A Bluestocking Knits

Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!

Will would have enjoyed this, I think.  Always good to see the Beatles larking about, too!

(I'm pretty sure that Peter Quince doing the prologue is Trevor Peacock.)

Orphan Dollies

On the props list that was sent home recently for the 6th-grade production of "Annie" going up in a couple of weeks was "Tattered Rag Dolls 2 or 3".  I thought to myself, "I bet I could make rag dolls that look like they belong to orphans!" so I poked around on eBay for "1930s rag dolls" and came up with a number of ideas, and searching generally for free patterns brought a few more.  I chose a range of models and patterns because I wanted the dolls to look like they'd been made by different people, and possibly at quite different times.

I even managed to use all materials from my stash -- even the stuffing, which is from an old pillow that I had thrown out literally the day before and then rescued from the bin! (and washed, of course!)

The first one was based on a couple of eBay vintage dolls, and used the rag doll pattern from Allcraftsblogs.com. I couldn't open the PDF file, so I just cut-and-pasted the pattern, and sized the body up to about 7 inches, and the arms and legs proportionately.  This one has the most shaping of the three, and with the limbs being separate was a bit more fiddly, as it turned out, but not at all difficult.

Her hair is fine black wool (from Super Yarn Mart, so that might tell you how long it has been in my stash!).  I wound a long length of the wool around a book, to what looked like "enough", then carefully spread the mass across a strip of fabric, then machine-sewed along the strip with black thread to make the "part", then hand-sewed the hair to the doll's head.  This took a bit of fiddling, and I had to trim the base strip and color it with black laundry marker to keep it from showing through, but it worked pretty well.  I trimmed the ends of the yarn after I did the two braids -- it seemed safer that way.

She has very shapely calves, and the feet are, for a rag doll, quite elegant I think.

I ended up making her bodice fully lined, because facings at this scale were far too fiddly.

Her face is drawn on with ballpoint pen, which has a faux-faded look already.  I am not very good drawing faces.

The second doll was based quite thoroughly on a vintage original, with the pattern half-improvised and half the Simple Doll Pattern from Doll Chamber.  I thought it was interesting how much size was "lost" with stuffing, even this one which I wanted to be much softer than the first one. 

I made the neck too long -- it flopped very disconcertingly -- and because I was lazy I didn't bother making a new body, but just tucked in the original one until it was as short as I could get it.  It's still floppy, but at least more of a "baby" floppy than otherwise.  These joints are simply machine-sewn across after stuffing.

The face and hair are embroidered with three strands of floss, based fairly closely on the original folk-art doll.  I couldn't decide from the seller's photographs if the original doll's hair was chain stitch or outline stitch, or maybe a combination of the two, so I just used chain stitch.  I used two slightly different shades of blond floss so that it would look "faded".  The eyelashes are blanket stitch, the pupils satin stitch and the rest outline stitch.  I was impressed by the artists' trick of the dab of pink in the corners of the eyes on the original doll!

The original doll has a safety pin at the back of its romper, too --

The third doll was an utter failure on three attempts, and ended up back in the rag bag (do not make the arms too narrow, trust me!), but the fourth one, from a pattern at Nadene's Practical Pages, went together quite easily.  I did modify the pattern by adding a quarter-inch seam allowance all around, and omitting the armature -- as a result, the body was much simpler, and finished in about an hour.

This one is also based fairly exactly on a vintage original, but didn't turn out quite as appealing as the original for some reason.  It went together relatively easily, though, as I sewed the pieces of the dress straight onto the body, first the bodice, then the skirt, then the waistband.

This is the back, although really you can only tell because of the seam in the waistband, since I left her face blank like the original doll's.  The dress is made from an old shirt of David's that was frayed at the hems and collar, but I liked the fabric so much that I saved it.  The skirt is one of the shirt sleeves, partly because it was already hemmed but mostly because the hem was already worn through in places.  Except for this hem, the dress is completely hand-sewn!  I made two basic T-shapes for the bodice and sleeves, and gathered it a little at the waist -- sewing it directly onto the doll -- then "pleated" the skirt and sewed it down, then folded a strip for the waistband and sewed that on top of the join between skirt and bodice.

