway, so that was no problem.  The only worrisome moment was when the back piece, which is a very thin piece that you glue the battens on, apparently sucked out all of the moisture from the glue, and because it is so thin it didn't have much surface area along the bottom edge to stick to the cross-piece at the bottom, and promptly warped out to the back so much that I could easily have stuck my finger into the gap.  But I found some pieces of scrap wood in the garage that fit almost exactly on either side of the back, and clamped them together and left them to sit overnight, and luckily it was almost as good as new in the morning.

The instructions said that maroon was the traditional color, but I didn't really like the rather orangey look of the one craft paint I found actually called "Maroon," and so I used "Red Barn" instead.  I obviously need some practice getting a smooth coat of the clear finish on.

It's now roughed up a bit, with some scratches and wearing-off of paint -- even, I'm sorry to say --

some graffiti. 

But of course it will make an interesting and amusing bit of "junk" in the attic!

I have also been slowly painting the dollhouse itself.  The room on the left is going to be mother's sewing room, and I've removed the wallpaper -- which I liked but was peeling off a little too much -- and painted it with FolkArt's Milk Paint in a really charming "Churned Butter" palest yellow.  The library in this picture had just had the first coat of Milk Paint in "Jamestown Blue," which here looks alarmingly seedy but after a second coat is extremely pretty.  To be honest, I really hate the copper-colored fireplace hoods, and as I was priming this room -- two coats, to try and cover up that very 70s-looking kelly green -- I thought, "oh, the heck with it" and painted over the hood as well.  We'll see.  It looks kind of truncated now, but maybe I can disguise that with a mirror or something!

The breakfast room downstairs, after removing the faux wallpaper and sanding off the remnants of glue -- glue stick, I suspect, and not easy to get off, as the paper fuzz was very recalcitrant.

It's funny, in my callow youth I probably wouldn't have given this color a second glance, thinking most neutrals a waste of time, but now I find this one really beautiful -- it's Martha Stewart's "Lake Fog," a sort of beige or sand with a hint of grey in it.

(No, I'm not masking off the woodwork.  It's really hard at 1:12 scale, trying to get a piece of masking tape to stick on the edge of a piece of baseboard that's protruding only 3/32 of an inch.  I found that it was actually less stressful to just do without, and run a fine brush along the edge very slowly.  There certainly are some wobbles, but on the whole it is working pretty well.)

A Large Turkoman Carpet

This is the Turkoman carpet, designed by Sue Bakker, from Venus Dodge's Dolls' House Needlecrafts. It is is a rather frustrating book, with hundreds of projects in all different kinds of needlecraft, from knitting and crochet to sewing to needlepoint and embroidery, but with pictures far enough away from the particular instructions that flipping back and forth from one to the other is inevitable, and in particular the needlepoint carpets are all photographed in a room setting, i.e. under furniture or dolly feet so that you don't necessarily have a particularly clear idea of what a piece is going to look like -- a fairly major flaw in a needlecrafts book.  The ultimate frustration (so far) for me has been that the very charming Arts & Crafts carpet in the cover photo -- which I would stitch in a heartbeat -- isn't even in the book at all.

I've already given my theory on the Problem Chart for this carpet, so I will only say here that although the instructions imply differently, the chart itself is meant to be flipped -- that is, it is only one-quarter of the finished carpet -- otherwise you will have to drastically alter the border as charted to fit the much-smaller main field.  I worked my version as the full ten-gul carpet, as it looks much better that way to my eye, and I like Bakker's designs. On my 28-count Monaco canvas, the finished piece turned out to be 5 3/4 x 7 3/4 in. (14.6 x 19.7 cm), less the fringe.

