A Bluestocking Knits

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    Page 5, Triangles, and a Handful of Samplers

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    This is page five completed on the "Quaker Virtues" chart, with a bit extra — I worked most or all of the large motifs that overlap the page breaks, in order to orient myself on the adjoining pages, and most of the smaller motifs.  There are nine pages in the chart, but luckily for me the three along the right-hand side are less than half the width of their neighbors, and I think the ones along the bottom edge aren't full sheets either.  It is not a particularly user-friendly chart, I'm afraid — I've quickly become used to the modern charts with an overlapping few rows, which mean that you don't have to keep flipping back and forth between two pages, counting and re-counting to make sure that you're in the right place — nor does this one even have a darker line every ten squares.  I think that pretty soon I will be drawing in the latter myself, having already had to work a couple of these motifs two or three times after counting wrong!

    Still — I'm enjoying it immensely —

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    This is the first step in the star quilt for Laura.  I admit that I am already getting a-weary of little triangles — it is very slow-going and fiddly, sewing these together.  I keep reminding myself that once all of the triangles are together, it's straight lines from there on!

    I'm having trouble getting hold of a cream solid fabric that more-or-less matches this cream print — apparently all of the Joann's stores in Southern California are sold out of all Kona Cotton creams and whites so thoroughly that they aren't even offering it online, and although the word on the vaccines is encouraging it still isn't a good time to go traipsing about to quilt shops (much as I'd like to, she said wistfully), so I've ordered a carefully-curated — cough-guess-cough! — trio from Hancock's hoping that at least one will be all right.

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    I got a pair of miniature sampler kits for Christmas and worked one of them last month, the "Heritage XIX" chart by Annelle Ferguson.  I was so pleased with it — the one at bottom left, "dated" 1798 — that I resolved to mount and frame the other two that have been sitting in a box for over a year while I wrung my hands over the possibility of any number of things going wrong.  The other two samplers are the "Boston Band" by Nancy Sturgeon at upper right, and on the left "Southern Heritage" also by Annelle Ferguson (which was a NAME souvenir from a decade ago, that one of my club members gave to me).  I tweaked both of these, eliminating the "V" on the "Boston Band" and shifting the "Z" up to join the rest, in order to add faux initials, and switching out the lower-case alphabet on the "Southern" one for a motto and another faux signature.  I had the dickens of a time cutting the moldings, as even a fraction of a millimeter on one piece of the four at this scale can make the frame out of true, and sometimes it was a choice between a true rectangle or a slightly-too-big rectangle — you might be able to see that at least once I chose "true"! — but on the whole I'm very pleased with these, mostly because the charts are so charming!

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    Knitting in the Movies and TV: “All Creatures Great and Small” (2020)

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    I am finding the new "All Creatures Great and Small" series a fairly solid B- — adding in backstories etc. for characters like Mrs. Hall is all right, but a few points off for non-period dialogue that's full of pesky Americanisms (why on earth don't the older folks in the production crew let the writers know that you didn't "call" people in Britain of the 1930s, not even in Britain of the 1980s, you "rang" them?!), and even more points off for rewriting scenes from the book and taking much of the sparkle out of them.  But the cast is excellent, the scenery is gorgeous of course, and in most respects the production values are very good.  And there are lots of knits, many of them handmade! there is that, of course.

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    Helen (Rachel Shenton) and James (Nicholas Ralph), pretending they aren't flirting.

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    Tristan (Callum Woodhouse) looking quite louche, as one might expect!

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    Mrs. Hall's knitting is alarmingly chunky for the 1930s.  Points off for letting her wool roll about on the floor, which I don't think any self-respecting Yorkshire housekeeper would do, but points back for the crochet squares on the table.  I was a bit alarmed that her right hand is over the needle when so very many English ladies at this time and for some years later held their right hand under the needle, but apparently that was a "posh" thing, and so it seems quite likely after all that a country woman would have held it the way Anna Madeley is doing.

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    Tristan seems to get the lion's share of the hand-knitted slipovers!

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    Well, this is actually a pretty characteristic thing for book-Tristan, actually …

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    A truly splendid Fair Isle-style scarf, in gorgeous colors too!

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    I don't really know why barmaid Maggie (Mollie Winnard) should be holding a donkey on a rope halter, but perhaps that will be explained later — what I am interested in at the moment is those very fetching Scandinavian-star fingerless gloves!

