A Bluestocking Knits

"Memling Bergama" Carpet

This is the "Memling Bergama" from Frank Cooper's Oriental Carpets in Miniature. This chart and finished carpet echo very strongly my feelings about the Shirvan 1 I worked this past summer from the same book -- the chart is tiny and does not include the very-helpful bold on every tenth line that many do nowadays, and some of the symbols are easily confused for a similar symbol which refers to a similar shade (e.g. small dot = dark red, large dot equals light red -- and this seems backwards to me, too, wouldn't dark red have a bigger dot?? gaaah) -- but the finished piece is so charming that I can only shrug and say, "but it's worth it".

I did make some changes in the materials -- it is worked in Appleton's crewel wool on 28-count Monaco, to be in scale with the Holbein carpet I worked last summer, instead of Paternayan wool on 18-count as in the original.  It is not a particularly simple matter to convert one brand of crewel wool to another -- various conversion charts I found online and in books gave me usually two and sometimes three possible choices, wh. really goes to show that each brand has fairly unique colors! and you can't quite get a true match if you convert to another brand.  But Paternayan is heavier enough than Appleton's to be impossible to work at 28-count, whereas I already knew, of course, that Appleton's would.

These are the shades I chose, though after working it I would recommend a different choice for the P643 than Ap343, as it doesn't quite contrast enough with the dark gold of the 911, and "disappears" quite a bit from the center crosses in the four outer medallions --

P500 = Ap326
P756 = Ap992
P950 = Ap226
P643 = Ap343
P751 = Ap911
P641 = Ap245
P930 = Ap147

The alternate conversion in the image below uses Ap566, Ap882, Ap226, Ap342, Ap911, Ap315, and Ap224, which looked much more "faded" to me and I wanted a newer-looking carpet.

I was also a bit perplexed by the quantities of wool specified in the materials list: although it list calls for equal amounts of the two reds, the results are obviously skewed to using much more of the so-called "dark" red -- so I used the other one for the overcast edging.  I ended up running out of this one by the time I got to the fringe, as it happened, so a good portion of that is the two reds mixed together, which you can see in a strong light but is otherwise more-or-less unnoticeable (she said hopefully).

This is how much wool I had left -- the 911 is what is left from the second skein --

Cooper writes of his version, "There is no assurance that [the carpet in the painting] is a Bergama rug, but it meets the description given in several books, and rugs from this area [in Turkey] were being exported to Europe as early as the fourteenth century. Because the rug appears in a Memling painting, it is, perhaps, safer to call it a Memling Bergama"!  He is not the first one, I think, to notice Memling's fondness for a certain type of Bergama, as there is a long article here about Oriental carpets in Renaissance painting which devotes an entire section to Memling.

Hans Memling "Flowers in a Jug" (ca.1485) now in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.  I think Cooper's is a very handsome re-creation, in fact!

Karagashli No.10 Carpet

This is the Karagashli carpet, number ten in Meik and Ian McNaughton's Making Miniature Oriental Rugs and Carpets. 

It is worked in Appleton's crewel wool on 22-count Hardanger canvas, something of an experiment as I haven't been able to easily get hold of 24-count canvas, which is what the McNaughtons use throughout their book, and I had only 22-count and 28.  The coverage of the Appleton's is erratic at this gauge, even inadequate in some places, I'm afraid.  I noticed that the lighter colors have better coverage than the darker ones, so perhaps this is due to the peculiar effect of different dyes on the same kind of wool -- I've noticed this in knitting wool, certainly.  I wanted a good-sized carpet, so I chose the larger gauge, going on various needlepoint websites that assured me that Appleton's is for 18-count. I did get the wool to bloom a little in the blocking, though -- soaked it in warm water for a few minutes, roughed it up a bit, whacked it on the side of the sink -- which did actually work a little, but you will have to take my word for it as I'm afraid I forgot to take a "before" photo.  There are still some noticeably thin spots, but, well, I will just call it "wear and tear" on an "antique" carpet, I guess!  I purposely didn't block it very hard, either, to leave it looking even more aged.

