I suppose that someone has already done a time-lapse series of a needlepoint piece being worked -- anyway, I obviously didn't take a daily photo, but it amused me to imagine the piece just sort of filling itself in, as though it were being worked in the middle of the night by elves or something.
I picked up my "Small-patterned Holbein" carpet after some months of neglect (plus somehow losing the ball of red wool and having to wait for a replacement), and took it with me to a Fourth of July do at a friend's house, and worked on it while keeping an eye on the kids in the pool. The top photo is the results of that day, which was a pleasing improvement on where it had been since I'd picked it up last, but then I got into the rhythm of it and didn't have to keep looking at the chart, and got quite far. I've just now finished the first "border" around the center section -- that solid line in a sort of brownish-purple. There are two patterned borders to come.
The canvas is just a little too small for this wool, as I have to tug rather firmly sometimes to pull it through, and my stitches do not lie as smoothly as I'd like, though that may just be me. I hope that a good blocking will take care of at least some of that -- I'm afraid the canvas is stretching dreadfully. On the other hand, much as I'd like to, I can't take all of the responsibility for uneven coverage, when Appleton's provides this:
Oh well. The colors are a bit deeper in real life -- it is already quite lovely, and will make a somberly beautiful little carpet.
I haven't been doing much knitting since the last pair of socks, since I got distracted by this, which is the "Small-patterned Holbein" carpet from Meik and Ian McNaughton's Making Miniature Oriental Rugs and Carpets. I was a little concerned about it being too big (!) for my Tudor house-to-be, so I'm working it on 28-count evenweave instead of the 24-count of the book -- it's a bit more fiddly, and I have a hard time seeing it sometimes, especially now that the pattern is really filling in, but the more I look at the design and the colors, the more I like it.
This is the first miniature piece I've worked in wool -- of course it will have a different feel to it, but I didn't realize quite how much. I guess at this gauge the linen is even harder on the wool fibers than a 24-count would be -- I have to be unusually stingy when cutting a length, as it can get worn down to just a few hairs very quickly!
Here are two new things for No.16 that I impulsively put on my wish list, and got for my birthday -- thanks, Mom! The fishbowl looks a bit odd in close-up because of the bubble in the "water" but it's very charming in real life. Now I need to get started on a kitchen dresser for the new dishes!
Here is another miniature carpet, called "Elizabethan Squares"; like the Long Flowers Panel, it is from Sandra Whitehead's book Celtic, Medieval and Tudor Wall Hangings in 1/12 Scale Needlepoint, but with three major modifications, one Whitehead's suggestion and the others mine. I wanted a carpet instead of a wall hanging, since it isn't for my Tudor-house-to-be (because they didn't have carpets on the floors at that period), so I added in another pattern repeat at one end to make it longer, and I used Whitehead's alternative color scheme instead of the original pinks and creams. The other modification was to work it in cross stitch instead of tent, as I generally feel that single-stitch diagonal lines in tent stitch always look a bit off to me, unsymmetrical, whereas in cross stitch they look the same whether they are heading upwards or downwards -- the strong black diagonal lines in this seemed to want more symmetry to my eye.
I made only one permanent mistake on the chart, on some of the 0 shapes inside the squares, but by the time I noticed it, it became a design element (!).
On 28-count Monaco, this carpet as modified works up to a finished size of 4 3/8 x 3 inches (11 x 7.5 cm), not counting the fringe.
I wasn't quite as successful with the long-legged cross-stitch edging this time -- I don't know why. Maybe just because the white canvas stands out more between the navy threads?
I also tried something different with the hem, using mitered corners instead of folded ones. Not sure if this is the best way of going about it, but I really love mitered corners, so I just get a kick out of it. They didn't fold quite as well as I would have liked, but the Turkish knot edging needed a little bit of cheating on the turn to lie flat, and I suppose that canvas isn't as helpful as something lighter would be.
I enjoyed working this carpet very much -- the original colorway is very pretty, but the stronger blue-and-ginger really speaks to me.
This is the "Long Flowers Panel" from Sandra Whitehead's book Celtic, Medieval and Tudor Wall Hangings in 1/12 Scale Needlepoint. I liked it very much from the photo in the book, but I like the real thing even better -- the colors are a little deeper and richer in person. These colors are exactly the same DMC floss as recommended, except that I chose a slightly earthier cream than the ecru -- the palest shade, in the centers of most of the flowers.