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    I am enjoying watching 1930s and 40s programs while I knit on the Rae slipover for Julia, so it's all good.  The Palette is loosely-spun and a bit splitty, but I'm hoping that most of the inconsistencies come out in the wash — and it is surprisingly soft even still on the needles.  These are some of the craziest "Fair Isle" patterns I've ever seen, but there is no question about it not being "1940s"!

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    I couldn't get enough of the "Oregon Coast" in the same dyelot, and I also had a bit of trouble matching the gauge of the single-color bands to the gauge of the two-color ones, so I solved both issues at once by working the single-color bands with two balls of the same color but one each from the different dyelots.  I don't think the difference between the two is quite as apparent in real life as it is in the photo, or perhaps the random-ish alternation is working its magic.

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    And for a bonus, a flashback to the original series, here with a very young Peter Davison as Tristan — now that I look at it, the slipover has a rather 1980s look to it in gauge and length! but it is still very charming —

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    Decisions

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    2129

    As it happened, I went in a different direction from what I had originally planned, which was some shade of brown for the words and letters in the "Quaker Virtues" sampler — I think it was the little "m" that made me think of just going with the next-lightest and next-darkest shades of blue to the 931 that I'm using for the motifs.  This will make it a bit more Delft or willow-ware like than I was picturing in my mind, but that's not a bad thing by any means.

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    With the spring weather here seems to come more decisiveness for me — I felt good about changing my mind to a rather-simpler quilt for our bed, but since there is a lot less solid fabric in a half-square-triangle block than in (proportionately) a Cross and Crown, I had to get more fabrics, which meant rearranging the layout I had already started.  Oh, well — I'm really happy with the new fabrics.  Like the "Quaker Virtues," this has changed the whole look of the thing, but I think for the better.

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    I had been putting this off for months, unsure of how well it would work, and — surprisingly — dreading having to work with teeny-tiny molding, but the other day I told myself, "Right! get on with it!"  I wanted to make framed "vintage" photographs for my 1:12 carpet shop, but of course they should be glazed, so how to do that …?  I printed out a selection of photographs to a good size, then glued them face-down to some clear plastic cut from either a box of croissants from Costco or a box of spinach (I tried it more than once).  The glue is just outside each photo, so that it doesn't show.  I painted some tiny cove molding, then cut it to fit each picture, then glued that to the plastic "glazing" with the photo underneath.  After the glue dried, I trimmed away the extra plastic and touched up the cut edges with black paint to hide them.

    They turned out pretty well, and the slightly decrepit bits here and there are on a par with the rest of the shop!

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    And I managed to choose fabrics online! — always a gamble — for Laura's star quilt —

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    Fine Art Funnies

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    David sent me a ton of these, so I thought I'd share a few — we could all use some humor these days!

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    Indecision

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    Trying out different shades of brown — and one of lighter blue — on the "Quaker Virtues" sampler …

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    Hooray! It’s Ray-Ray-Raining

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    Well — we had another generous few hours or so last night, it's not raining now, but the air has that clean feeling and the garden has got a pleasantly-surprised perked-up look.  I'm also starting the "Rae" pullover, so there's a nice little pun for you.  Julia and I settled on an adjusted color scheme, and after I had to winkle some glue down into the crack in my only pair of wood 2.5mm circs, I was knitting away on the ribbing.  The original gauge is 30 sts per 4"/10cm, and I'm getting 28 (in the round), so I'm recalculating a bit. 

    After my success with the Crazy Rails quilt, I dove straight in to the new quilt for our bed, fabrics for which have been sitting in a drawer untouched for a year.  For some reason, though, although I still really like the Cross and Crown I had decided on, it seemed a bit more-advanced than I am at present — perhaps I'm wrong, but neither do I want to stretch myself too far.  I decided on something simpler, half-square triangles, and so I am cutting and pressing this week.  And at the same time, I thought about Laura, who at twenty is making plans to go away to college in September, and I wanted to make her a quilt to take with her.  She liked the idea, and after I proposed a few patterns I felt I could handle, she said, "You know, I'd like something with stars."  I nodded, and went to another room and came back with my copy of this magazine —

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    which I've been daydreaming over for quite a while.  The one on the cover was what had come to mind when Laura said "stars" — so she likes it and we've conferred and ordered fabrics.  I'm kind of glad that I decided on something simpler for our bed quilt — the stars one is I think a bit less-complex than it looks, but still I don't want to overwhelm myself.