I had just enough of the green wool left to make a small sample to compare "before and after".  I suspect now that much of the inadequate coverage has to do with the particular stitch used, as you can see on my afterthought-sample that the canvas shows through on regular diagonal lines every other stitch, and I have also noticed in other projects that the stitches lie differently when the continental is worked to the right than when it goes to the left -- so, like knitting, it apparently can make a noticeable difference what direction the wool goes in at the back of the canvas as it comes in or out of the stitch on the right-side.  It is possible that continental stitch would have provided better coverage, but of course with more attendant warping in the finished piece.

(On closer inspection, I see that even some of the other carpets in the McNaughtons' book show a little canvas in the darker background sections, so perhaps even 24-count canvas is a bit skimpy in some projects.  Oh, well.)

This is the second carpet I've worked from this book, and while the first chart was flawless, this one had a small but fairly glaring mistake in the outermost border (repeated, because apparently the chart was mirrored for printing) but it was so obviously wrong that it was not at all difficult to spot it before I worked that area.  I did notice -- eventually! -- that the three red rhombus-ish motifs in the center are actually slightly different from each other, but whether this is a mistake or intentional, I don't know.  ("Only Allah is perfect.")  Mine are worked slightly differently, because I assumed that they were all the same and wasn't working strictly to chart!  But otherwise I'm delighted with this design, and the planning that went in to making the odd-sized motifs fit into a regular field -- notice that the white "stars" touch the border at the bottom end, while there is a single line of green background on the opposite end, and that the whole arrangement of central motifs at the bottom is not quite in the same places relative to each other as in the top part -- by only one row -- but since it is only one row, you hardly notice it, only that everything fits neatly.  This ever-so-slight imbalance is in order to accommodate a perfectly regular arrangement of the border motifs, and I can only admire the meticulousness of designers whose corners have full, continuous motifs, not lopped-off overlaps.  And I would also highly recommend this particular chart for a beginner to petit point, as the border is very logical and therefore easy to work, yet the central panel is rather fantastical and interesting.

I suspect that the McNaughtons' designs are not based on specific antique carpets, as Frank Cooper's are for instance, but they label this one as "mid-19th century" so perhaps it is more in the style of a mid-19th century Karagashli than a miniature version of a particular one.  They write, "Karagashli is a village near Kuba in the eastern Caucasus.  Many carpets woven there display a series of banner-like red rhomboids on a turquoise background, surrounded by white cruciform stars and strange, bird-like motifs.  The pattern in the main border is known as 'leaf and chalice' pattern.  It is not peculiar to Karagashli, but is widely used in Caucasian weaving."

Here are two full-sized Karagashlis, in fact, from the very helpful and interesting identification guide at Azerbaijan Rugs in San Francisco --

which clearly show the inspiration for the miniature version.  It would be fun to work the McNaughtons's chart again with the dark-turquoise background, though I do like the green.  There are also ones in the guide where the abrash is quite noticeable, and a handsome one where the two background colors are reversed, with a mid-blue on the leaf-and-chalice border and a golden-ivory in the center panel.  (Interestingly, the guide calls the border "leaf and calyx" -- like the McNaughtons, I guess, I certainly immediately saw chalices!)

New skill for me on this project: basketweave stitch.  Most needlepoint guides, online and in print, tell you to do larger swathes of single-color stitching (backgrounds, for example) in basketweave, which unlike continental stitch has a tendency to keep the canvas true.  I'm guessing that this comes from the strong angle of the back of the continental stitch, which you can see here in pretty much everything except the green background and the red in-fill of the large medallion.  Presumably the vertical/horizontal alignments of the back of basketweave stitch counteract the slant of its front.  But I got my nerves all a-jangle by various sources warning that you must alternate the vertical and horizontal rows or you get a little ridge visible from the front -- fair enough, but the instructions on how to do this seem to involve a whole lot of trying to keep straight which is the warp and which is the woof of the canvas and whether you have used vertical on the warp or on the woof, say by going "under" on the "overs" (or is it "over" on the "unders"??) and this all just made my brain go aaaauuggghhhhhh.  But since this particular piece had already turned out to be a "teaching moment" I thought, "right, just try it" and dove in.  After carefully working a good-sized plain section in one corner, I realized that this is the back of a "down" row --

