A Bluestocking Knits

Saturday

Not long ago, David needed to go down to San Diego to collect some tool or other that he was buying from a friend, and said, "Let's have a little road trip," and so he and I went to Temecula and visited the Temecula Quilt Company shop which has been mentioned rather frequently here of late, and which is going to online-only in the next few months.  I had thought, "Gee, what can I do with all of these mini quilts once I sew them up" as I'm not really the quilt-on-the-wall type, and eventually I thought, "Duh!  Placemats!"  And so I came away from the shop with one each of their last two mini quilt kits, a booklet of doll quilt patterns (which are often about the same size as placemats ...), and some pre-cuts of TQC fabrics.  After lunch in San Diego, we stopped off to visit some friends who recently moved to the wilds of the Santa Ana Mountains -- had a good visit and a delicious dinner, with the bonus of a gorgeous sunset -- so all in all, an excellent day.

I sewed up the first mini quilt kit in an afternoon, deciding to arrange the squares randomly instead of in four-patch. The kit is of the same high quality as the others, with a generous selection of fabrics and clear, concise instructions.  I backed this with some navy Kona Cotton and hand-quilted it, pleased to see that I'm getting a bit better at the latter, though that may also have something to do with the batting being thinner that what I used previously, and thus easier to manipulate the needle through!

I'm glad I started with this one, as it was thus clear to me early on that for placemats, I think I will want most of them slightly longer than the 16" here.  I've sewn up the pinwheel kit, and will start quilting it soon.

I do have -- of course -- another distraction --

which is Mamilou's charting of an antique sampler which I found almost accidentally while I was researching French samplers.  I decided, since I had some linen that has quite a loose weave, to experiment with three strands of floss instead of two, to get that rather "thick" look that so many antique samplers have, usually (I guess) from the original stitcher using wool and not modern cotton floss.  It's actually quite a success, I think! and because of the loose weave isn't at all too much.  I was originally thinking that I would veer towards a "re-creation" and follow Léontine's mistakes as well as the now-missing stitches, but the chart has a few "corrections" and I've made a few mistakes of my own (!), so it is Léontine as well as a soupçon of both Mamilou and me!

And I do, I assure you, still knit, although it may not seem like it!  I like this wool and think this will make a fabulous scarf, but I cannot knit it during Zoom meetings, as I lose track of which row I'm on and find after an hour that I worked a plain row when I should have worked a pattern row, or vice versa, and have to rip out all I've done since then.  This is the longest it's been yet! --

Thoughts on the Basic (Baby) Blanket

This, at last, is the "Basic Blanket" from Simple Crochet for Cherished Babies by Jane Davis, which I have to say, was an utter pain most of the time I spent on it, but is very pretty now that it's finished and draped artfully over the arm of a sofa.  I had searched for blanket or afghan patterns that called for 10 balls of Jaeger Baby Merino and would be fairly quick to make, and this seemed to fit the bill perfectly, but ten balls were not enough by at least one, and I spent quite a lot of time having to figure out not only the instructions themselves but how to arrange it so that I could get as much of the pattern worked with almost every inch of the ten balls I had.

Strangely, although my gauge came out noticeably larger than given in the book, with the same weight yarn and my usual 1-size-smaller hook, the finished measurement of the panel was smaller than given.  How can that be?

There really should be a more-clear photo of what this blanket is supposed to look like when laid flat. I suppose that this --

-- which is the photo from the book, is clear enough once you've already made the thing, but before I got to that point, I heartily wished to see it more fully.  (What does the seam look like? for example ...)

I found out early on from reviews on Amazon that a lot of people have had difficulties with a number of patterns in this book, so perhaps I'm a bit more salty than I would have been if I thought it was just me.  I suppose I can figure out that if the instructions say "weave in end after row 11" that I'm supposed to break off the yarn at that point, or that if it says "sew the panels together" that I'm supposed to make a second panel, but it doesn't say so at all.  But I was mystified by the instruction "Work row 8 along the top and bottom edges of the blanket" -- it's multi-directional, so which edges are the top and bottom?!