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    A 1:12 scale sampler kit from Annelle Ferguson, on 48-count gauze.  I have had a bit of a slump this year where miniatures are concerned, but I got two of these kits for Christmas, and they are certainly very charming!

    I admit also that knitting on this vintage pattern has got me thinking about knitting myself a little vintage something, perhaps in that KnitPicks Palette that didn't really work with the crocheted vest thingy last summer.  I really like the sleeveless vest/pullover style, as it's more versatile here, where real winter lasts only about three weeks, if we're lucky.  I'm very taken with the one on the left here —

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    or maybe (rather wildly!) this one —

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    for which I actually have the pattern — "Simonetta"! — unlike the first, which I guess I will have to make up as I go.

    And because the title of this post has me singing the song, here is a version of it sung by Disneyland's Dapper Dans —

     

  • Unity

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    It grieves me more than I can say that as I began to put out the American flag this morning, I hesitated, remembering its use in recent weeks not as a symbol of unity and cooperation but of division and hate.  I can think of no better thing to tell myself or anyone else than the closing words of Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address in 1861 —

    We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

    Image by matthewmorris from Pixabay

  • Crazy Trails

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    I've had these thirties and feedsack reproduction fabrics in my box for I don't know how many years, over ten at least, maybe close to fifteen — I used to go to Tall Mouse with the girls and let them choose fat quarters to make into napkins for their lunchboxes or for the big "Turning Twenty" coverlets I sewed for their beds, and it was like a candy store, looking at the different colors and setting them on one of the tables to decide.  I always found the thirties prints cheerful and managed to accumulate quite a number of fat quarters, as well as yardage from other shops, and a few years ago I said to myself, "I really need to make a thirties quilt with all of these."

    I decided eventually on a disappearing nine-patch, inspired by the last post from Wool Palace Mary and even more by this one (which is lovely), and I cut my fabrics into four-inch squares and sewed up a nine-patch block to get things started.

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    And there it sat, for nigh on three years.  Why?  I don't know, it just didn't speak to me.  I'd see it in my fabrics box, think, "I should make some more blocks for that," and put it back.

    Then not long ago, after receiving Amanda Jean Nyberg's Sunday Morning Quilts for Christmas, and looking through her alas-now-dormant blog, I happened to see a vintage crazy-rails quilt that inspired her to make a similar one for herself, and I thought, "do it!"

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    So I cut my four-inch blocks into 1 1/2-inch strips, and chain-stitched three at a time into blocks and the blocks into strips.  I decided to just let it go randomly — that's the "crazy" part, as rail blocks are usually arranged with the colors symmetrically or at least in the same order — and so I had only a general rule of not repeating a fabric in its neighbor blocks in the strip, but sometimes that just didn't happen.  "Oh well, it's 'crazy,'" I shrugged, and carried on.  A couple of times, sewing blocks in the twilight, I inadvertently put one strip wrong-side out, but I left some of them, too.  "It's 'crazy'!" 

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    I ended up with seventeen strips of thirteen blocks each.  This didn't seem quite big enough, so I found some Kona Cotton in "Bone," a sort of creamy off-white, and cut 5-inch strips for a border, which makes it now about 47×58 in. (say 119x147cm).  I thought at first glance that I wasn't going to have quite enough of the grey-and-white polka dots fabric for the back, but after fitting in the disappearing-nine-patch block — had to, of course — and piecing here and there, there is actually a goodish piece left over.

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    I made some scrappy binding using Amanda Jean's tutorial here (saving the leftover triangles because, yes, she does have a use for them, the fabulous "Up and Away" quilt in the Sunday Morning book — you can see a reader's version here at Running Thimble).  The paisley fabric is one of my favorites.  Also the cherry stripe.  Also the white daisies on yellow, which is left over from my favorite apron — and you know, ordinarily I'm not much of a yellow fan, but this makes me smile every time I look at it, and you can't ask more from a fabric than that.

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    I found some natural-white yarn in a drawer — it might be Kroy sock yarn — and Julia helped me tie the quilt, although she drifted away after only a couple of rows, whereas I found it rather meditative.  The yarn frayed more than I expected in the wash, so I might have to redo it later with pure wool.  Sewing on the binding took less time than usual, a pleasant surprise which I at least partly attribute to using 100% cotton thread instead of the more-common polyester.

    Obviously, more than a few of the fabrics were going to end up next to each other in the rows, there being quite a number of strips from each fat quarter, but … it's crazy!