and this is an "up" row --

It seems quite a simple matter to me to tell which is which, so I worry that I'm missing something and it actually is really tricky.  As long as you have a long-enough row for the stitches to be clear, it shouldn't be a problem -- but since this revelation I have been making it a point to stop on a long row like these where it is quite obvious how the stitches are lying, or even better to start a row and pause it in mid-stitch so that I can see right away in which direction I've been traveling.

This is the overcast edging, as Janet Granger uses -- I wasn't sure if there was enough blue to work one of the "braided" edgings.

Now that I've had a chance to look at it finished, I'm less unpleased with it than I was before, so perhaps if I put it in a darker corner of some roombox, the wonkiness will look quite natural!

A Shirvan Miniature Carpet

Here, at last, is the Shirvan I miniature carpet from Frank Cooper's book Oriental Carpets in Miniature.  This is the first piece I've worked from the book, so I really only had the photos for clues as to its worth.  I don't know why it spoke to me so very much, but although there are others in the book that are more "my style" (whatever that is), I found myself coming back to this one again and again.  It has, I think, a really charming raucousness to it!

This particular chart (one of three Shirvans in the book) is based on a 19th-century original, wh. unfortunately I haven't seen yet.  Now part of the Azerbaijan Republic, Shirvan is an historical region in the Caucasus, on the western side of the Caspian Sea.  There is a Wikipedia article about the Kuba "family" of carpet styles from this region, and a longer one here about Shirvans, from an antique-rugs dealer.

As for the chart, one of the bigger flaws in Cooper's book, I must say, is that there are similar symbols for similar colors, so here, for example, you have a large X for dark green and a medium-sized x for medium-green, resulting for me at least in constant checking of the key and trying to decide if that's a small x or a big one (because the chart is tiny even when enlarged 200%).  At one point, I ended up photographing the chart with my camera at the highest resolution, and printing out sections of the center panel enlarged as big as the piece of paper would hold them.

Quite a number of the figures in the center panel are not the same in the chart as in the photograph of the finished carpet, mostly in the color choices, but occasionally in the shapes as well -- this is a fairly serious flaw too, in my opinion, and only adds to the difficulty of reading a very small and rather indifferently reproduced chart with similar symbols for similar colors.  But, really, I love this carpet.  I did simply turn the chart face-down and work from the photograph at times!  Throughout the book, Cooper does sometimes point out that after writing a chart, he changed his mind and worked a particular figure in a different color, but while that isn't really an issue (because you know about it ahead of time), the sheer number of "inconsistencies" in this particular carpet lead me to feel that these are mistakes, not design choices.  So, on the whole, stitcher beware, and if you want your piece to look like the photo in the book, you'd best keep a close eye on it as you progress, but if you are willing to either modify as you go or pick out sections that you just worked by-the-chart, then you'll have fun.

This carpet is worked in Paternayan wools on 22-count canvas, a bit smaller than the original 18-count.  I think that this is pretty much as small as one should go with Paternayan, as the irregularities in some of the strands made it quite crowded (or thin) in some areas, though thankfully most of this doesn't show in the blocked piece.  The Paternayan didn't worm on me nearly as much as Appleton's has, so there is that to be considered!  I made a rather stupid mistake when buying the wool and assumed that when Cooper said "15 strands of blue" or whatever, he meant strands in the way that you buy Paternayan, which comes in a triple strand -- whereas he meant single strands, so I ended up with pretty much three times as much wool as I needed.  I can't think why I didn't look at my basket -- since I was there in the shop with the stuff in my hands -- and think "this is far too much wool for a miniature carpet!" (blush).  I may end up adapting another chart to use up some of this stash, now!