This edging, by the way, is simply begging for a chart, but I am not at that stage yet, myself.  (Laura herself came in not long after I'd hidden the blanket-in-progress but not my attempt at a chart.  "What's this?" she asked, "some weird code??")

After trying to puzzle out the directions, then trying to figure out from the photo what was meant in the directions, I came up with these alternate instructions for certain rows, with my choices and some clarifications in boldface. Note that in the main body of the panel, the initial ch3 does not count as a stitch -- you are making loops in which to anchor the edging.  (This, if I remember correctly, is not what the general instructions say at the beginning of the book.)  The initial ch3 in the border, however, does count as a stitch.  I also did 1 less ch than specified at the beginning of each row, as mine tend to be a bit looser than average, I guess, so that one less ch made my edges a bit straighter than they would have been --

• Row 3: Ch3, 1 DC, [ch1, sk 2, DC, ch1, sk 2, 3 DC in next st] 32 times (on the last rep, 2 DC at very end) [129 sts].
• Row 4: Ch3, DC, [(DC, ch1, DC) all in next st, 2 DC in next st, sk 3, 2 DC in next st] 32 times, (DC, ch1, DC) in top of ch3.  Note that the "sk 3" will be above a DC in the row below.
• Row 5: Ch3, 2 DC in 1st st, [DC in sp of sk3 section, 6 DC in ch1 sp] 32 times, 3 DC in top of ch3. Note that the 6-DC cluster will be above the 3-DC cluster in the row below.
• Row 6: Ch3, sk1, 1 HDC, 1 DC, sk1, [2 DC, 2 HDC, 2 DC, sk1] 32 times, 2 DC, 1 HDC in top of ch3.  Note that each bracketed section will be centered over the 6-DC cluster of the row below.
• Row 7: STDC, DC in 1st st, DC, sk1, (2 DC, sk1) 64 times, 3 DC (the last in top of ch3).

As I said, I did not have nearly enough wool to do the four rows of DC mesh at the top of each edging section (which is worked four times!), so in frustration, I just worked the mesh on each side until the wool ran out, estimated how many rows total I could get, which ended up being about a quarter of what was called for, and then ripped out the ones that had gone past that.  In the end, I decided that, really, an open section of mesh down the middle makes a rather drafty afghan, and so I would work the edging only through Row 7 on one side of each of the two panels, stitch those two together, and then work as much of the mesh as I had yarn on the two "outside" borders. 

It also seemed to me -- and perhaps I'm mistaken, not having that much experience with crochet -- that having a mattress-stitched seam running through a quite-pretty lacy panel might look just a bit clunky, and so, remembering some particularly clever methods I'd come across for joining crochet squares and used myself with tolerable success, I decided to do one of those instead of a mattress-stitched seam.  (I used the fourth one from the top, the one with the sort of "telegraph pole" look to it).  I thought this suited the pattern quite well, actually, and would recommend it to anyone making this blanket, certainly if not using the full complement of mesh rows down the middle.  (I ended up, by the way, after joining the two panels after their respective 7th rows, getting a grand total of two rows of mesh on the two outside edges, four altogether, far less than the sixteen the pattern called for with ten balls of Baby Merino, even subtracting maybe two of those which got used up in my join.  Oof.)

But -- as I said -- it turned out very pretty, and I'm also quite happy with the color, which was Jaeger Baby Merino 233 Lilac overdyed with 1 package of grape Kool-Aid per ball.  Interesting that it came out mottled even though I did not try to get it so.  It looks very different in different lights, as you can see!

(Yes, that is my HST quilt, finished and on the bed!)

"Japanese View"

The "Japanese View" cross-stitch is completed, partly-blocked, and ready for framing!

The chart is by Irina Neskorodeeva and is available free at Smart Cross Stitch.  It is actually quite polished for a free chart -- I don't mean to sound snobbish, mind, but it is complex and clearly has had a good deal of thought and effort put into it, so was a generous contribution to the free-charts library by the designer.