    My piecing is still a bit erratic in places, I'm quite aware of that, but I was very impressed with the fact that almost every single one of the great-many corners matched up very neatly when I sewed the rows together, which was a nice little boost to my sewing confidence, and the new-to-me binding tutorial — Amanda Jean's method of joining the end to the beginning is a simpler modification of the method I usually use — went without a hitch.  And so on the whole I'm very pleased with this as a beginner-ish quilt!

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    2020, We Hardly Knew Ye

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    2020 calendar

     

    Well, I didn't get much Christmas-ing done this year — no cards even though I bought some on sale in January last year, no we-are-still-well newsletter even though I started planning one in October or thereabouts (we've never done one before but having missed so much family news this year it seemed a good idea), no decorated mantel over our fireplace/bookshelf even though we raided — with permission! — the trimmings pile at the tree lot, no cut-paper snowflakes in the big living-room window, a rather Cratchit-like Christmas dinner though in all fairness that was mostly on purpose as it was just the four of us and not a dozen as usual, no "12 Days of Christmas Carols" series which I've enjoyed doing here in years previous.  It isn't for lack of Christmas spirit, mind you, just that weird sense of time shifting and turning just outside the door but rarely actually inside or at the same time as oneself.  But there it is — 2020 has been a bit of a bust, to say the least, and Christmas has been as weird as pretty much everything else.  (Even my search engine doesn't know what day it is — the other day its calendar had the 28th highlighted, while the taskbar on my computer said it was still the 26th.)

    (I can't tell where this graphic came from, but it's brilliant and I wish I could credit the artist.  Its days not only melt Dali-like and disintegrate more with each week, but the numbers get increasingly out of sequence, or even non-existent, very like the surreal normality, or the new-normal surreality, that has been 2020.)

    I couldn't help noticing that the Los Angeles Times's year-in-review section in Sunday's paper was 27 pages of their top columnists mostly in a sort of "WTF?!" daze and one page at the end of "well, there were some good things, though".  There has been a lot of stress and disappointment just here in our house, and none of us has been sick so in comparison with others we've had it pretty easy.  But I thought it would be good to say goodbye to this year on a positive note, so here are some of my "Best of 2020" lists —

    Best New-to-Me Recipes (in no particular order)

    Best Escapist Fiction

    • Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series and Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" series tie for first, partly because they are both wonderfully transporting into their respective worlds, and partly because there's a whole series of each and so therefore all the more immersive.  As Emily Dickinson said, "There is no Frigate, Sloop, or Sailing Dinghy like a Book / To take us Lands away"!
    • D.E. Stevenson runs a close third only because I'm reading The Young Clementina along with the DES list at the moment, and it's rather sad for much of the middle of the book
    • Molly Clavering deserves an honorable mention for Near Neighbours (1956), a charming novel in which "nothing much happens" but everything turns out satisfyingly well

    Best Needlework for Daydreaming Over as well as Potentially Actually Doing

    Best Old Song that's Suddenly Pertinent Again

  • Swatching for “Rae”

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    2047
    This looks like it will be a good gauge for this pullover, but the background color is a little too dark, clearly — it's a bit muddier in real life — for the pattern colors to show up well.  I suggested to Julia that the sandy-brown "Oregon Coast" (in the second pattern band) be moved to the main color, and another even-lighter creamy-white added in its place ("Oyster" perhaps), but Julia suggested simply switching "Oregon Coast" for the darker "Bittersweet" main color, so I will try that first.  (I would have to get another ball of the new main color anyway …)

    I can certainly tell that the plain rows in between the patterns are much looser in gauge, worse luck, especially when as here I didn't work the two-color rows as carefully as I should for the real thing, not securing the longer floats or being fussy about the joins between needles. (I still have the foolish notion that swatches are "wasteful" and meant to rip this one out and recycle the wool if it didn't work, which is why it's still on the needles!)  I do fully intend to throw period-pattern instructions to the wind and knit this pullover in the round, which would mean either consciously making my plain rows tighter — which resolution usually starts off well but quickly fades as one begins to knit "in the zone" — or using a different-sized needle, which would be a pain with my non-convertible circulars.  Sigh.

    On the bright side, the Palette, which was middling-soft just off the needles, has become almost cloudlike in its softness when lightly blocked.  I was impressed that Julia actually wanted a knitted garment at all — Miss "It's Too Scratchy"! — so this will be a good way to ease her into wearing wool instead of just admiring it on the hoof.

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