I also somehow broke two Bohin tapestry needles, one snapped clean in half and the other a broken eye, both used on this project alone, as they were in a new packet.  The third seemed to compress about the eye as I worked, as it was easy to thread at first but then got more and more difficult but is still in one piece.  I am prepared to admit that my use of Paternayan on 22-count canvas was on the snug side, but was the breakage due to this or to the needles themselves?

As for my own modifications, I changed the gauge of the canvas, as I say, since 9 x 14 in. was considerably larger than what I wanted -- as it is, mine is 7 1/2 x 12 in. (19 x 30 cm), quite a large carpet in 1/12 scale.  Aside from the most obvious but unavoidable use of a dark blue a shade lighter than in the book -- because that was what the shop had in stock (thus 501 for 500) -- I sometimes used a lighter shade for a darker one, especially in the center section where they sometimes seemed to sink into the dark blue.

I decided not to attempt to learn something new for this carpet, despite some of the Petitpointers listers assuring me that basketweave stitch would work perfectly on the backgrounds here, since I had already started working some sections in continental and the advice also had it that I shouldn't change in mid-stream.  I never did get the finished carpet quite straight, even after three hard blockings, so I will definitely try the basketweave in similar situations in future!  On the bright side, I really wanted the carpet to look if not well-used then at least not-brand-new, so in that sense the wonkiness is actually a plus.

I also used the long-legged cross-stitch edging, which at this scale I think was a little too much, since it is naturally rather thick, with all of the overlapping stitches, and mine ended up a bit lumpy in places, possibly due to the thick/thin variations in the Paternayan, or to my tendency to switch from working it horizontally to vertically -- I think, certainly with this particular edging, consistency is key.

Amusingly, I still can't decide which is "right side up".  The little dog-like figures in dark red in the center section certainly want to be this way up, but since the chart was the other way around in the book -- and so that is the way I worked it -- what Cooper calls the "eagle-head" figures in the large border look completely upside-down this way to me!

I get the feeling -- assuming that the miniature version copies faithfully the full-sized carpet -- that the weaver improvised a lot of it.  The color choices are not particularly well-balanced -- the eagle-head figures in the border have a kind of splotchiness to them if you just look at light vs. dark, and if I had planned the design out on paper before weaving, I would definitely have switched the two pairs of circley figures in the corners of the center panel, so that the light/dark balance would be better.  The center medallion is also really lopsided -- why? that would have been an easy fix -- when you look at it from the side.  But, on the other hand -- I really love the improvised look of the finished piece, so that every complaint I have about the design makes me shrug and say, "I just love it anyway!"

One of the things that appeals to me most is the use of colors in the big border, the way they flow back and forth between light and dark, and the subtle differences between the three greens, and between the three reds.

(I learned a new term from Cooper, by the way -- abrash, which is the variations in shade in a particular color, due to dye lots or fading over time.  You can see a built-in example of abrash in this carpet, where Cooper has used a darker green at the ends of the carpet, which goes all of the way across as it would if woven, and seems to "change" dye lot to a lighter shade in the middle.  I "faded" one of the outer puzzle-piece borders accidentally, when I picked up an even-lighter shade of green, but happily this looks quite natural!)

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!

Grrr...

I've been stitching along, happily if intermittently, on the Shirvan miniature carpet -- happily although more than a little daunted by the small size of the chart and the mid-1990s photocopy-generation printing quality in the book.  Mystifyingly, Cooper also used two very similar symbols for two very similar shades of red and for two similar shades of green -- a serious error of judgment, in my opinion, since of course it is therefore very easy to confuse not only the two reds, but the two greens.

Well, I was quite pleased to feel myself ready to start the center section the other day, and carefully counted out the white stitches -- since of course if you make a mistake setting it up, everything from there after is thrown off! -- and was rather puzzled to find that the next-lightest shade, an off-white, was combined with the white in the round medallions in the corners, and then in the diamonds a little further up.  Two whites together -- well, he knows what he's doing, right?