I also decided to try "fading" the colors this time, to make the carpet look older.  Instead of using two strands of the given colors, I used one of the original and one of a shade lighter -- this not only "fades" it a bit, but gives the colors a bit of depth, I think.  This is what I used, original shade first and the lighter one second --

• dark brown 3371 + 938
• blue 3750 + 930
• cream/ecru 3033 + 3866
• gold 3045 + 422
• red 355 + 3830

The fringe is 3866.  Since I was going for an older-carpet look, I decided when I was beginning to fill in the red ground, that I would also give it some "abrash", which is the word for the color variation you sometimes see in oriental carpets, as when a slightly different dye lot has been used in one section, or one dye lot has faded at a different rate than the rest, or simply due to natural variations --

(I've taken these details from carpets in the Wikipedia article.)  In a woven carpet, abrash often appears as a "stripe" across the width of the carpet -- to mimic this, I just used two strands of the lighter red for a few inches, then two rows of the blended, one more of the lighter red again, then back to the blended red for the rest.  I'm really pleased with the way this turned out!

Turkoman carpets -- now usually called Turkmen -- were produced by the Turkmen tribes in what is now Turkmenistan, as well as Afghanistan and Iran.  The deep red background is a distinguishing characteristic, as is this "Tekke Bokhara" design of symmetrical repeated guls, here the oval motifs, separated by stars or diamonds.  (More information here, and some examples from past auctions here.)  Bakker's version looks like it might date from the early or mid-Victorian period to somewhat later, so is ideal for either a Victorian setting or, like mine, as a family heirloom!

In the Breakfast Room

When I saw the "Retro" dining table kit on Jane Harrop's website, I couldn't resist it, so I counted up the money from my Christmas stocking and splurged.  I really liked the set anyway, but when I found out that the table is only 4"/10cm long, I knew it would probably be perfect -- you can see how small the room is!

Now that it is all a month or so behind me, I am beginning to forget how much of a bother the chairs were to put together, and instead to just appreciate their ingenuity and beauty.  The kit pieces are laser-cut, so you must sand off the scorch marks, and despite heeding Harrop's warning to be especially careful with the side pieces -- because the horizontal part goes across the grain and is therefore very vulnerable -- I managed to snap two of the eight before I even got to the gluing stage.  One went back together almost invisibly, at least! 

There are also very few points where the pieces actually come into contact with each other -- just at the ends of the three stretchers -- so the glued joints are also vulnerable.  I was using Aleene's Tacky Glue, so maybe it would have been a different matter with something else, I don't know.  They were definitely more sturdy the more stretchers were in place, which was helpful, but I even managed to knock one apart while finishing it -- I wanted to use the Tried & True I have, which was so successful on the Arts & Crafts bed, but requires that you finish it after assembly.

The cushions are some glossy papery stuff I'm not familiar with -- you glue one piece to the top and one on the underside of a piece of heavy card cut to shape (all provided in the kit) and then shape them to the required curve while the glue is still damp, to fit the stretchers in the seat.  I found that this worked perfectly to shape them! --

I learned along the way that these particular chairs are based on Erik Buch's "49" design from the 1950s -- I guess a minor Danish-modern designer, as he doesn't even have an article in the Danish Wikipedia, let alone the English one.  Here is a photo of the 49 chair from the Erik Buch company --

There are some interesting pictures here of a 49 chair with the seat removed, so that you can see how the seat "floats" -- other photos of restored chairs are here and here.

Harrop's 1:12 version is ingenious in miniaturizing the essence of the chair and table, just with the caveat above that the kits (certainly the chairs, the table is much easier) are probably best for someone with some kit-building experience.  I do wish that the seats were a tiny bit bigger, so that you could get more of the "floating" effect, but it's certainly good the way it is!  I did put the back rest up a little higher than in the instructions, which looked to me more like the originals.

(I used Loctite gel glue for the cushions, by the way, as the back is held on essentially by friction, since you can't use much glue or it will show.  By this point my chairs had a linseed/beeswax finish, and regular glue probably wouldn't have held.) 

The table was a breeze after the chairs!

The piece underneath can actually be a table leaf if you like.  I was sorely tempted to do so, but trying it out before gluing, the larger size would have been just a little too impractical in the small room, and so that piece is now a reinforcement, its original purpose anyway.  The grain lines look a little darker in the above photo than they are in real life, where they are quite beautiful.