I did make a few tweaks -- as I said before, I like the more-solid look of full cross stitch, so the mountains and "sky" here are not in half-cross as in the original.  I have used partial stitches in the past, and so I wondered why they aren't used here, to smooth out the stair-step edges on the many curves.  I did blend the colors at the upper edge of the peak on the far left, just by going over the color-change with a single thread of the darker color, which made it flow a little better, to my eye.  There was a slightly-harsh straight line across the "sky" where the palest-pink is, which was probably more apparent in my full-cross than it would have been in half-cross, and so I just skipped a few stitches in a sort of programmed-random manner, fewer and fewer through the four or five rows as I went upwards.  

I confess I had a terrible time keeping on track in all parts of the sky, partly mistaking which small "panel" I was on, and partly just miscounting, and so the blending isn't quite what was intended, but luckily the shading is particularly effective either way.  I wasn't quite happy with my French knots, either, which seemed to have a mind of their own and never wanted to lean in the direction I thought they would go, so that the effect isn't quite what it is in the original, but there it is.

And because I clearly crave more than one needlework project going at the same time! --

The State of the Cross-Stitch, and Some Other Things on a Reflective October Afternoon

"Samplings V" by Ellen Chester, one of her five-chart "Quaker Samplings" series, here in Gentle Art's "French Lilac" thread on coffee-dyed Edinburgh linen.  I gave it a bit of a steam-press after finishing, but clearly it needs a bit more!  A very enjoyable chart to work.

I've pretty much finished, bar the backstitches, the lower part of the "window" in the "Japanese View" cross-stitch, and am doing the second of the three swallows as a bit of light relief.  I'd forgotten, in my fascination with samplers, how easy it is to lose one's way in the painterly kind of chart.  But it's really starting to come together now, I'm happy to find.  The original has the landscape part in half-cross, but I like the more solid look of full crosses, so am doing it that way.  I think I will go back with a mid-purple shade and soften the line at the top of that hill on the far right, so that it's more like the other hills ....

I'd had Maggie Lane's Growing Older with Jane Austen on my wish list for quite a few years now, but for some reason all of the used-book sellers have been charging nearly three figures for it, and so when not long ago I saw a copy for only slightly more than its original price I did not wait for some kind gift-giver but bought it immediately myself.  It is certainly worth the wait, though, as it is well-written and insightful, on a subject that does not usually feature much in literary criticism, but clearly was important to Austen, both simply as a means of delineating a particular character and, perhaps as she grew older herself, a way of pointing out the effects of one's relative age on a person's -- more often than not a woman's -- place in her family and social circle and in the society of the time.

After the thorough treat of being able to compare in person every single color of Kona Cotton and Bella Solids at a new-to-me fabric store, I came home with a not-quite navy blue solid to surround my six mini quilts, so have pieced together both a backing and batting -- have been thinking of calling this "No Scrap Left Behind"! -- and am pondering how best to quilt it. 

Flying Geese Friday

This batch has a bit of a "theme" since I came across a large-ish piece of the green print in my stash on Sunday, and thought it looks very handsome with this selection of the light-value prints.  I hope it's not a fluke that I got all of these rather neatly lined-up!

I went a little crazy Tuesday morning and sewed up all twenty of the blocks I'd laid out on my board.  On the bright side -- well, brighter, because I'm now twenty blocks further along! -- this gives an idea of how the finished quilt will look --

Out of the Frying Pan

I decided that both because I was quite unsure if the amount of wool that I have would make it all of the way through the "Modern Classic Baby Blanket" and that the mottled over-dye distracted from the lovely stitch pattern anyway, and that, to be honest, being still a novice crocheter there were times when I couldn't understand what I was supposed to do -- I would set that pattern aside and go for a more sure thing.  I searched online for patterns specifically using Jaeger Baby Merino DK, and came up with the "Basic Blanket" from Simple Crochet for Cherished Babies by Jane Davis, which, wonder of wonders, is held by my public library and was on the shelf at that very moment. 