Then after I'd worked a substantial amount of the second white, I looked at the color photo, and it isn't two whites at all in the finished carpet, it's white and medium-red!  And not even in the same places as on the chart!  See the little tuning-fork shapes in the chart? those, the blank squares, are white, the slash "background" is off-white, and the dot is dark red -- but in the finished carpet, the tuning-fork is definitely red, the background maybe off-white, and the outline white?

Cooper's symbol for medium-red is the dot with a slash through it -- I thought maybe he'd confused the slashed dot with the plain slash, medium-red for off-white -- but no, it's actually the reverse of that in the finished carpet.  And that's just the round medallion -- the diamond above is also completely different.

Let's not even get started on what happened to those little plusses across the bottom, under the spidery figure, which have almost completely disappeared in the finished carpet!  They are all fairly bright colors in the chart -- including white and off-white! -- and should stand out clearly.

What a shame -- these are all wonderfully detailed charts of some really beautiful little carpets, and while I'm still excited about making many of them in future, I'm feeling really frustrated not only at the difficulty of deciphering similar symbols on a small and not-very-high quality print of a chart, but now I can't trust that the chart will produce something that looks like the photo of the finished carpet.  Hence the "grrr."  I think this carpet will be really lovely when it's done, but ... grrr.

(I have, by the way, found only a single instance of this miniature carpet on the internet, by a stitcher on the American Needlepoint Guild website, but she obviously changed her colors along the way to look more like Cooper's finished one.  I'm guessing she just said to herself, "the heck with it," and did what she wanted for the center section, as those diamonds at the sides, the ones I'd just started, are like neither Cooper's chart nor his finished carpet!)

No, I didn't really like the white/off-white combination anyway, so -- heavy sigh -- I am going to pick it all out now.

Perhaps needless to say, I have also just now enlarged my high-resolution photograph of the two center-section charts, enlarged those, and made myself some copies of half of each -- so four gigantic charts, each one quarter of the center section, which I am now going to cross-check and re-color.  But first, a nice cup of tea, I should think.

Got Tension?

I had to move my Shirvan-in-progress from a mat frame to my big wooden one, as the opening in the mat was really too big -- I admitted to myself with great reluctance -- and the canvas was distorting dreadfully.  The frame is much heavier and rather awkward for working in my lap, wh. I really have to do because most of the time I work it without my glasses, so have to hold it two or three inches from my face in order to get the benefit of my Super Microscopic Up-Close Vision^TM.  I worked the smaller carpets on a smaller mat, which was perfect for holding up close, and fit into a regular 8 1/2x11 page protector or a zip bag when I wasn't working on it.  Oh, well.  The Shirvan is definitely happier in the frame, I could see at once, though it still has a bit of a list to port.

I am pretty sure that the wobbliness of the stitches is going to come out in the blocking, so I'm not alarmed at present.

You can see the built-in abrash, the color variations often found in Oriental carpets due to time and different dye lots, in the border greens, where there is a darker one along the bottom and a little bit up the side, then a mid-range green continuing.  I learned this word from Cooper, in fact, who remarked on it in the description of another of his charts, that he'd run out of wool and had to match it somewhat imperfectly.  This carpet actually has the color variation charted in a couple of places, so presumably the abrash is in the antique original.

But you can also see the differences in tension, either where I was working up-and-down or side-to-side, or where the wool varied in thickness.  The cream is especially prone to the thick/thin issue -- it's especially obvious to me in the little dashed lines along the bottom edge here, where the outer one is super-thick and the inner one is teeny-tiny.  I'm tempted to work over the teeny-tiny one with another thin strand.

I am really enjoying this carpet, though! the colors are lovely.

Here is another tension issue, though with a much happier initial outcome.  This is the first of Julia's mitts for her DC trip next month.  I got halfway up the stranded part, and wasn't very happy with my tension, so thought I'd try the inside-out trick.  You simply turn the piece inside out and knit it looking at the center -- down the inside of the "tube" -- and the floats are just a little more generous from traveling on the outside of the tube instead of the inside as usual.  I was really amazed at the difference between the two methods, which was obvious after just a few inches.