It's funny because usually the things I like best are really old, but Danish Modern does get my heart pounding! and so I'm delighted to have found these kits.  I didn't plan it, but they also look really good on the Karagashli carpet I worked a few years ago -- I really like the golden wood against the green, and the styles, despite being both a century and a continent apart, are unexpectedly harmonious!

Q for Quilt

For my first 1:12 scale quilt, I decided on an Amish-style one instead of the jewel-box, as the pieces are bigger (!) and thus I felt on more solid ground.  I'm drawn to Amish quilts anyway, the richness of colors and the simplicity -- they have a kind of peacefulness to them.  There are a lot of patterns I like but I chose Diamond in a Square, for its relative simplicity yet with the subtle liveliness of the diamond's angles.  Interestingly, the Diamond in a Square pattern (sometimes called Center Diamond) originated in the 1930s, among the Lancaster County Amish.  It seems so timeless that I assumed it had been around forever.  There are some variations that can be made -- the corner squares on the narrow borders can be omitted, one or both, or the narrow border around the center diamond -- but of course the basic elements are the same.

I found an image on Pinterest which I then couldn't track down --

which seemed to me quite unusual with the tan/beige, but was very appealing, so I started with that and just played around with different colors in Kona Cotton, which I really like for its quality and the richness and wide variety of its colors.  I ended up getting these --

which are from the bottom, Parchment, Laurel, Hibiscus, Teal Blue, and Garnet.

For the assembly I was going to just wing it (she said blithely), but when I was looking around for old quilts for color ideas, I also came across the Diamond in a Square mini-quilt tutorial at Purl Soho, which turned out to be a very helpful starting point.  Not having much quilting experience myself, it was a bit of a revelation that I didn't need to cut all of the pieces beforehand, which turned out to make it much easier and less stressful to adjust the next piece here or there if it needed it.

I decided to press all of the seams open, figuring that that would distribute the thickness more evenly, which I suspect at this small scale might be obvious.  I didn't use any batting at all, thinking it might make the quilt too stiff to drape properly -- I've heard that some miniaturists use fabric cut from an old T-shirt, though, so I'll keep that in mind.  The binding is just folded over from the back and stitched down by hand on the front, mitering the corners.

Yes, the last corner is really wobbly!  I didn't notice until after I'd finished -- so that's the end that gets tucked in!

I was really grateful for both the quality of the Kona Cotton, which took a bit of a beating getting sewn and resewn more than a couple of times on some of the pieces but still looks great, and also for the Purl Soho tutorial and the advice I read somewhere (last summer when I was making the sling bag) that people will never know how long it took you to sew something but they will see how much care you took sewing it, which on occasion must be translated as "yes, pick out the wonky seams, you will be glad you did," which is entirely correct, for just look at the results --

Any quilter reading this will no doubt notice that I haven't actually quilted this yet, and I think I will leave that for the time being.  Obviously it won't get much wear-and-tear in the dollhouse, so there shouldn't be a problem with things shifting around, or the seam allowances bunching up.  My hand-stitching is still a bit rough, so I think it prudent to wait until I've had a bit more experience in keeping the stitches both small and even!

Well, after this success, of course I had to hurry up and make the rest of the bedlinens, so I stitched up a set of sheets ...

... four pillows, and cases.  The pillows themselves are sewn from plain bleached muslin stuffed with one fluffed-up cotton ball each, and the sheets and cases are from a partly-worn-out sheet, the rest of which has that lovely old-sheet softness.  The fabric proved to be awfully ravelly, but the cases do look good.

Next time I will try and get the scale a bit better -- this house isn't particularly "realistic" as dollhouses go, but I'd like to have things not too "dolly" here -- but really I'm quite pleased with the quilt, and very happy with the colors and the way they play together.  Plus "quilt" starts with Q, so there's my ABChallenge!

Happy New Year

I'm not particularly sorry to see the end of 2017, so here's to good things in 2018!  Above is a stash of hand-me-down RYC Cashsoft in "Mist", headed towards Purl Soho's Foxglove Vest.