This piece was a bit of a challenge, as I could not get 24-count evenweave canvas at Michael's, not even for ready money, so I got 28-count instead -- even finer, of course. My finished piece is thus 3.8 x 10 cm with the edging. I had trouble seeing it sometimes, even with two (!) pairs of glasses on. I'm not entirely pleased with my stitching, though a light pressing did wonders for the evenness. I missed a lot of stitches and had to go back and put them in one at a time, and I made two glaring-to-me mistakes, one in picking up the lighter blue instead of the darker, and the other in not noticing that the twisted-rope border became grey-brown for a moment, not black -- I left the blue where it was, as I couldn't face picking it out at that stage, but I stitched over the black mistake with the grey-brown, which was only partially successful, as the black does "bleed" through a bit. (Probably the blue would have been all right if I'd stitched over it, since it is two shades of the same color -- I was concerned about it being too thick at this fine gauge, but the black/grey-brown bit seems fine.) But I am so utterly charmed by the piece that it doesn't matter that much.
Whitehead suggests finishing by folding the edges of the canvas and backing it with a piece of light cotton. I used another method with more finished edges, though, following Janet Granger's excellent tutorial on miniature wall-hangings -- this uses a whipped edging. Since my piece was so narrow, I decided not to cover the back with iron-on interfacing, as Granger does, and simply enclosed it with the turned edges of the canvas (judiciously dabbed with Fray-Check). My whip-stitching is also rather amateur -- oh, I see one long stitch! -- but again, the piece is so charming that I am quite delighted with it anyway.
(I still have to add hanging loops to the top. Next time I might try mitering the corners of the hem.)
A kit of this piece can also be found, as the "Tudor Long Panel", on Whitehead's website, Knighttime Miniatures. There are a number of other interesting pieces in the book -- many of which are also available as kits from the website -- all original designs based on mediaeval and Tudor sources, mostly "tapestries" for the miniature setting. The charts come in both color and symbol versions, which I find very handy, as I seem to work better from the symbol charts, but the color ones give a good overview of how things will come together.
Yes, I am planning an Elizabethan doll's-house ...!
There is a tradition that what you do on New Year's Day is an indication of what you will do throughout the coming year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I did a lot of mom things -- schlepping Julia back and forth to her riding lesson (the horses don't care that it's a holiday!), chores, grocery shopping, cooking.
I also -- hurray! -- did some needlework, both on the first of a pair of Selbu-ish mitts for Laura, whose school trip to Washington DC is at the end of March. I could hardly let her go that far without some handknits. I made a Three-Rib Beret which I gave to her for Christmas, and now am working on mitts with the same color -- which is Lorna's Laces' "Blackberry", possibly one of the most delicious purples ever -- so that they will almost match but not quite. I'm not as far along as I expected to be, since the first mitt was just a smidge too small, and I've pulled it out and restarted the colorwork section with a few more stitches, rebalancing the pattern and making some adjustments.
I also continued working on this, which is the "Long Flowers Panel" from Sandra Whitehead's first book of miniature needlepoint projects, Celtic, Medieval and Tudor Wall Hangings in 1/12 Scale Needlepoint. Fate, I tell you -- the book was in a public library not more than fifteen minutes' drive from my house. I have for a very long time been fascinated by doll's-houses, as I've said before, and I was so pleased with the house we made for Laura that it has never been far from my mind to make one for myself. Since needlework is at present far easier than woodworking -- not to mention more portable -- I am starting with that. Oh! but it's tiny. This center section is barely 3 cm wide, and I have to wear extra glasses to see the stitches. Michael's had all of the floss colors recommended in the pattern, but not 24-count evenweave canvas, so this is 28-count. But I must say it's fascinating, and I'm enjoying it immensely, despite having found four missed stitches already!
And I read, too! staying up a little too late, perhaps, but I was enjoying it -- the first of Susannah Stacey's (aka Jill Staynes and Margaret Storey) Inspector Bone series of murder mysteries, Goodbye, Nanny Gray. I was so disappointed to find that our public library had recently weeded all of this series that I bought three of them for a penny apiece off of Amazon a month or so ago. Douglas Henshall's character in "Collison" a few years ago reminded me very much of Bone, an engaging detective coping with a tragic recent past, and rereading them now I tend to see him in the part, which can't be a bad thing. The books are an easy read but intelligent, and I like the way that Bone's and his daughter Charlotte's stories are emerging very slowly throughout, so that you get to know them over time instead of all in a rush.
