A Bluestocking Knits

  • Better, But …

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    This revised gusset is much smoother and better-fitting, so I’m happier. But now that I’ve got a good fit on the thumb, I realize that the slipped-stitch hand is a bit snug. I don’t think I’ve ever before used such a relatively-large swathe of slipped-stitch fabric, but I suppose it makes sense that it would pull in a bit more than regular stockinette. The cuff is certainly big enough, so I think it isn’t the number of stitches — especially since I did try the next-larger size first of all, and found the cuff too big. So I think I will rip this back to the braid at the top of the cuff again, and work the hand with needles one size larger, to get a skosh more room ….

  • Sewing Machine — Fixed!

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    I got my sewing machine back from its week-long sojourn in the repair shop yesterday afternoon, and, on their advice, spent some time sewing this morning to make sure that I’m happy with the repair. It no longer shrieks like a banshee, and — bonus! — the action feels smoother than it has in a long time. Yes, I’m happy!

    These are the quilt blocks I put together. I saw a scrap quilt in the Old Swedish Quilts book a few years ago that appealed to me enormously as something both handsome and useful, as well as thrifty, using up scraps left over from other sewing projects. It is simply a string-pieced block, using a square of old fabric — here, cut from a set of worn-out table napkins — with strips of various widths sewn onto it. No piecing required! so it really takes longer to choose the strips than it does to sew up and press the block. With today’s batch, I have about forty blocks, so some ways to go still before I can put together a quilt top ….

    It pleased me very much to add in one of the hand-pieced and probably-antique scraps in my box of Betty’s things —

  • Grandmother’s Footsteps

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    This is the first of a pair of “Gilded Cage” mitts, being knitted as a gift. I either wasn’t paying attention or couldn’t see on this beautiful but rather dark wool, that I had knitted at least three stitches in different places in the ribbing when I should have purled, and I didn’t really like the way the Estonian braid joined together, so I ripped it out and did it all over again. I liked the way my join looked using the crochet-hook method better, and so I carried on, merrily working the gusset increases as written in the pattern.

    But after I had finished the gusset and put the stitches on a piece of scrap yarn to work the thumb later, I slipped the mitt on to my hand just to double check how things were going, and found that the gusset bulged strangely down at the base. This pattern has the gusset increases every other round until there are enough for the thumb, then it is worked straight until it gets to the dividing point, which, sure enough, makes it much wider at the lower edge. I’m not sure why, and it doesn’t look this bulgy in the pattern’s photograph, but of course logic says that increasing every other round for a little over a third of the way and then working straight would give you something resembling a Florence flask.*

    And so I’ve ripped it back to the braid and started the gusset again, working the increase rounds more evenly distributed up the length of the gusset. Wish me luck!

    * I didn’t know that it’s called a Florence flask! Well, you learn something new every day, don’t you!

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    A Year of Finishing Things?

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    My “Annie’s Cushion” from Treehouse Textiles —

    Am quite pleased with this, especially now that it’s done (!).

    In the midst of spring-cleaning — because, yes, in Southern California it is already spring — I have come across a number of unfinished projects, and am coming to the realization that perhaps this should be a Year of Finishing Things. I have a black cardigan with lacy trim still on the knitting needles (stalled when I decided to sew a new black choir dress altogether), a pair of socks also on the needles (wh. I have now taken on two trips intending to finish and didn’t touch once, either time) and the 1909 Ladies’ Mitts (I don’t even remember now why I set these down …) — also two counted-stitch samplers that got taken off the frame for something else and never put back, a quilt that I laid out and thought, “well, I hate that” but really deserves finishing, and two pincushions that I could use right now, in fact.

    But, yeah, I have just started something new, though my excuse is that it’s a gift with a deadline …!

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    State of the Petitpoint

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    I have not been as attentive to this for a while as I might have been — mostly because of The Game,* I confess — but I have now got it within sneezing distance of the mid-point, which runs through those little floral motifs at the top of the stitched area in the photo. It isn’t really a difficult chart, but it does require fairly close attention!

    *Which absorbed quite a lot of my time this past autumn, and I freely admit that I will no longer roll my eyes at how the hours that David and the girls might spend on a computer game. Mind you, I can still tell them that they should be reading a book instead.

  • Some Quilting …

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    I suspect that I hadn’t posted these before (cough–TypePad–cough!), so here they are now, two new-to-you mini-quilts-as-placemats.

    A modified “Windowpane” from Kathleen Tracy’s book Small and Scrappy (I added in another column of the windowpane blocks to make it a rectangle) —

    And the finished “A Bit of History”, which is really too big for an ordinary placemat but I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out —

    And a few more fabrics for “Lucy Diamond” — a selection of fat quarter-ish pieces from a fabric thrift store (!) that David discovered for me (!!) —

  • New Year’s Resolution: Blog More!

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    Well, it has been a while, and a lot has been happening, and I’ve blogged none of it — sigh. I even meant to post this yesterday! There are lots of reasons, most of them valid — we spent three weeks in New Zealand and Australia which was lovely (I’ll post some photos later), then the holidays were upon us, my laptop had some issues so that I couldn’t download the photos from my camera or my phone, &c. &c. &c.