This still needs a bit of blocking, to be sure, but is noticeably smoother already than the right-side-out method, especially at the needle joins --

The spotted three-stitch stripe up the middle here would have been much wobblier than it is if I'd worked it right-side out.  The white is still a bit looser than it should be, but I'm hoping that a good blocking will fix that right up; I've noticed that Laura's pair, two years old now and much-worn, has tightened up noticeably (to me), so a little looseness at first shouldn't be a problem.  Bit of a mental adjustment, working inside-out, but worth a try!

Khotan No.25 Miniature Carpet

This is the Khotan No.25 miniature carpet from Meik and Ian McNaughton's wonderful book Making Miniature Oriental Rugs and Carpets.  I started this all the way back in August, as it happens.  It has been almost finished for quite a long time, but I ran out of one of the colors and had to wait for another skein, and I didn't block it very well the first time and had to do it again, just at the last before I sewed down the hem.

I still didn't get it quite true, so I need to be sure to block a piece really severely before working the edging next time.

This was actually a very tricky chart, and it took me some time to stop confusing the colors in those stepped medallions!  The wools themselves had a little more difference between them, luckily.

I noticed not very far into working it that the colors in the photograph of the finished carpet were noticeably different from what was in my hands, and so I decided after some internal debate to change the background of the center section from the lightest wheat-colored shade to a cream in my stash.  Unfortunately what looked like cream in the ball turned out to be putty (Appleton's 988, left over from the Holbein carpet), so the finished carpet looks neither like the original colors should nor the slightly-off illustration in the book, though it is not unpleasant, to be sure.  I just think the putty doesn't play quite as well with the wheat of the border as I had hoped.

I also switched out the "dark" wheat-ish shade (903) for the medium one (766) on the border -- the 903 is quite auburn, and I liked the more-brown one better.  By the way, this is how far you can get with one skein of each color --

so I would recommend two skeins of the 766, certainly if you are going to use it for the border instead of 903.  (This photo shows that I was going to use the "hemming row" trick, but after working the Wm. Morris one, I realized that the finer gauge on this carpet would make it considerably trickier, and as I'd already decided that the hemming row isn't really necessary with an edging stitch, I went ahead and worked it without hemming.)

I managed the McNaughtons' edging stitch much better this time, though I think it doesn't have quite the same handsome braided look that the long-legged cross-stitch does, as the "braid" is nearly on the underside.

I did work the fringe a smidge too short -- it's like cutting your hair, that when you smooth it down you think "there!" and after you cut it, it bounces back a little, so I need to be sure and keep this in mind with a wool fringe!  This is two strands of wool, without "fluffing" the strands with a pin afterwards.

The finished measurements on 28-count Monaco canvas are 6 1/4 in. x 3 1/2 in. (16cm x 8.75cm), not counting the fringe.

The McNaughtons write of this 20th-century design, "The carpets of East Turkestan, now part of the Chinese province of Sinkiang, show some Chinese influence in their decoration, including the use of muted colours, as in this example. The details of the design, however, show a clear relationship with both the Caucasus and Anatolia in the geometric stars and the decorative Kufic border."  I can read neither Kufic nor Chinese, but the border pattern has a strongly Chinese look to me! so it's fascinating how it manages to convey both at the same time.

A William Morris Miniature Carpet

I was holding out on you yesterday, actually -- I had only a few stitches left on this carpet before it was finished!  This project is from Dollhouse Decor by Nick and Esther Forder, and is designed by Sue Bakker, based -- pretty successfully, I suspect -- on a William Morris design.  I can't find an image of an original anywhere, but Bakker's certainly looks very Morris-like, so I'm sure it's accurate in spirit.

As a project, this wasn't quite first-rate -- there are quite a lot of ... well, not mistakes but inconsistencies in the chart, though luckily I noticed most of these before they were past.  The photos in the book clearly show different colors of floss on some of the swirls in the outer border, as well as some revisions in the stems in the main border, and the general effect of the colors in the photo is quite different from the chart, which is more like the actual colors.  I also found that the recommended thread coverage (2 strands on 18-, 22-, or 30-count canvas) was quite skimpy for the 22-count I was using, so I would advise either experimenting with more threads, or using cross-stitch as I did, for better coverage.

