A Bluestocking Knits

New Year News

A New Year mish-mash today, some of the little things I've been working on.  Above, my progress on the 1:12 carpet for my third shop.  The "light topaz" pops more in the photo than it does in real life.

During our New Year's Eve stroll downtown, Julia and I happened into a new used-clothing boutique and scored these woolly beauties --

Shetland wools!

Last month, I read two D.E. Stevenson novels, one to my astonishment and great anticipation that I had never read, and one a favorite.  For some unknown reason, I had never even seen a copy of The Tall Stranger, so was delighted to find it under the Christmas tree with my name on it.  Needless to say, I started reading it that very morning, and enjoyed it very much.  It is assumed by everyone that Barbie France will marry the cousin with whom she has grown up, including Edward himself, but when the time comes, Barbie finds herself unsettled by the idea, and must discover the truth about Edward's behavior.  This novel was published in 1957, and Barbie is, rather unusually for Stevenson, a career woman who realizes that she does not want to give up her job after she marries.  This tidy Sirdar twinset looks quite appropriate for both town wear in general, and for making a smart impression on her interior-design clients --

(I'm greatly impressed that there are four sizes for this pattern!  Like Barbie herself, very modern for the late 1950s!)

The other title was Green Money, wh. I had read only once before but was already a favorite.  (Like The Tall Stranger, this has been recently re-issued by Dean Street Press.)  George Ferrier, who even himself admits that he is not very bright but is nevertheless an honest and decent young man, finds himself one of the trustees for the naïve and sheltered daughter of a wealthy businessman.  Being George, he is a bit floored by the suddenness of it all, but takes this responsibility seriously.  Elma, however, finds her inexperience something to be discarded as quickly and smoothly as possible.  "Chaos obviously ensues," as Bertie Wooster would say, and this story is actually quite Wodehouseian both in tone and screwball-comedy plot, yet with Stevenson's own touches, of course, and I enjoyed it immensely.  When Green Money was published in 1939, men were still wearing lots of Fair Isle jumpers, thanks to the former Prince of Wales (by then the former Edward VIII, as it happens), and so it seems quite appropriate for George to have a pullover something like this one --

(I don't think these are even close to traditional Fair Isle patterns, and even without seeing the directions I rather suspect that this is knitted flat, awkward as that might seem to us now!)

Next in my mish-mash, a selection of fabrics for patchwork stars, on sale from Reproduction Fabrics --

It's a coincidence that they are all pink! but a happy one.

And yesterday afternoon I glued up another pair of those delightful mid-century chairs from Arjen Spinhoven for my 1:12 tea rooms --

Not Singly But in Battalions

Projects, I mean, not sorrows, though there are a great many of those in the world these days.  And it is not impossible that this jitteriness is my way of trying to cope with that.

At the top is the Fereghan carpet designed by the amazing Frances Peterson, on 48-count silk gauze wh. I told myself after working a 1:12 cushion at that scale I would never do again and here is a carpet, for heaven's sake.  But it will look exceptionally beautiful in my third shop --

which is still not glued together.

(Am having some issues with TypePad, by the way, not displaying images correctly, but I've already held this post up for over a week.  If something looks strangely truncated on the right margin, it probably is.  Click to view the whole image. [EDITED: I think I've fixed that ...])

Two more sets of stars in English patchwork for that quilt-to-be.  It now takes me about 30-35 minutes to sew the six diamonds together, assuming that all goes well (...).  I take great pleasure in finding ways to incorporate French General's selvage border into my projects!  The brown striped one is a bit rough-hewn compared to the others, but maybe it will work, we'll see.

Finished the "Quaker Samplings III"!  Very pleased with this!

The thread color doesn't quite ring true in this photo -- it's Gentle Arts' "Blueberry," which isn't the steely-blue that it looks here, but mostly blue with some purply tinges here and there, like blueberries.

And I had a fancy to knit a little cardigan thing to go over my old choir dress, now that we are wearing "whatever we want as long as it's black, floor-length, and has at least three-quarter sleeves".  This would solve that last issue.  I'm not even close to the lacy part yet, but I thought I might try a slip-stitch edge on the increase section of the points to go with the bind-off on the decrease part, and so I knitted up a swatch -- this works in theory, but I'm not sure if the second two points, which are knitted with my tweaks, aren't a little too vague-looking compared to the first two.