The construction is a bit strange, and not quite clear since there is only one photo of the finished blanket in the book and it's scrunched and folded over on itself, and the instructions never say "make a second panel" but I think this is how it goes: you work the DC panel, turn that on its side and work the edging, then break the yarn and work the edging on the other side, and then make a second panel in the same way and sew them together up the middle.

You can't quite see them in my photo, but there are three safety pins where I joined in new balls of yarn -- the first about a third of the way up the main panel, the second almost two-thirds up, and the third a row or two into the edging (near where the crochet hook is at the moment).  That is, yes, four balls of yarn so far, with six more rows of the first border section and all eleven rows on the second still to go -- and I have ten balls altogether.  Rather naïvely, I suppose, I did not make a gauge swatch, since I'm using the same yarn and a one-size-smaller hook, but it turns out that my gauge is much bigger than the one in the pattern, so I suppose that's at least part of the issue.  Regardless, though, I don't think ten balls of yarn is enough as it stands now, and so I need to figure out how much smaller I must make the blanket in order to use as much of the yarn as possible.

I do rather like the overdye with this pattern, though -- it's not quite as "busy" as the Modern Classic blanket (which, again, I think would be wonderful in a solid yarn, and I will keep it in mind as a potential future project).  It might be also that this one has a bit more "space" in the twiddly part, more lacy-ness, as it were --

Flying Geese Friday

I have slowly been collecting 5" charm packs of vaguely mid-19th-century-style fabrics -- some freebies, some lucky finds, many on sale -- so am going to put together a few blocks every week and be delighted when I look in the box (eventually) and there are hundreds of them.  There are apparently three most-common ways of assembling a flying-geese block, and although the "no-waste" appellation appealed most, I don't really want to have lots of duplicate blocks, so am going with the "stitch and flip" method, using rectangles for the "geese" and squares for the "sky".  There is a bit of waste involved, as I have to trim off a half-inch from one end of the rectangles, but it's a simple matter to get the right-sized squares from a 5" charm square, and this method seems to need the least amount of trimming.

That half-inch I think will have to go into the compost, as I don't think I could face sewing on a strip that narrow, but I saw a little tip for the small triangles that are trimmed off the nearly-finished block, so I'm putting in a second seam as I go, in order to make small half-square-triangle blocks for some later project ....

A Little Bit Here, a Little Bit There ...

Well, it has been over a month since I posted, and I didn't even realize it.  I finished the "Honeysuckle Sampler" ages ago, enjoyed it very much despite the egregious number of queen-stitch flowers in that border (!) -- haven't blocked it yet, though, obviously.  I made some very slight changes, re-positioning the signature line a little, and centering the date by moving it down a single thread -- feeling a bit of an outlaw as I did so, as nobody ever seems willing to suggest that sort of thing even though sometimes a motif looks quite strange with two two-thread rows below it and only one above.  (I think I made the "J" a stitch wider as well -- and why not?!)  These thread colors look very well against the natural linen, I think!

Also unblocked, "Samplings IV" by Ellen Chester, from her "Quaker Samplings series.  This is on the 36-count Edinburgh linen that I coffee-dyed over the summer.  I enjoyed working this little sampler very much, and the thread is quite handsome -- Gentle Art's "Brethren Blue" -- and so I look forward to the rest of the series, which I will do in a selection of different colors.  I've started the "Samplings V" -- in Gentle Art's "French Lilac" but got distracted ...

I got a new phone for free so felt entirely justified in splurging a bit on a new case, the first one I've ever bought, since all my others were hand-me-downs.  Some folks might recognize the place names as being in the Lake District, others might realize, from, say the campsite just there near the compass rose, and the Amazon Boathouse across the lake, that it is actually Swallows and Amazons!  It makes me happy every time I see it, and that's the first time I've ever said that about a phone, to be sure, so well worth the extra few dollars.  And it has prompted me to start rereading the series -- I'm now in the middle of Pigeon Post, so about halfway along.