With the money from my Christmas stocking, I bought something I've had on my miniatures wishlist for a long time, and tossed in a few little "filler" items to qualify for free shipping -- these are for the kitchen area of my Elizabethan house-to-be.  On the left is a pair of carboys, which is a vessel for fermenting beer or other beverages.  Not sure I would have bought these particular ones if I had known that they are wood, but there it is -- I do really like the color.  (I am not entirely sure that this shape is correct for the period, but the research is part of the fun!)  On the right is a stoneware jug, v. handsome in its serviceable plainness.

A pair of "Staffordshire" dogs, I confess because I have a hankering for the real thing!  But these are charming too, and I love the way that they each have their own personality.

And this, the sine qua non as it were, a Biedermeier commode kit from Mini Mundus, which will go in the dining-room at Hardy House, with its myriad of curious nooks and crannies, all of them small -- so not much room for large furniture!

While waiting around for Julia at band rehearsals the past few weeks, David and I had the chance to go to more than one of the monthly flea markets, and at the last one I came across this charmer --

And I am well into reading a stack of new books!

Wishing you a happy new year of lovely woolly things, lots to read, little pleasures, and happy discoveries!

Slowly But Surely ...

I have begun dressing the mahogany Arts & Crafts bed I finished a few months ago (from Jane Harrop's Edwardian Era Miniatures in 1:12 Scale).  The mattress is following the tutorial at Tiny Handmade, which I adapted only slightly by using cotton balls instead of foam, with a layer of thin quilt batting as a sort of pocket to hold the cotton. I cut the batting to size without seam allowances, then whipped the edges together so that it was all one unit (stuffed) before wrestling it into the "ticking", which is an old work shirt of David's.

(Why cotton balls?  Because I had a coupon for a huge bag of store-brand cotton balls that ended up being about 75% off, and we don't use them much in the bathroom, so I figured I could stuff dollhouse furniture with them.  This worked quite well -- I did fluff them a bit so that they lay more smoothly inside the batting pocket -- and they are not nearly as lumpy as one might think they'd be.)

The tutorial is quite simple but effective, though I will say it is a bit of a challenge to get all of the seams straight, even if you use striped fabric! and also to get the tufting spacing to be the same on both sides.  This is in fact my second attempt, as the first one I tried to tweak a little too much and it came out too small.  I also think that next time I will try off-setting the rows of tufting.  But I'm pleased with how very comfortable the mattress looks!

The lace skirt is made of 17 repeats of the Clover Leaf Lace edging in Lace from the Attic, with a crochet cast-on and then a suspended bind-off taking the place of the very last row, in an attempt to "match" the two ends as much as possible.  The cotton is DMC 80 tatting cotton, which to my amazement I found at Michael's --I didn't think they would ever carry anything so esoteric ... hurrah!  It's still a bit large in scale, but I'm not ready for the micro-knitting yet.  I stitched the two pieces of edging to a hand-hemmed piece of muslin.  I had hoped to have a piece of lace along the foot of the bed as well, but the construction of the footboard doesn't allow that -- it probably could, though, if one thinks ahead far enough while putting it together.

This is the Hepplewhite serpentine table kit from House of Miniatures.  Mine is not as much of a success as it deserves, I'm afraid -- since it is a lovely little table -- but my kit-building techniques are still rather amateurish.  Apparently it's a classic newbie mistake to sand too much -- you don't realize that at this scale a little sanding goes a long way -- and I took off too much of the delicate shaping of the legs.  I decided to convert this into a design element, and roughed up the wood even more, to look like an older piece of furniture.

I also am not impressed with my polyurethane-finishing.  I really like the linseed oil/beeswax finish on the bed, so I think I might stick to that or maybe Danish oil in future -- more work in the applying thereof, but the results, at least for me, seem to be much better.

Still -- this was a happy coincidence! --

I will keep an eye out for a better sewing-machine, but this will do very well in the meantime.

And this is the tile-topped table kit from Omniarts of Colorado, which I came across quite accidentally on Etsy a few months ago.  This particular kit is probably from the 1980s. 