That's Better!

Now the boulders look like "three-dimensional" boulders, after switching out the errant DMC flosses for ones that more resemble the picture on the cover of the chart.  I meant to take a photo of this at the time, but clearly I was enjoying stitching too much to think of it.  Curiously, the water didn't look like much of anything until the landscaping around it began to be filled in, and then suddenly it was obviously a waterfall!  I'm still not quite sure what that brown construction at the lower right is -- I thought it might be a mill wheel ... a bridge tunnel?  At the moment, I am leaning once again towards mill wheel ...

I bought these delicious-looking pastries for my 1:12 tea room some time ago.  Flush with the success, I decided to re-paint the outside of the third shop, which I had done in a rather vivid blue --

that turned out to be just too much.  I had been going for a lovely dark blue, but though the paint chip looked tempting enough to buy a sample pot, it just didn't work on the shop itself.  One night when it was far too late to run out and buy something else, I looked through my craft paints and pulled out a Martha Stewart one in "Magellan Blue" --

and I quite like it now!  I'm afraid that the white trim next to a dark blue does show up the crookedness of the factory assembly, but there it is, can't be helped.  I might try and touch up some of the wobbly paint work, though (!).

I bought this at the same time as the two chairs for the tea shop, a midcentury-modern room divider from Arjen Spinhoven.  It is a superb kit, cleverly reducing a real piece of 1950s furniture into 1:12 scale.  My finishing techniques don't live up to the beauty of this kit, I'm afraid, but luckily for me, it doesn't look too bad from a distance.

I worried a lot about the faux teak wood-grain that this piece absolutely required -- I could paint the chairs black, but not this! -- and I did a lot of research and testing on scraps before I did the real thing.  I'm mostly happy with my results -- could be better, but for a first attempt, not bad.

I'm embarrassed to admit that although I remembered and heeded the instructions to glue the two layers of a particular piece in a certain direction -- so that the notches on the underside of the upper cabinet are aligned with the holes on the top of the lower cabinet, to fit that central shelf support -- and that I laid them out carefully before applying the glue, I somehow managed to turn one half around as I was spreading the glue and forgot to turn it back.  This necessitated carving out some rather laughably clumsy notches on the piece that would become the underside of the upper cabinet -- in a piece that actually has some rather good faux wood grain on it, too! aaugh -- so builder beware, and learn from my mistake!

(What an eye for detail Spinhoven has! Look at the double-H piece -- the upper side of the cross-pieces, which will support the two small shelves, are cut with straight corners, but the undersides, which will be visible, have a slight curve in the corners.)

This double-H was the most worrisome piece, as it is frighteningly thin and bendy, and you can see that I did not get it to stand as straight as it is meant to.  Even though there was a spare included with the kit (thoughtfully!), I had already cracked said spare earlier while dry-fitting my re-cut holes, and so I didn't dare to take this one out and re-set it.

This is my favorite part of the piece, the bow-like cross-pieces on the legs! --

And yes, those "glass" doors do slide open and closed!

Chairs for the Tea Shop

I had long intended to scratch-build the chairs for my 1:12 tea shop, and was hoping to re-size this 1:24 tutorial from Little Architecture (which is actually the Sibbo/Pinnockio chair by Yngve Ekström), but after a great deal of math, some trial and error, and months of dawdling, I saw the mid-century modern dining chair on Arjen Spinhoven's website, and realized yet again that anything I can do, Arjen Spinhoven can do much, much better.

The kit does go together fairly easily, and the resulting chair is not only beautiful in itself, but sturdier -- less vulnerable, I mean -- than Jane Harrop's mid-century chairs, charming as those are.

The real-life design is the Fresco chair by Ib Kofod-Larsen -- it's uncanny, how well Spinhoven has re-created it in 1:12 scale. The back rest on the original chair is upholstered, which Spinhoven has decided not to simulate, but that is a minor detail -- the 1:12 chair looks very good with a wooden back -- but if one has a steady hand, I'm sure this could be done with paint, as with the seat.