I bought this cross-stitch Navajo rug design at one of the gift shops at Mesa Verde this summer, pleased to find a needlework souvenir and delighted that it would look charming in Laura's dollhouse.
The kit is "Burntwater II" from NP Designs -- there were a number of different designs of various styles and colors available. Everything is included in the kit but a hoop, and the chart is very easy to read, despite the relative complexity of the design. It would have been even easier, of course, if I hadn't mistaken one of the pale blue-grey shades for another and realized that I would have to pick out the entire center medallion and redo it -- sigh -- but I managed to finish it in a little over six weeks.
There is a sheet of instructions and tips, one of which was to use three strands of the floss -- "if you prefer, you can work the kit with 2 strands but it will not look as dense" -- and another of which was to separate each strand, then put the three back together, to reduce the floss's tendency to twist. This being really only my second major cross-stitch project, I used the three strands as recommended, but I wonder if the result wasn't quite as even as my "Gather Ye Rosebuds" picture because the three strands tended to crowd each other, as it were, competing for the space in that tiny hole. I also tried the separating-the-strands technique, but after picking out my center medallion mistake, I decided not to do it the second time around -- the technique may have helped with the twisting, but like that third strand, it seemed to make the floss "fluffier" so that it didn't lie as smoothly as I would have liked.
There are no instructions in the kit about finishing -- I suppose they assume that you are going to frame it, not use it in a doll's-house -- so I had to look elsewhere. Whipping the edges as the doyenne of doll's-house carpets, Janet Granger, does in her excellent tutorial, did not in fact work here -- I guess because of this Aida canvas being such different proportions of threads-to-holes than the interlock she has used for her tent-stitched carpets -- my canvas showed through quite a lot. Instead I used the long-legged cross stitch recommended by Sue Hawkins in her Dolls House Do-It-Yourself Carpets and Rugs, which when pulled snugly tends to pull the edge under quite nicely for folding, exactly as she says it will.
This finish has a beautiful braided effect, and turned out very nicely, I think.
I tacked down the trimmed edges of the canvas with herringbone stitch, which I decided to work staggered, in case any of it showed on the right side -- don't know if this was at all necessary, actually. (I didn't starch the carpet, though, as Hawkins recommends. It doesn't really seem to need it.)
I must admit that working this really brought home how poor my eyesight is getting -- after stitching happily for a few days, I took a really close look at it and saw any number of stitches where I'd just missed the hole, and the leg of an X here and there was a bit longer on one side than the rest, or that I'd completely missed crossing some at all and had to go back for just half a stitch! I left one of them in on purpose -- it's doll's-house "wear and tear" now! I ended up wearing two pairs of my drugstore reading glasses now and then, or a pair over my regular glasses -- David thought this was hilarious, but then he doesn't have to wear glasses at all, so he would, wouldn't he.
Laura doesn't seem to be as interested in the house as I am, though, so -- well, I have it in my room, now.
I need to make a sink, I see, and a dresser more to scale ...
Every knitter, I'm sure, has experience that strange sensation of knitting one's memories into a project, so that for long afterwards the garment brings back the time and place, what one was doing as the stitches moved along. This happens with all needlework, I expect -- and this little piece seems to me now evocative of both our summer road trip, the hot sun in the canyons of Mesa Verde and the amazing steam-train ride along the Las Animas River between Durango and Silverton, and of more recent days, the last heat wave of summer.
I've been introducing Laura to the Beatles this month. We had taken on our car trip a two-disc set of British Invasion bands -- the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, the Merseybeats -- and I was pleased to find that both girls liked it enormously. This has long been one of my favorite periods of music -- something about the cheerfulness of it, I think. But before this it was the Beatles.
The first time I saw or heard them was I think seeing "Help!" on television one afternoon -- maybe I was just barely in high school. I thought they were funny, and appealing, and I loved the music. My youngest aunt, who being only a little over a decade older than me had gone through the Beatlemania days first-hand, gave me her Beatles records, generously (actually, one of them was her by-then-ex-husband’s, I remember seeing his name written in pencil across the top of one of them) -- "Yesterday and Today", "Magical Mystery Tour", and "Sgt. Pepper". I think "Help!" was the first one I bought with my own money.
