A Bluestocking Knits

Long Time, No See

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

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

-- which I liked much better. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pomegranates and Pinwheels

Linen and threads to start the "Pomegranate Sampler" by Darlene O'Steen -- I'm looking forward to this very much!  The linen is Weeks Dye Works' in "Cocoa" with a collection of threads from Weeks, Classic Colorworks, and Simply Shaker, converted from the DMC list on the chart.  I'm also relieved to see that although I had to choose both the fabric and the threads without seeing them in person, the results are fairly successful!

A crocheted snowflake for an exchange-by-mail with our lace group.  This one is called "Matterhorn" one of the amazing variety from SnowflakePatterns.  I had planned to use starch to block this, but it is so ethereal that I was concerned it wouldn't hold its shape for long, so I re-blocked it with full-strength white glue.  This one is in Coats size 30 crochet cotton using a US9 steel hook, and, impressively, is not as difficult as it looks!

The second of my two Temecula Quilt Company kits, an unnamed pinwheel.  I'm quietly pleased to find that I'm getting better both at piecing and at hand-quilting.

The "Léontine Coutances" sampler by Mamilou, a free reproduction chart of a ca.1900-1910 French sampler.  I decided to work this to look a bit more like the original than like the chart, so I left out most of the now-missing stitches and kept some of Léontine's mistakes, though I confess I added a few of my own!  I like the effect of using three strands of floss instead of the more-usual-these-days two -- it does have that plump "vintage" look, as I'd hoped -- and was not too much for this rather loosely-woven Charles Craft linen.

And my "Camptown Races," thanks to no less than three concerts of Julia's for which I sat knitting while waiting for the curtain to go up, is actually starting to look like it's going to be a scarf!  Huzzah!

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! --

"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. 

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 ...

Page 7

Page seven of the nine-page chart for the "Quaker Virtues" sampler.  I had been feeling for a while that the border would look more finished with two lines of stitches instead of one, so I went back to the other side and have begun adding in another line.  I'm quite content with my rather agonized choice of three shades of Antique Blue -- blue and white china being always pleasing to my eye -- which makes the eternity that this thing is taking into a journey, not an arrival-to-be (!).  Laura -- who to my astonishment and delight has decided after working a set of small cross-stitch pictures that she actually likes this hobby -- frequently asks me, "How far along are you now?" and I sigh and say, "Not halfway yet," but I think I've passed that mark without even noticing, since page 4, the one above what I've just finished, is in fact the only remaining full-page of the chart, and the rest are all partial pages.

The State of the Counted Stitch

Darlene O'Steen's little "Honeysuckle Sampler," which I couldn't resist starting.  I suspect, judging from the thoroughness of her book as well as knowing that she taught numerous seminars in North America and the UK, that she would be delighted that I am learning new things with this first sampler, including that this is properly called "counted stitch" since not all of them are "crossed," that is Xs.  There are a number of stitches that I have not worked before -- Irish stitch, queen, rice, and double herringbone certainly. 

The Irish stitch is fun, and makes a lovely touchably-satin-like surface, as well as these rather dramatic "flames".  Queen stitch is my least-favorite, as it is not a simple thing to get the diamond to be consistently flat, or the little couching stitches across its middle to line up neatly, and more vexingly, it's an utter pain to pick out when it goes wrong.  Unfortunately, there is quite a lot of queen stitch in this sampler -- all of the blue flowers in the border, and as a filler for the box across from the Irish stitch one!  And I discovered that I must pick out that errant gold diamond in the upper corner ...

Oh well -- I'm still very happy with it, and with the color palette, which manages to be both rather brilliant and gently-faded at the same time.

The calm blues and whites of the "Quaker Virtues" sampler.  I have turned the second corner of the border, and am filling in and up to meet the already-worked area.  I'm pretty sure there are indeed variations in dye lots between the dozen or so skeins of DMC 931 that I've used so far, but as I'm alternating between three or four skeins at a time as I go, I find that, when you notice it at all, it has a pleasing overdyed mottling to it rather than a jarring "edge".

Some beautifully-cut pieces of poplar picture-frame molding, for "Froth and Bubble," "Peace to My Friend," and "Anna Ohman" -- the last is already stained and coated with beeswax and linseed oil.

And five pieces of home-dyed linen, waiting to become Ellen Chester's little "Quaker Samplings" series ...!

Experimenting PS (!)

I had the niggling feeling that there was some "experimenting" that I was leaving out of yesterday's post, and this morning I remembered two things.