As handsome as these would be in a teak-colored finish, I had in my mind's eye a set of black chairs, as a subtle difference from the various other wood tones in the shop.  I painted mine with a base coat of black, then after a light sanding, a second coat of 1:1 the same black paint and satin varnish, for just a little sheen.  I will probably age these a bit, but I'm enjoying them as they are for now!

Long Time, No See

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

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

-- which I liked much better. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decisions

As it happened, I went in a different direction from what I had originally planned, which was some shade of brown for the words and letters in the "Quaker Virtues" sampler -- I think it was the little "m" that made me think of just going with the next-lightest and next-darkest shades of blue to the 931 that I'm using for the motifs.  This will make it a bit more Delft or willow-ware like than I was picturing in my mind, but that's not a bad thing by any means.

With the spring weather here seems to come more decisiveness for me -- I felt good about changing my mind to a rather-simpler quilt for our bed, but since there is a lot less solid fabric in a half-square-triangle block than in (proportionately) a Cross and Crown, I had to get more fabrics, which meant rearranging the layout I had already started.  Oh, well -- I'm really happy with the new fabrics.  Like the "Quaker Virtues," this has changed the whole look of the thing, but I think for the better.

I had been putting this off for months, unsure of how well it would work, and -- surprisingly -- dreading having to work with teeny-tiny molding, but the other day I told myself, "Right! get on with it!"  I wanted to make framed "vintage" photographs for my 1:12 carpet shop, but of course they should be glazed, so how to do that ...?  I printed out a selection of photographs to a good size, then glued them face-down to some clear plastic cut from either a box of croissants from Costco or a box of spinach (I tried it more than once).  The glue is just outside each photo, so that it doesn't show.  I painted some tiny cove molding, then cut it to fit each picture, then glued that to the plastic "glazing" with the photo underneath.  After the glue dried, I trimmed away the extra plastic and touched up the cut edges with black paint to hide them.

They turned out pretty well, and the slightly decrepit bits here and there are on a par with the rest of the shop!

And I managed to choose fabrics online! -- always a gamble -- for Laura's star quilt --

Kurdistan Prayer Rug in Miniature

I have been utterly delighted with this piece from start to finish, I admit.  It has always been one of my favorites in Frank Cooper's book -- Oriental Carpets in Miniature -- and so it was a pleasure to add it to my queue at last, and then to work it, and even better, to have something charming to make in these worrisome times.

Here again is the late 18th-early 19th century original now in the McMullan Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (accession no.1970.302.8) --

I think Cooper did a fine job here, reducing and (necessarily) simplyfing the design without losing any of its charm.  It is my good luck that he worked his version on 18-count canvas, and that converting that to 40-count silk gauze -- which was only a matter of my using a different fiber, one strand of DMC floss instead of Paternayan crewel wool, and converting the colors -- makes the rug a more-delicate scale for 1:12 miniatures, and very like the original proportions of a prayer rug.

For colors, I used these --

• dark blue 3750
• medium blue 931
• light blue 3752
• ivory 3033
• red 815
• green 523
• gold 680
• yellow 422
• coral 3722

The green and light blue are very pretty but together their value is so similar that it isn't easy to distinguish them, so perhaps a darker green might have been better -- though on the whole, I don't think it spoils the effect at all.

I worked mine in continental stitch, which I find makes a neater back and an all-around more pleasant experience than working half-cross in tiny scales!

This has always been meant to have pride of place in the carpet shop, so the next thing is to install it!

Tiled Shop Front

Well, I'm much happier with this! 

Per my experiment, the tiles are made of watercolor paper painted with FolkArt Milk Paint ("Pirate Black," rather unsuitably!), "glazed" with Mod Podge in the satin finish.  They aren't perfect, obviously, but a great improvement on the previous attempts.  The tiles are individually glued to a piece of drawing paper, pre-folded and trimmed to fit over the corners and molding, then the whole assembly glued in place.  I didn't get the edges quite as flat as I would have liked, but there it is -- perhaps from a bit further away than these photos are, it won't be so apparent!

I will probably age it a bit, though not as much as the carpet shop as that is meant to look somewhat run-down, while this is "newer"!  Still, it should probably have a bit of dirt here and there ...

I am amused to find that I am becoming much more nonchalant about re-making miniatures -- I wanted to put a fireplace on one wall of the tea shop, and fell in love with the shape and reasonable price (especially with a coupon!) of this Tudor-esque one --

which has a very simple-yet-handsome arch, but wasn't quite what I had seen in my mind's eye.