This was the days before the internet, of course, even before home video, so I remember that it was years before I got to see "A Hard Day’s Night", like some holy grail of Beatlemania. We had a massive Tower Records not far from our house, and I would walk over there and look through the bin or, more thrillingly, the import section, with the Parlophone versions that had the line-ups the way the Beatles wanted them, which (purist that I am still) I craved. Ringo was my favorite at the beginning, but I liked each one of them best at various times, recognizing even then, I guess, the individual dynamics that went into making the band more than the sum of its already pretty impressive parts.
Those were the days that all of the Beatles books were always missing from the public library. Now you can find tons of stuff on the internet -- I think I've never seen any of these photos before, for instance. I thought it was pretty funny, considering, that I saw a new book at the library the other day, Larry Kane's When They Were Boys, about the "early days" up to 1964 or thereabouts. This being actually my favorite of the Beatles' eras, I brought it home and started to read it that day. I must admit that the writing style sets my teeth on edge sometimes -- he's got ostensibly only about five years to cover, but he jumps around constantly, restlessly, for instance talking at length about Stu Sutcliffe's death and its effect on John and the others, then back a bit to the Hamburg days, all before Stu is even properly introduced. He also has a rather annoying habit of putting the longer quotes in full caps -- one of them goes on for literally pages -- and starts the various sections with a sort of poetic mood-piece that just makes me go, "Huh?" -- "On January 1, 1963, Astrid Kirchherr was alone in her solace, the Sutcliffe family longed for Stuart, and fans in Hamburg recollected the sweet and sometimes high-pitched tones of the boy singing 'Love Me Tender,' the boy whose face could light up the night". And I've never read an author who mentions his own name as much as this guy -- "Well, you know, Larry--" "As it happens, Larry--" "I'm telling you, Larry--" But -- on the other hand, the stories about the boys in the early days, those mostly-innocent days, from not just Larry's own travels with them, but from almost everyone around them, family and friends and people who worked with them and helped in one way or another to set them on the road to the top -- well ...
Still, the best thing is still the music. We are all walking around humming "I've Just Seen a Face" and "Ticket to Ride" and "Love Me Do" and "Tell Me Why" and "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You" and "I'll Cry Instead", and my little Navajo-style miniature carpet seems infused with it all, in the best possible way.
Here is Elizabeth Zimmermann's justly famous Moebius ring, to the pattern in Knitting Around, in about 2 1/2 balls of RYC Cashsoft DK in white, worked as a gift for an elderly friend who remarked recently about the chill in her upstairs room, in snowy Bristol. "Aha!" I thought to myself.
I gussied up the I-cord edge with a little bit of faggotting (or is it technically only a column of eyelets?), by working a K2tog, yo at the end of each row in the garter-stitch section. This had the very satisfying effect of looking pretty much exactly as I had hoped it would, setting off the I-cord just a little. I regret to say, though, that I did not have the brains to figure out how to graft it, so it is not as invisible a join as I would have liked, but it's finished and off to its recipient.
The finished size is 15 in. x 10 in., when laid out as in the photo below. Wasn't sure how big to make it, but thought I should err on the larger side, rather than the smaller. It does tend to leave the neck a touch bare when draped artfully, but there it is -- it could also, as EZ points out, be laid flat against one's chest, thereby providing a double-layer of warmth.
I read an interesting review of Sebastian Faulks' A Possible Life recently,
and was pleasantly surprised to find that my local public library has it. (They do not seem particularly interested in fiction, I regret to say, though I must confess that I myself was not either until a few years ago.) It is unfortunate that Faulks' book comes on the heels of Cloud Atlas, which in its structure of different stories in different voices it resembles very much. Faulks' stories are much more independent, though -- a certain block of flats, a plaster statue, and so on, are the only links between them, bar of course the common themes of humanity, love, and the complexities of our relationships with each other. Mitchell's ability to create unique and amazingly disparate voices is what impressed me most about Cloud Atlas, and Faulks has some of this too, though not quite so dramatically -- his one piece set in the US is narrated by an Englishman, and I had to wonder why (except that it is said somewhere to be based on the relationship between Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash). The problem, I think, with this format -- like with Cloud Atlas -- is that perhaps inevitably there will be parts that a reader will relate to far more (or far less) than others. As with Cloud Atlas, I was bored by the story set in the 1970s, and was completely absorbed in the Victorian one. This of course makes the whole book feel more than a little uneven.