I had a bag of Jaeger Baby Merino in the bottom of a box, that I kept passing over because while the yarn is delicious, the color was just kind of meh.  I debated with myself for months about overdyeing it -- what if it went badly? aaugh -- but a few weeks ago, I said to myself, "Right, just do it."  I wound into skeins and dyed it with one envelope each of grape-flavored Kool-Aid, and was pleased to see that everything turned out rather well.  It's a bit more mottled than I was expecting -- that was really the only surprise. 

I had been half-planning to make a Christmas-present afghan with it for Laura -- whose favorite color is purple -- and I liked the "Modern Classic Baby Blanket" by Kirsten Holloway, though I've stalled a bit after working the first end section.  It seems to me that the mottled color of the yarn obscures the intricacy of the design -- the purple is a bit darker in real life than in the photo -- ironically, the yarn and the pattern would most likely have suited each other better with the yarn in its original state.  The stitches are on the complex side, and it took me a while to puzzle through some of them, but it worked out well -- but the other thing that is giving me pause is that it's very yardage-hungry, and this bit alone used up a whole ball and a good portion of another, and I've got only ten!  So my choices are to forge ahead and hope for the best, to try out the "plain" panel and see if the yarn goes further, as I could omit the inner fancy-work, or try something else altogether.  Ten skeins sounds like a lot; I can hardly believe that I couldn't make a lap blanket out of ten skeins!

In my indecision, I came across this "Japanese View" cross-stitch chart, available free at Smart Cross Stitch, and thought it also might make a good present for Laura --

and so as I have accumulated a considerable stash of 28-count Monaco in the past few decades, I thought, "Go for it!"  But I have had the dickens of a time with it -- counted wrong and somehow couldn't figure out where, picked out all of the mountain bits I'd done, got off again and picked it all out a second time (luckily not so far along as before), ran out of the medium-purple (of course, half of it was in shreds on the floor), did it a third time using a couple of in-betweens I had in my needle case as re-positionable guide lines.  Now at last I feel like I'm getting somewhere and it looks like the beginnings of a mountain view instead of a bunch of random specks, which is encouraging.

(Why multiple presents for Laura?  She has just gone off for her first year away at university, after spending her post-high-school years thus far at the local community college.  She is still in the same time-zone, but far enough away that I know she isn't living at home any more.  The compulsion to make things for her is especially strong.)

Lest you think I do not knit anymore -- I have been working on this scarf (which is "Camptown Races"), albeit for what seems an eternity.  I might rename it "Grandmother's Footsteps" as I keep finding that I've been daydreaming and lost track of which row I was on, so that some of the sections have far too many stitches, and I have to rip back to the point where it went wrong.  It's very nice yarn and lovely to knit with, thank goodness, and doesn't seem to mind my two-steps-forward, one-step-back.  If we take the train to visit Laura, this will be a perfect carry-along!

And there is the binding on my "Persuasion" quilt, which binding is very long (somewhat over queen-sized), but of course would probably be finished already if I didn't keep getting distracted ...

Aspirations; or, The Back of Quilting

These seven strips of blocks were in the quilting stuff I bought at the estate sale last Saturday, longish strips with six or eight blocks (small or large respectively), "on point" and edged with half-squares.  I was impressed with the piecing, and even more so later when I realized that they are all hand-sewn.

Most of the folks I talk with on a regular basis about miniature needlepoint always laugh at themselves that the first thing they do when looking at petitpoint -- theirs or someone else's! -- is turn it over and look at the back.  There is probably a slight touch of the competitive kind of curiosity about it -- as in "whose backs are neater, mine or theirs?" -- but most of the time that really is only slight, and instead it's more of a curiosity about what stitches did they use ("did she use basket stitch for the background? should I try that next time?"), etc -- like a car lover checking the engine, it's just something you do!  You don't very often get the chance to see the underside of quilts, though, of course, since most of the time once it's out in public, as it were, it's already bound and quilted and therefore impossible to do!  Even quilting bloggers rarely if ever show this -- I don't think I've ever seen it -- and so I will take up a rather long post now to show some details of the backs of these lovely and carefully-stitched blocks.  (And I've left those photos bigger than usual so that you can see up close if you like!)