Not that a Georgian-ish/early-Victorian shop would originally have had an Elizabethan fireplace, of course, but let's say some recent owner of the shop was loitering around an architectural salvage yard (as one does) and came across a small one, either Elizabethan or Revival, that would fit in a tiny shop -- well, I would buy it!  I didn't really care for the Houseworks fireplace's sandstone color, when what I was picturing was more limestone, like Little Moreton's above, or even better Dorney Court's, and so I decided to paint it. 

The best grey I had turned out to be the same one I had used on the interior of the carpet shop, with some aging and soot in dove grey, brown, and black.  I might actually put a bit more "smoke" on it.

(The pink vase looks huge, but actually it is the fireplace that is really very small -- you can tell by the relative size of the 1:12 chair!)

Plan B!

Wondering why a previously-successful process didn't work very well at all twice in a row, I decided that I should just do an experiment.  Since I have a number of different kinds of varnishes in my stash, I got out some unvarnished paint-chip squares that were left over, and tried every one of the varnishes, partly to figure out why the artists medium didn't work and partly to audition a different varnish.

The results were quite interesting, actually.  I stuck my samples on a piece of card stock, so that I can have a record of the various finishes -- at the top in the photo above is one of the leftover tiles from my very first batch, as charming as it was the day it was made!  Below it, on the far left, are a cluster of three of the faux tiles varnished with the Liquitex gloss medium I used originally, then Mod Podge satin finish, then DuraClear ultra-matte, CeramCoat gloss varnish, and DuraClear satin.  They were all smoothly covered when the varnish was newly-applied, so the dips appeared during the drying process for some reason I don't know yet -- I applied it intentionally quite thickly, by the way, so these flaws might not appear if applied thinly.  The DuraClear ultra-matte is ultra-matte, indeed! but too matte for my purpose, though beautifully smooth and even.  I wasn't willing to risk large irregularities like the CeramCoat sample, so that one was probably out, too, at least for now.  This left the Mod Podge satin finish and the DuraClear satin, both of which probably would be successful, but the Mod Podge was still a bit tacky the next day, and indeed the instructions say it might be, and recommend a varnish top-coat, so I decided to use the DuraClear even though the Mod Podge had just a bit more depth to it, which to my eye looked more like a real glazed tile.  But by the second day, the Mod Podge sample was not tacky at all, and so I changed my mind and used the Mod Podge after all.  (I figured that if the faux tiles were still tacky after a few days, I could varnish them with the DuraClear satin ...!)

My conclusion from this experiment is that the Liquitex gloss medium is just getting old.  I bought it and first used it in 2014!  It has worked fine only a month or so ago for "varnishing" faux paintings (printed on paper with the computer), so I'm guessing that enough of the water in it has evaporated over time that when laid thickly like this, it just doesn't set as well as it did when first opened.  (The first batch of mini tiles I glazed a month ago are still tacky, in fact.)  It's also possible that the water content helps it to self-level while it is drying, and therefore the bubbles and irregularities "stick" instead of smoothing themselves out.

And so I made a third set of tiles -- but this time, I had been scrolling, rather disheartened, through photos of "tiled shop fronts" on Google (as one does), and seen one with a sort of self-border of half-tiles, and thought it looked very handsome.  And ... if I did rows of half-tiles along the top and bottom, I could make them bigger and still have an odd number of rows!  The only remaining problem was that of getting each square the same height and depth as its neighbors.  I cut a piece of watercolor paper a good bit bigger than the area to be tiled, painted it with FolkArt milk paint in "Pirate Black" (!), and tacked to the back of it a piece of 1/2" grid paper.  Instead of cutting the painted area into strips and then cutting each of the strips into squares -- which is what I did before, resulting in ever-so-slightly different "squares" -- I numbered the squares on the unpainted side before cutting, enough squares to fit the space to be tiled, then used my big paper-cutter to cut along the horizontal lines but only almost to the edge, leaving them still attached to each other at one end.  Then I turned the whole thing clock-wise 90 degrees and cut along the other set of lines, this time all of the way (because I could put them back in order using the numbers).  This was more than a bit awkward, obviously -- I had to make sure that all of the partly-cut strips were flat and butted up closely to each other, so that the second cuts would be in the right place, and the grid paper didn't stick very well so that I had to carefully peel it off of each cut square and write the correct number onto the back of the square! -- but it wasn't as onerous as it sounds, and it achieved the result I was hoping for, a nice straight set of squares that line up evenly, and in both directions.