So these are the dollies before "aging".  The girls kind of laughed when I said I wanted them to get the dolls dirty -- like "is she serious? get stuff dirty on purpose?" -- and I had to actually throw the baby doll on the ground as Laura and I were walking across the school field the other day, and tell her to kick it as we walked.  (I heard other kids saying to each other in disbelief, "She's kicking that doll!")  That didn't get it really dirty, to my surprise, so yesterday I filled a dishpan full of coffee and soaked the baby doll and the plaid-dress one, and the clothes of the pigtailed one in that for about half an hour.  (The pigtailed doll is stuffed fairly hard, and I was afraid she wouldn't dry fully before Tuesday.  Her hair wouldn't survive the washing-machine or dryer either, I suspect.)  I had also bleached the striped dress to fade it.

(I also, I confess, stomped heartlessly on the pigtailed doll after I threw her down onto the deck in the back yard.  That got it dirty.)

It was interesting how differently the fabrics were affected by the coffee.  The pigtailed doll's petticoat looks quite ancient now, but the plaid-dress doll -- who was bleached-white muslin to start -- is only a pale ecru.

It's a hard-knock life ....

Twelfth Night

"Daylight and champaign discovers not more: this is open. I will be proud, I will read politic authors, I will baffle Sir Toby, I will wash off gross acquaintance, I will be point-devise the very man. I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me; for every reason excites to this, that my lady loves me. She did commend my yellow stockings of late, she did praise my leg being cross-gartered; and in this she manifests herself to my love, and with a kind of injunction drives me to these habits of her liking. I thank my stars I am happy. I will be strange, stout, in yellow stockings, and cross-gartered, even with the swiftness of putting on. Jove and my stars be praised!"

Malvolio -- played by the inestimable Stephen Fry -- convincing himself that Olivia loves him, while Sir Toby Belch (Colin Hurley), Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Angus Wright), and Fabian (Jethro Skinner) eavesdrop, in the recent production at the Belasco Theatre on West 44th Street in New York, originally performed at the Globe in 2012.. 

Memorial Day

In Which We Sing the Praises of Araucania Nature Wool; Or, This Rough Magic

I ended up somehow with a drawer-full of this lovely stuff, Araucania Nature Wool, a dozen skeins or so in four colors -- the old Tall Mouse craft store in Yorba Linda used to every so often have sock yarn or something else that wasn't a novelty yarn, and I picked up one of these skeins in amazement one day, and then every few months bought another, because nobody else did, until the supply was gone.

The colors are rich and varied, as you would expect from kettle-dyed skeins, the red especially vivid.

The wool has a slightly rough softness to it, so that you know you're wearing wool but you like it.

Alas, both Tall Mouse and Nature Wool are no more.  What to do with my drawer-full of wool?  It felts beautifully, I heard, and so I decided to make placemats in a random-stripe pattern.  Here are the first two --

Famous Knitters

Mary Pickford during a break in the filming of "Sparrows" (1926), knitting for disabled veterans.

Some Lesser-Known Greek Gods ...

I came across this again after many years, and thought it's too good to keep to myself:

Some Lesser-Known Greek Gods (by way of Merl Reagle of the Los Angeles Times)

Manacles, god of bondage

Envelope, goddess of mail

Millipedes, god of crawly things

Telephone, goddess of gabbing

Gametes, god of new beginnings

Receptacles, god of trash control

Amperes, god of electricity

Cellophanes, god of freshness

Erudite, goddess of learning

Follicles, god of good hair days (surely the one in the picture above!)

Vestibules, god of passageways

Limeades, god of tangy drinks

Tomatocrates, god of truck-farmers

Antibias, god of equal opportunity

"What dreadful Hot weather we have! -- It keeps one in a continual state of Inelegance"

That was Jane Austen, in a letter to her sister of 18th September 1796.  I suppose, though, that to Miss Jane "dreadful Hot" was not what we've been having the past month or so -- I am reminded of that headline of some years ago, "England Swelters in 75-Degree Heat".  Hah!  I used to dream of 75-degree heat!

So this is my knitting lately, then,

Pathetic, really.  This one is a little better,

but not much.  A cowl-scarf thing, for an easy Christmas present, and a doll cardy. Not yet, anyway.

Today was a day off of school, so we all watched the tree service as they swarmed over our giant stone pine in the back yard.