Some time ago I bought a copy of Diana Boston's The Patchworks of Lucy Boston, and admired the quilts -- of course -- but put aside the thought of paper piecing as just too labor-intensive.  Imagine my amused contrition when not long ago I browsed through the book again and thought, "You know, self, I think I'd like to try that after all ...."  It was partly the capability of using "oddly-shaped" pieces that aren't particularly easy to do when machine-piecing (though "odd shapes" aren't usually something that appeals to me), but more just the intrinsically-pleasing effect of Mrs. Boston's quilts that spoke to me, as well as the pleasure that I am taking more and more in "slow" needlework.  You can't really do this kind of quilting by machine.  And so I ordered a small stash of paper shapes, deciding to start with a simple table runner using some William Morris fabric reprints I bought years ago. 

This kind of paper-piecing really is as labor-intensive as it sounds -- you have to baste the fabric to the paper shape, stitch two basted shapes together, then add more shapes one at a time, all by hand -- though it is more the tedious kind of intensiveness, not the exhausting kind.  I must admit, though, that I'm very impressed with the tidiness of the results -- the intersections where my four tumbler blocks meet are pretty much perfect, even from a novice such as myself!  So we will see how it goes ...

There are varying opinions about whether it's okay to dye fabric with coffee and/or tea -- the thought is that the acids in coffee and tea will eventually degrade the fibers in the fabric, and popular knowledge says specifically that tea-dyed cotton will begin to degrade in 30 to 40 years, and coffee-dyed in 75 to 100 years.  On the other hand, some dyers such as R&R Reproductions say that it isn't a problem, that "the acid content in coffee and espresso specifically] has been tested and approved by museums all over the U.S."  Of course, "degrading" is not only subjective in itself -- is that a bit of fuzz here and there, or does the whole thing just dissolve into a mass of loose fibers?! -- but much I'm sure depends on the conditions in which the fabric is kept -- framed (under glass or not), acid-free storage or not, etc. etc. etc.  Anyway, I thought I'd try it on some fabrics intended for samplers and see what the results look like.

This is Cashel cotton on the left and linen at the bottom, both from Zweigart (with its distinctive red selvedge).  Both were dyed in the same batch of cold brew made with Seattle's Best house blend, though with slightly different methods and times, so it was interesting to see that although the linen was in the coffee bath for about a half-hour it is darker than the cotton, which soaked for at least ninety minutes!  Both are a fairly unexceptional ecru in real life, so I suspect that in future I will leave the dyeing to the professionals or at least the more-dedicated-to-it than I!

Page 8

Finished page 8 of the "Quaker Virtues" sampler this morning!  The line runs down the center of that big motif just below "SIMPLICITY", with the top of the page through the word itself -- which isn't crooked, I assure you, the fabric is just a little stretched there!  I'm finding a rather surprising number of mistakes in the chart, and not just subjective things like spacing (which I admit to having tweaked here and there), but missing or extra stitches, one of which took me quite a bit of picking-out to fix, since the error was near where I started the particular motif, and I didn't realize it until I got to the next cardinal point.  Oh well.  I'm still enjoying the piece immensely!

Being so very near to finishing Laura's quilt (!), I felt justified the other day in starting a small knitting project (!!) -- having had a conversation with Brittany by way of the comments about Stephen Maturin's comforter, I thought, "well, I must have some suitable wool, let's just see what one of these 'comforters' looks like, eh?"  This one will be the "Figured Comforter" from the 1840 edition of Miss Watts's 1837 book -- about twenty-five years after the events of Desolation Island, but presumably things didn't change overmuch between.  This particular comforter's shape will narrow a bit where it rests at the back of the wearer's neck, then widen out again at the other end.  (I was a bit concerned at first that it wasn't going to lie flat, but once it got a bit of heft behind it, as it were, it settled down nicely.)

This miniature sampler was finished some weeks ago, and again I put off making the frame, had trouble with same, etc. etc. etc.  The chart is the "Heritage VI" by Annelle Ferguson -- I lightened all of the colors by one step, which result usually pleases me very much though in this case I suspect wasn't quite successful, but there it is.  I had great difficulty getting the picture-frame molding mitered properly, so rather than keep wasting it I ended up using plain strip wood (this is 1/8 x 1/4") and "scratch carving" a simple line around the opening to make it look like a home-made frame.  This didn't turn out too badly -- it looks old-ish, at any rate!

I have been reading quite a lot -- I keep meaning to write about that, then find myself absorbed in yet another book --