The Mod Podge, just like the artists medium in my very first set of faux tiles, took on some of the texture of the watercolor paper, which is fine with me.  I'm very pleased with the satin finish, too -- it has enough shininess to say "glazed tiles" but not so much that it's distracting or reflects irregularities.  Now that I have a better idea of the predicted-success-rate, in future I might try a smooth paper -- the paint chips are worth using again, for instance -- or something more Arts & Crafts/"hand-painted" like a watercolor wash.

So I'm happier with the finish, and I'm happier with the new size!

(The façade developed a crack running from the upper left corner of the door frame through the cornice molding, so I've pulled it apart and reglued it, which is why it's clamped now.  The tiles are not attached to the bay window yet ...)

10th Update

Here is the status as of this afternoon of the main projects I've got going.  I usually wake up early most mornings, and so after breakfast I stitch for an hour or so on the miniature Kurdistan prayer rug, before I put in my contact lenses.  I continue to find this an utter pleasure to work.  The strange white diagonal lines are the traveling threads on the back!

Granny Sampler Afghan all stitched together -- at last, she said wearily -- and the border almost finished.  Still have about two-thirds of the ends to weave in, though.  Sigh.  On the bright side, it was looking very, um, extemporaneous for a while, and looks much more cohesive now, so I'm quite pleased with it.

A loaf of Finnish rye bread, from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess -- amazingly easy, since there was almost no kneading, to my surprise.  Even better that it tastes delicious and used 180g of the rye flour that's been lurking in my freezer for years.  (I might have to buy more now, actually, this is so good.)

Swatching with the KnitPicks "Palette".  I wrote here quite some time ago that I wanted to knit the Victory Jumper with it, and I still think the yarn would suit the pattern well, but I think what was bothering me at the back of my mind so much that I've left it for a full year was that it's just a bit itchy to want to wear against the skin.  What I'm thinking now is something more like this lacy waistcoat/vest from DROPS ...

These faux tiles would obviously look a bit more "realistic" when attached more snugly -- I've started gluing them to a paper base, which is curling a bit when just propped up against the front façade of the tea-shop-to-be -- but I'm just not very happy with them, I'm afraid.  I could live with the uneven surfaces, but the fraction-of-a-fraction difference in sizes is quite glaring at 1:12 scale.  So it's on to plan B, but unfortunately I don't yet know what plan B is.

Still pretty happy with this.  I'm really fascinated by Quaker samplers -- I think what pleases me most about this particular one (aside from the ligatures, of course) is the combination of complex motifs with serene colors.  I've made a few tweaks of the chart here and there, and haven't yet filled in the empty spaces with their smaller motifs.

Tomato seedlings, hardening off the last few days before getting planted.  Some of the seeds didn't sprout along with their brethren, and so I put another seed in those pots -- then lo, up came the first one! and now some of the pots have two seedlings.  With limited space in my two new raised beds, I had ordered seeds of two heirloom dwarf varieties, and then the seed company sent a third packet "similar to my selections" free, so I have eight little pots altogether, the purple cherry tomato "Dwarf Velvet Night" and the bicolor beefsteak "Dwarf  Beauty King," plus "Dwarf Sleeping Lady".  (I think I wrote "Sleeping Beauty" on the stick!)

The arroyo lupines and the lacy phacelia in our front garden are looking a bit decrepit now, since being the first ones to appear they have been setting seed for some weeks, but the mountain garlands are in full glory at the moment -- I think they are what I was most looking forward to, so it's lovely to gaze across the field of them (stopping before one's eye gets to the line of cars perpetually resident along both sides of the street these lock-down days, as so few of our neighbors are going anywhere at all).  Though this photo doesn't really convey the delicious colors (nor the hum of the delighted and slightly drunken bees), I've left the photo full-size, so you can get the full effect!  The shrubs that I can still find (!) are all doing well, and the little California wild rose has buds on it, hurray!