There are in fact three men in the tree in this picture, some thirty feet up (9 meters?) into a fifty-some-foot tree.  It was fascinating to watch them, actually -- they couldn't get any machinery to the back yard, so they climbed the old-fashioned way, with ropes.

About half-way through the morning, we thought, "let's go see the shuttle!"  David had heard that it was going to fly over Disneyland, so we thought we'd get a good view from the top of the big parking structure.  We were not the only ones with this idea.

The whole top of the structure was like this.  But although there were a lot of people, it is very big, and away from the main escalators, it was not such a crowd.  The nice thing was that everyone was excited to be there, so those with radio or internet access were giving updates to those without.  Around 11:20, we got the news that it was over the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, so those of us who were sitting on the shadier stairwells came up, and not long afterwards the hum of the crowd could be heard.  "There it is!  I see it!"

The 747 flew literally over our heads.  There were two military escorts -- you can see one not quite in a direct line from the wing on the left, and the other escort about the same distance again, towards the bottom left.

David didn't take any photos of it directly overhead -- he said later, "well, there was a point at which I thought I'd rather be watching it with my own eyes."

It was rather amazing, really.  You think you're getting all blasé about stuff like this, but then it's right over your head, and you think, "wow."  It's been in space.  Amazing.

Tie Dye

The theme for our Girl Scout Day Camp this year was of course the one-hundredth anniversary of Girl Scouts in the United States.  We did a different decade each day -- Tuesday was the 'teens, Wednesday the Forties (we made a no-bake ration cake), and Thursday was the 1970s.  We made tie-dyed bandanas that day, and there was enough dye left over to bring home the leftovers and do some more stuff ourselves.

I got a couple of "hobo bags" from Michaels as well as some t-shirts.

The bags are from Simplicity, only a few dollars so they're not super-fancy, but are fully lined (cotton knit on the outside, cotton muslin on the inside) with a large pocket divided in two on one side.

The bandanas that we did at camp were a kit with triangular bandanas, wash, pre-soak, and yellow, red, and blue dyes.  Julia, though often so meticulous about her art, did this random tie with equally-random splotches of dye.

Laura pleated hers before tying.  It was so black when we brought it home in the Ziploc bag that I did not have much hope for it by the next day, but quite a lot of the blue rinsed out, leaving this wonderful purple with a surprising and very cool red streak.

I was hoping for the same dark-purple effect on the t-shirt later, but despite also being 100% cotton the fabric took the dye much differently, and much more of the dye rinsed out.  This was a sort of scrumble-tie, just gathering it all up into a kind of disc shape and tying across with the rubber bands.  It is still fascinating to me how differently fabrics take the same dye, as well as the different effects you can get with the same tying method -- the bag at the top is also pleated-and-tied.  Maybe the pre-soak also had some effect on the bandanas, keeping the colors so much brighter?

Thursdays are for Genealogy: Beards of Grampa's Sweden

I came across this set at Flickr this morning, part of the Swedish National Heritage Board's collection, and was struck by the generous and wonderful beards on every one of the men.  These particular photos were all taken by Einar Erici in the 1930s -- he was obviously a talented and sensitive photographer, to judge by the character studies that each of these photographs becomes.

The coachman C. P. Lundström, born in 1851, and his wife, who lived in Södra Trädgårdsgatan street in Gävle, Gävleborg province.

The postman Anders Wedin in Enånger, Hälsingland. Born in 1866.

The master painter (målarmästaren) Olof Nilsson, Kulladal, Skåne. Aged seventy; born in 1865.

A man on the doorsteps to a house, place unknown.

Churchwarden Anders Andersson, born in 1866, and his wife, of Brunn, Gästrikland.

The verger (kyrkvaktmästaren) Andersson, born in 1858, and his wife, of Skederid, Uppland.

The farmer J. Johansson, seventy years old, with a cat, in Åslunda, Uppland.

The crofter G. V. Gustafsson, born in 1872, of Margretelund, Uppland.

Oskar Almgren in Stockholm, born in 1852, smith at the Maritime Pilots Administration.

The parish constable (fjärdingsmannen) August Ländin in Åkeshov, Uppland playing the guitar. Born in 1863.

The yeoman farmer (hemmansägaren) Carl Anders Samuelsson, born in 1857, and his wife Anna Lena, of Stigåsa, Småland, in 1932.