There is also very little finishing instruction given in the book -- you have to look hard to find it, as it's a few pages past the carpet section in the "finishing workshop" at the back of the book -- and the photo of the carpet in a room setting clearly shows that it has no edge stitching, so presumably the Forders mean you to simply turn the edges of the canvas under and sew a lining to the wrong side.

But as a finished piece, I'm very pleased with this carpet -- I really like the strong colors, and the design itself is very pretty.  Interestingly, Janet Granger's "Carole" carpet is obviously based on the same Morris design of peonies and stylized tulips, to interestingly different effect with her own interpretation of the design and her (two!) different colorways.  (Here is another interpretation in miniature presumably of the same carpet, wh. dates it to ca.1865.)

I suppose quite a lot of Morris carpets do have this formal symmetry -- the Forders' chart is only one-quarter of the design, so that you repeat it in mirror image for the other quarters -- but I felt that the center section at least wanted a little less formality, so I worked the green stems and leaves and the peonies slightly differently each time.  The border being much more stylized, I worked it with the chart's strict symmetry.

I edged my carpet using Janet Granger's overcast edging technique, but I mitered the corners instead of just folding them squarely as she does.  I also tried something different with this carpet -- I'd heard somewhere that you can leave the third row of stitching for last, then stitch it together with the hem of canvas, thereby catching down the hem quite neatly.  (I did the fourth row, actually, since the third row was white, and you are supposed to work the lighter colors before the darker ones, to prevent stray fibers muddying the colors.)  I found it pretty tedious, but then I was determined to match up the two sets of holes one-by-one as I went, and so I had to flip the piece over for every single stitch.  I don't find that the finished hem is that much better than simply tacking down a turned one, so I don't think I'll do it again very often.  It would be excellent if you are not using an edging stitch, though, because it does make a very tidy and firm hem in itself. 

I did try pinking the raw edges of the canvas this time, to help avoid that cut edge showing from the front -- this is on the same principle as grading a seam in sewing.

My overcast edging wasn't terribly successful, as it happened, which rather shook me since it's Janet Granger, after all!  But I suspect now that this stitch would work better in wool, which is what Granger generally uses, whereas the long-legged cross-stitch may be better for floss.  By the way, at one skein of each required color, there was just not enough of the two reds (which are blended in the needle) to work an edging stitch, so stitcher beware.

Hot Pink

It's hot again today, in the 90s (30s C) with far more humidity than we really like -- we want our California summers nice and dry, you know.  Not a good day for knitting, anyway.  I tried a few rounds of this Jaywalker, and not just the yarn but the needles were sticking to my hands.  It's a nasty irony that there is so much moisture in the air and yet we're in a drought with no end in sight.  ("The only way in which we know that summer is coming is by the more chilling winds, the increased dust, the tawny color of the hills, and the general dying look of things," wrote Caroline C. Leighton in June 1876. Heck yeah.)

Strangely enough, it isn't too hot to do needlepoint.  I'm not sure why this is, but I suppose it's that the needle and wool don't need to slide through one's fingers.

This is another miniature carpet from the McNaughtons' book -- the Khotan No. 25.  I've changed the background color from the lightest gold shade in the medallions to the putty-ish white left over from the Holbein carpet.  The pale gold was quite all right, but this really speaks to me.

Am also reading The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks.  I'm torn, actually -- sometimes he writes whole paragraphs in sentence fragments, which are generally like fingernails on a chalkboard to me, but sometimes he's quite lyrical, and sometimes I feel, with his viewpoint, that the world would be a better place if more people were able to simply do what they love, regardless of whether others think they are "wasting their lives," and that tourists are a nuisance (or worse), and from my own viewpoint that those who are blessed enough to live in the Lake District, to have lived there for centuries, regard people like me as a nuisance (or worse).  A conundrum, to be sure.

A Small-Patterned Holbein Carpet in Miniature

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

which is "Georg Giese" of 1532.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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