    But — here is something I’ve been doing in the meantime, hand-stitching the top for an “Annie Cushion” from Treehouse Textiles. I was going to say “my first and last” hand-stitching project, as I didn’t really enjoy the process much, I confess, though after pressing it and seeing that it turned out much tidier than I expected (!), I’m a bit more optimistic. (I didn’t get to visit the shop in person — alas — but had the cushion kit and a low-volumes bundle send to my friend’s house, “quite northwards” though still in Melbourne. The low-volumes fabrics are for a “Lucy Diamond” quilt-to-be …)

    To be continued — !

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    Still Figuring Things Out …

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    I’m still a bit at sea with WordPress — but I got a few things rearranged for the blog layout, at least got rid of that interloper’s “About Me” (for those of you who didn’t see it, this particular template came with an “About Me” that was about somebody else, some presumably-generic person, and perplexingly, that actually posted on this blog).  Anyway —

    I have managed to finish a cross stitch project, an alphabet that was included in New Künstlichs Modelbuch, a small book of needlework charts published by Bernhard Jobin ca. 1600, and generously reproduced by the Met.

    I re-charted mine to be oriented vertically and widened it a smidge, as I wanted it to fit this particular frame, but the letters themselves are as in the original.  It’s worked on the piece of 36-count “Legacy” by Picture This Plus that I had left over from “Awake My Soul” — it’s a bit too mottled for my taste, and so I decided to use it for this as the letters covered up a lot of it (!).  The thread is the lovely “Brethren Blue” from The Gentle Art.  (And I’m happy to freely share my chart of the original version, but you’ll have to ask in a comment, as I have no idea yet how to post a PDF here ….)

     

     

    And in other worlds, well, when I first heard about the then-upcoming “be a hobbit” computer game from Wētā Workshop, I thought, “That’s for me!”  I waited and waited, and the first reviews when the game was eventually released were not very complimentary, and I thought, “Hmm, I’ll give it a try anyway,” and I’m glad I did.  I’m having a lot of fun with it, I have to say!  Not being a gamer, I suppose I’m not the best judge of it as a game per se, and there are certainly odd little bugs and glitches here and there, and some things that just don’t make sense (how does a mixing bowl make foods go from tender to crisp, for heaven’s sake!), but you know, sometimes it’s nice just to stop and admire the scenery —

    to watch the sun rise, or the snow falling —

    to come home after a long day’s foraging or fishing, to a cosy little hobbit hole —

    Actually, I’ve “finished” the main goal of the game, which is to make friends with all of the main character hobbits, and now I’m spending my “days” doing Club missions, little goals sort of like merit badges in Scouts — “Catch 5 Softmouth Trout” or “Harvest 3 2-Star Beans” or “Cook a 3-star meal with Eggplant,” which is pleasantly low-key and just the sort of thing I want these days.  Even though one dashes by most of the time, I’m very pleased with how I’ve arranged my upper garden —

    and I have to confess that after Fosco Burrows made me a present of a bath tub, I was so excited that I spent a good real-time hour or so yesterday afternoon turning the original little bedroom off the kitchen into a bath room! I re-tiled the floor and everything! —

    (These last two “photos” — yes, there’s a Photo mode, because of course you want to take pictures of all the decorating you’ve done! — were on two different “days,” a rainy evening and a sunny morning, because I took so long trying to get good angles that I fell asleep right there!).

    And another thing is that all of the cooking one does makes me very hungry.  One of the first things I cooked in-game was Bundle of Sperage Rolled in Bacon — wild asparagus with a wodge of cheese all wrapped up in bacon, oh my goodness!  Raised Cheese Bread!  Mrs. Cotton’s Amazing Autumn Tart!

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    Hello World!

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    Welcome to WordPress! This is your first post. Edit or delete it to take the first step in your blogging journey.

    That is the sample text in the “first” WordPress post that is there automatically when one starts a blog.

    I feel rather awkward at the moment, like I’ve just moved to a new house and everything’s different and I don’t know where anything is. Unfortunately — continuing with this analogy — I didn’t want to move, and I resent it a bit, and so I’ve been putting things off (as one does), and now it’s getting down to the last minute. This sounds more than a bit whiny, I know — I just need to get past the point where the theme template that I chose still has the theme’s “About” blurb on it — and a “Sign up for a free recipe e-book →” link across the top! and although I paid for a domain name — which you apparently have to do, although this isn’t really clear at the beginning — the address still appears to be something like “33f04f0542-qitrl”. Sigh.

    Maybe it’s time to go and watch the rest of the instructional videos …

  • Blindsided

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    TypePad is shutting down, effective September 30 — four weeks away.  I got an e-mail from them just yesterday.  We've been with them since 2005, when we started a private blog to keep in touch with our families while we were in Hong Kong, and it was while we were there that I started "A Bluestocking Knits" — that's twenty years! it's kind of hard to believe.  It's a lot of knitting history for me, and of course reading and quilting and, since 2020, counted-stitch and samplers, plus all of the little family details and whatnot that came into it along the way.

    I don't know yet what I'm going to do — move to Blogger for free, to WordPress (less expensive than TypePad but with fewer amenities)?  The knitting community seems to have pretty much abandoned the blog format since Ravelry came onto the scene, which is disappointing to say the least, though in a way I sort of understand, since long-format posting not only takes more effort and doesn't have the near-immediate gratification that Instagram et al. do.  I don't and won't do FaceBook, and I don't really think it serves the crafts community very well anyway — too brief, too transitory — so that's not even under consideration.

    Sigh.

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