I painted it with Martha Stewart’s satin-finish craft paint in “Wedding Cake," and made the tiles to my "old favorite" tutorial from Wasting Gold Paper.  The design is of course a Duncan Grant drawing, though I don't know where it is from -- it's not quite the "Queen Mary" design but very like, certainly.  I did trim it just a smidge at one side, to center the roundel.

I was really touched to read the tribute on the Omniarts website to the lady who started the company, so I made sure that the pencilled assembly number, which presumably she had written, was visible on the underside, the way so many full-sized pieces of furniture have --

(I did add in the extra bracing underneath, as the table seemed alarmingly delicate without! but I should trust that Aleene's tacky glue more, it's great.)

I am extremely pleased with the way this turned out -- some of my craftsmanship is a bit rough, but the whole thing looks pretty much exactly the way I'd pictured it in my imagination!

And here is this month's in-progress photo of the Turkoman petitpoint carpet -- which I must say is very handsome but rather tedious.  I do like the general effect though, so I will just keep plodding along! --

Thoughts on the Parley Cardigan, and Some Catching Up

My Parley was finished and worn exactly a month ago, to be honest, but it has been quite summery lately, really too warm to want a sweater, and I've been rather busy with other things as well, so haven't had the wherewithal to photograph it.  But the weather dropped about twenty degrees quite suddenly this past weekend -- I kid you not, twenty degrees -- and I wanted wool, so I am wearing the cardigan again today.  It is of course the Parley by Mary Lou Egan of Yarnerinas, from her book with Gale Zucker and Kirsten Kapur, Drop-Dead Easy Knits.  The book is full of good-looking knits that are fairly low on the concentration scale, which is great for those of us who tend to have -- cough -- numerous projects going at once.  This particular one comes in pullover and cardigan versions, with simple shaping and lots of stockinette, with a bit of twizzle at the edges to keep it interesting.

This is just four skeins of Briggs & Little Sport in mulberry, which I got from Penelope Fibre Arts in British Columbia, as it's apparently a rather small line produced in Canada, and not many US shops carry it, even online -- it's worth perusing the B&L website to see the "tour" section and how the wool is processed, from grading to shipping.  Mine is a lovely purply color, with hints of blue and red and black giving it a lively depth which is very difficult to capture with the camera!  The yardage on the Sport wool is quite impressive, as I still had a good-sized ball and another full skein left over -- I bought five.  The wool is a single-ply, so tends to worm a little while winding and knitting, but not frustratingly so, although it doesn't feel particularly pleasant to knit with since it is rather rough in itself and perhaps it is that combined with the single-ness that makes it feel a little like wire when wrapped around my fingers.  Much of the roughness does wash out, though, and so now it has a sturdy wooliness to it and a light sheepy smell which is not atal unpleasant.  I am a little concerned about the alarmingly frequent thin places as I went along, two or three of which were such a hair's-breadth, literally, that I broke and spliced them on the spot.  I was tempted to weave in a bit of extra wool as a reinforcement in the less-alarming places, and had at least a dozen safety pins marking them as I went along, but in the end I didn't -- although I do have so much wool left that at least there is enough for repairs if that does become necessary later on!

The buttons are La Mode no.214 (eleven, not ten, since the buttonhole band came out with that many, as it happened).

The purple is generally a bit darker than I could get in these photos --

The sizing is quite generous, and I probably could have made the next size down instead of the 42 for my US12 figure, but there it is -- it's a great no-fuss cardigan, and in this yarn is good for nicely-cool days, not too light, not too heavy.  It probably does look its best with a scoop neck underneath, not a collared shirt, to play up the slightly-rolled neck, which has a gracefully curving line to it that I really like.

We had a good bit of rain this past winter, much to everyone's relief.  The down-side is that all of the weed seeds that have been lying dormant for the past three or four years of drought have apparently all decided to sprout and grow now.  Our backyard, which has a gigantic pine tree in it and therefore little else, has been since February or so a veritable sea of stinging nettles and crabgrass, which I have been digging up -- with a shovel, mind, not one of those mild-mannered forks -- an hour or so every morning, filling usually two trash cans a week. 