In other news, Mary Lou was wondering a while ago -- well, it was more than a few months, I guess -- about a stain on a piece of cross-stitch her mother had worked. This is the first cross-stitch I ever worked --
and I didn't realize that what I thought was a clean hand (blush) was not, and that holding it in the same place for hours on end left yellowish stains on the canvas. This disappointed me so much that I rolled it up and left it to knock about in various cupboards and boxes since then (thirty years!). I found it again last autumn, and thought I might as well try anything as it was unlikely that I'd mount the thing with long yellowish streaks across the corner.
I started out gently, as one does, with laundry detergent, graduating to stain removers, nothing worked -- then I thought, "oh, well," and poured bleach straight on it. This worked pretty well, in fact, and didn't fade the colors of the embroidery floss at all. I ended up doing this twice, and re-blocking. You can still see a hint of stain in some lights, but it was good enough to frame at last.
I'm not sure I would recommend such a drastic measure with something really valuable, but I was impressed that this floss came through so beautifully. Aaron Bros. framed the piece very nicely for me, too.
It has been quite a long time since I finished the first part of our Elizabethan garb, and I have let myself get distracted from even starting the rest of it, but here are the shirt and the smock -- David's and mine respectively.
These are both fairly simple to scale up from the graphs, as almost every piece is either a square or a rectangle. I made the shirt with a plain collar and cuffs, and the smock with a ruffled collar and cuffs; both have tie fastenings.
I used the IL019 linen -- 5.3 oz per yard -- from Fabrics-Store.com, and washed and dried it in the machine three or four times before cutting to soften and pre-shrink it. It is the mid-weight linen, with a bit of that lovely linen slubbiness and heft but is not too heavy.
I decided to flat-fell all of the seams, which with french seams are the two most common period seams. I like the look of them, and the flatness. They turned out well on the whole, although working the underarm gussets was a bit awkward, and so I did them a little differently from the book's. I attached this square gusset as instructed, but instead of sewing the side seam first and then inserting the sleeves, I started working the flat-fell at the bottom of the underarm gusset, sewed up the front of the armhole to the shoulder and down the other side, and then straight into the side seam, all in one go. Trimming this for the second pass of the flat-fell was a little awkward, but it turned surprisingly neatly, towards the back on the side seams and towards the sleeve on the armholes.
I'm in two minds about the ruffle -- it is obviously too short to iron, so that it has a kind of solidity to it which is not especially handsome, but under a waistcoat will perhaps not be so obvious.
David was looking at my blackwork sampler one evening and said, "You know, I really like this one. And this one. I like all of them. Can you do some on my Ren Faire shirt?" Well, this was like saying, "Honey, could you knit me some socks?" -- of course I said yes, although I didn't really know at the time if it would be as simple a matter as it seemed. The biggest problem was that all of the borderlike patterns I knew of were a bit girly, so I thought of Celtic knotwork and wondered if I could find a chart.
This was actually quite fun once I realized the trick of it. I couldn't find any suitable chart online, so I had to "unvent" a couple. I liked a twist-straight-twist-straight sequence I saw somewhere, so adapted that, a narrow one for the cuffs and a wider one for the collar.
You can see my thought processes in the page of sketches below. The top one (which has a height of 10 stitches) is finished at the left edge and increasingly draft-like as you go towards the right. Basically, all you have to do is draw the squares, then fill in the edges slanting to the right or left depending on whether the ribbon should cross "over" or "under". This seemed quite miraculous to me when I saw how it worked!
In theory, this is infinitely expandable, although the ends of the border would have a greater and greater number of "unconnected" ribbons depending on how many you use. The 4-stitch border (which is the one I used for the shirt cuffs) has only one ribbon, the 8-stitch border (which I used on the collar) has two, and the 12-stitch one has three. (Whoops, I see a mistake on that one now!)
I actually did the blackwork without my contact lenses. The only benefit I have ever found to being extremely near-sighted is that of having Super Microscopic Up-Close vision. If I look at something at a normal hand-working distance without my glasses, it would look like this --
but if I hold it within, say, two inches of my unaided eye, it looks like this --
which as you can imagine is perfect for counting those very fine threads of linen! (And for removing splinters, but that's another story.)