I am assuming that this is Betty's work, since it is clearly not antique and probably not particularly "vintage" -- there were some large scraps of the two background fabrics folded up along with the strips, and the brown one still has "Marcus Brothers" on the selvage. 

It took me a few moments to realize what it was, but one of the things that struck me the most about these is how very little fraying there is!  That certainly goes a long way to explaining the air of tidiness about the backs of these blocks.  The fact that there are few loose thread ends also contributes.

You can see the traces of pen lines, on both the pieces and the border triangles, that Betty marked as sewing lines.  This here looks at first like machine-stitching, but the thread she used is cream-colored, and the pen line disguises that.  (She used running stitch, by the way, not back-stitch.)

I was particularly interested in the stars, having just completed a dozen of a similar size, and not been terribly impressed with my results.  Here is one of mine, it all of its shabbiness --

It's easy to see here what I mean about the fraying! There is essentially none on Betty's.  It's possible, looking at the one below, that she cleaned it up, either as she went or while pressing it, as you can see where the fraying would have been, but still -- gosh!

Sometimes she marked on the back of the fabric the center of a motif that she wanted to "fussy-cut" -- she didn't on the center square of the above block, but did on at least three of the four light brown prints, presumably with a window template --

She was careful, certainly, but not obsessive about pressing particular seams in a particular direction on the same kind of block -- sometimes it's towards the lighter of the two fabrics, sometimes it isn't --

Four, Five, and Six

The "Brick Road" mini quilt kit (from Temecula Quilt Company) was part of the "Monthly Minis" subscription from 2016.  There are a couple of wobbles if you look closely, but I'm pleased with my piecing on this one!  I made my first cutting mistake here, unfortunately for me on one of the few kits that had little extra fabric, and so I would have had to piece a strip, but I decided to use a little bit of the border/binding fabric instead, since I'm not going to bind these individually.

"Bathwick," using prints from Karen Styles's "Bathwick" collection, these from 2018 so not too long ago.  I chose this kit partly because it's pretty but partly because I have a half-yard or so of that fussy-cut print in my half-square triangles quilt that I'm this close to finishing, which amused me greatly!  The kit came with that particular piece larger than the rest, so that it could be fussy-cut, a nice touch.  I made a slight cutting mistake -- well, not really a mistake, but I changed my mind literally as the rotary cutter was whisking across the fabric, that instead I should just make the border strips as wide as the fabric allowed, instead of trimming them to 2" -- and so one of them is a smidge narrower than the others!

The "Little Stars" kit was immediately my favorite, but I also knew that it would be the most fiddly, with those star points, and so I left it for last.  It is also, unfortunately, the one at which I was least successful -- the stars are sometimes more "wonky" than they should be, and as you can probably see, some of the blocks were not especially amenable to lining up with the ones next to them.  As much as I've taken to heart the maxim, "People will never know how long it took you, but they will see how well you did it!" I wanted to pick out as few as possible of any wobbly seams because the pieces are so small -- I was afraid they would stretch or fray so badly that nothing would go right -- though I did pick out the howlers on this one.  Well, it's a learning experience, and yesterday evening I spent a rewarding hour gathering tips for more-accurate piecing which I will use in future!

I was pleased, though, with my figuring out how to get the strongly-directional fabric of that pale-pink star to have the lines all radiating outwards, instead of some outwards and some across (like the less-obviously-directional fabric of the star in the upper left corner), which is what happens when you cut the triangles from squares in which the lines all run in the same direction.

This is, by the way, apparently the "traditional" way of assembling a sawtooth star block, cutting out each piece individually.  There are two other methods that I know of now, which are a bit less risky where that unsupported bias edge is concerned, for one -- but I thought I should try it this way, to see for myself.  Personally, I don't think I will cut individual pieces this way again, unless I'm doing English piecing! certainly not on pieces this small!

Here is something like my idea for putting these six pieces together, here laid out on my "Medallion Variations" quilt which is about the size I'd like this one to be -- blue though, navy blue perhaps, instead of purple!  I have enough scraps to piece together a good-sized frame or border for the sides at least, with luck for the whole thing --