Unfortunately for the butterflies, some of whose caterpillars subsist pretty much exclusively on stinging nettles, this is not good.  I fully expect the nettles to come back again next year (she said, weeping quietly into her tea), but this year for the bees and other insects in our little patch of wilderness in the middle of suburbia, I scattered around a packet of California wildflower seeds in the few spots that get any sun, and a packet of shade flowers for the more woodsy corners.  The photo above is the very first bloom, which is a baby blue eyes (Nemophila maculata).  It looks like a little bit of everything in the sunny packet has come up so far -- I am quite looking forward to the mountain garlands and the lupines!

This is something else that has been keeping me busy, albeit indoors -- a pair of Elizabethan venetians (which are sort of ur-trousers) for David's Renaissance Faire garb.  These have been a real pain in the neck, to be honest, but I am on the home stretch at last, and only need to do buttonholes and lacing eyelets now, which will mean that -- huzzah! -- David will for the first time have a complete period outfit, bar the shoes of course.  More photos to come.

We took the afternoon Saturday to go and see the "Dressing Downton" exhibit at Muzeo in Anaheim.  I have rather mixed feelings about "Downton Abbey", not as keen in the later seasons as I was at the beginning -- but from start to finish, the clothes are pretty wonderful.  This suit of Lady Sybil's, from season 1, is probably what I would choose if they were to say, "Yes, you may have one!" although Mary's red suit from the same season would run a close second.  Cora's court dress from season 4 would be my favorite of the fancier ones, I think, but, goodness, how often would I get to wear it?!  More photos later of this, as well ...

The weather has been cool enough too, this past weekend, for me to enjoy again the feeling of wool running through my fingers, so last night when I had three hours in front of the television (new episodes of "Call the Midwife" and "Home Fires", and a repeat of "Wolf Hall"), I managed to get the rhythm going and finished the thumb gusset and worked over half of the medallion of the first two-end mitten.  It puzzles me why this cast-on doesn't lie as smoothly as the first one, but I tried a different technique, so I guess it just does.  V. glad that these fit well, to be sure!

And, yes, there is a new petit-point carpet!  It's spring, how could I resist?  This one is the Flower Trellis by Sue Bakker from Venus Dodge's Dolls' House Needlecrafts.  I haven't yet worked a Bakker chart that was free of significant errors and this one is no exception, I'm sorry to say, and in fact has some real doozies.  The chart gives symbols for "red, light red, green, gold" etc. with the materials list specifying which colors of DMC floss are used, either by themselves or in combination with similar shades -- but although there are symbols for "blue" and "yellow" there are no indications in the materials list that you need any blue or yellow at all.  I had to just choose shades I thought went well with the other colors.  The chart has the full border and the "trellis" in the main field, but only one each of the flowers inside each medallion, so the stitcher must decide where to put what -- this is perhaps not a serious drawback for a more experienced stitcher, but a beginner may not appreciate this, nor the fact that one long edge of the "vine" is clearly marked with the symbol for yellow, not green. 

But, yes, it's a very pretty carpet now that it's finished, I must say!  I worked out before I started the flowers which one I wanted where, and whether or not I would reverse it (just to make each medallion a little different).  I also reversed the light and medium pink blends here and there, for the same reason.  I used a partial chart for the half-medallions, leaving a one-stitch edge between them and the gold border, to match the trellis-work -- some have worked it differently, I find from poking around the internet.  Mine is kind of busy as a result, but in an ordered sort of way -- quite garden-like.

I used the following shades of DMC floss (3 strands, on 22-count mono canvas) --

• dark gold = 680 and 420 (1 + 2 strands)
• yellow = 745 and 3078
• blue = 931 and 932
• pale pink = 223 and 224 (2 + 1)
• medium pink = 223 and 3372 (1 + 2)
• red = 356
• pale green = 3347
• medium green = 3347 and 3052 (2 + 1)
• grey = 646
• background = 3033 (instead of ecru)

Note that I needed 3 skeins of the background color, not 2 as on the materials list, and that the number of red stitches (the "tulip" stamens) is a mere six per medallion, so if you have a bit of a pretty red already, you really needn't buy a new skein!