I worked this particular piece in two strands of regular embroidery floss, each stitch over four threads of the linen. I'm not entirely pleased with this result, but for a first effort it's not bad. The pictures above are my sample -- when I worked the shirt, I basted the "safety box" one stitch out from the design, as stitching into it sometimes incorporated red fibers into the black floss which remained behind when I pulled it out. I highly recommend the basted outline, by the way -- enough said, I think.
I added a "turning" in the knotwork at the center back of the collar as I was working it, in order to lengthen the design enough to fill the ends of the collar, but I think unless you actually count the turns you'd never know.
I did do all of the blackwork before cutting the pieces to size, for ease of handling, having heard this advice from a number of sources, luckily for me well before-hand!
The man's shirt differs from the woman's smock mostly in that it has neck and side gussets. I'm not sure why women don't need the neck gusset, but the side ones, because of the shirt's much shorter length, need a little extra room and reinforcement at that point to keep from tearing. Also different, at least in the Tudor Tailor versions, is that the shirt is gathered a little between the collar and the straight top of the shirt, whereas the smock has a curved neckline and fits smoothly where it joins the collar.
I haven't decided yet what kind of ties to put on the shirt -- for my smock, I simply braided three strands of crochet thread, but I was thinking for David's I might try a lucet braid.
Mistakes: I wasn't very careful when I cut the shirt pieces, and so the front and back are slightly on the bias and don't sit quite straight. I had no idea how to set in the side gussets -- maybe this was after I decided to flat-fell all of the seams, which then meant that the "flaps" at the bottom of the shirt had turnings that sometimes had to go first one way (for the flat-fell seam) and then the other (for the turned edge) -- I sewed in one of the side gussets and hand-sewed the other one simply on top of the seam and turnings, but wasn't especially happy with either method. I assumed that the generous-seeming size of the shirt would mean that it would fit the 5'11" David easily, but the collar is barely long enough, and the length of the shirt itself is a bit on the short side. I haven't seen anywhere what a "typical" length is for an Elizabethan man's shirt, but the book's illustration is just above knee-height (the idea being that the side slits allow you to wrap the tails between your legs, fore and aft as it were, and this is what serves as underwear).
I cut the neck slits the length in the pattern, which is far too long. Since at the time I was sewing it was approaching winter, I also ran up a version of the smock in flannel just to use as a nightgown, and made the neck slit half as deep, which is much more comfortable and a lot less drafty.
This pattern is number 20 from Rosemary Drysdale's The Art of Blackwork Embroidery, adapted a little in that I shifted each line of medallions so that they nested together a little and left less white space.
Drysdale's pattern 14. This one seemed to take forever; I don't know if that is why I don't like it as much as I thought I would, or if it just doesn't speak to me as much as some of the others, but there it is. Perhaps it's too modern -looking?!
This one is lifted from Alina Silverthorne's "Chalice stockings", in turn being a pattern from Ein New Modelbuch [sic] of 1526. Unlike the very-fiddly pattern #14 above, for example, this one is completely in Holbein stitch, and if I'd taken a little care would be completely reversible. It says Catherine-of-Aragon to me -- I'm not sure why, perhaps the rather severe Catholic look to it? Those Spaniards!
This was fun to work in a daring sort of way, in that the first pass -- every other stitch showing, as it were -- requires understanding how the pattern will look when finished without actually seeing the whole thing as you work it. The first pass thus looks like a set of bird tracks in the snow. The second pass was only a matter of connecting the dots, though!
(All of these samples are worked in one strand of black embroidery floss on 28-count Monaco cotton.)
And here are two contemporary examples of blackwork on garments --
Simon George of Cornwall, by Holbein ca.1533, a lovely little work now in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt. His considerable technical mastery aside, Holbein's people always look so utterly real to me that I find it impossible not to be fascinated by them.
"Mary Nevill, Lady Dacre?" ca.1545–1549, by an unknown artist; also known as "The Wrest Park Portrait" from its former location, and also identified as Lady Jane Grey. J. Stephan Edwards at Some Grey Matter writes convincingly and at length on his re-identification of this portrait as Lady Dacre.
“Compassion is not religious business, it is human business; it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability; it is essential for human survival.”
