This is the snowflake pattern I chose for a gift exchange — it is a free pattern by Maggie Weldon. I used no.10 crochet cotton with a 6 steel hook, and starched it with 1:1 starch and water. Quite pretty, I thought!
-
I spent a few weeks recently on a bit of a quest, having fallen utterly, completely in love with this sampler. It is by Darlene O'Steen of "The Needle's Prayse, both of which names, still being a neophyte in the world of reproduction samplers, were new to me, and it is called "Virtue Outshines the Stars". Everything about it appeals to me, the softly-aged colors, the 17th-century florals, the meticulous symmetry, the verse — wonderful, all of it. But, alas, look at the date — 1984 — there are no copies of the chart to be had. In my wanderings, though, I discovered more of O'Steen's work, and more about her.The name of her design company is from a line in a 17th-century sonnet by John Taylor, "I write the needle's prayse (that never fades)". A needleworker from early on, she was fascinated especially by samplers, and found that in early examples quite a variety of stitches were used whereas by the mid-1800s or so many of them had fallen out of fashion, leaving mostly just the basic cross stitch. She began to study early samplers, from the 17th and 18th centuries, the intricacies of queen stitch, Smyrna cross, herringbone, rice stitch, and others that have not been forgotten but became less and less common in samplers. Naturally, she began to design new samplers, teaching samplers that incorporated these old stitches and motifs, and to give classes on them. I remember reading somewhere, though I can't now remember where, that she stitched all of her pieces in hand, without a frame or hoop, which she said compresses the stitches — I confess I have a grudging admiration for people who can do that and still keep the tension in their stitches even, as it isn't easy!
I found after not very long in my searches that O'Steen had had a bout of cancer and found it necessary a few years ago to retire from teaching and designing, and that now only a few of her more-recent charts are still easily available. Em-Li's still has a number of charts listed, and for half-price, and so I sent off a note (this was before things went south furlough-wise, and there was a generous wodge of cash tucked into a birthday card from my in-laws). Luckily for me, the one called on the website "Lady Brittany's Sampler," which is my next-favorite after "Virtue" —
was originally published five years earlier as simply "Floral Sampler by Darlene O'Steen," in the February 1996 issue of "Just Cross Stitch" magazine, as Em-Li's was unresponsive despite multiple attempts. I did manage to find a copy on Ebay, along with this unexpected tiny charmer —
The fact that it was signed by the designer was a bonus, but a very pleasing one, as the chart is charming. I was also very taken with the mounting, that it seems to float on the mat underneath — I later noticed that this is a favorite method of O'Steen's.
I also found a copy of the "Pomegranate Sampler" in the May/June 1996 issue of "Just Cross Stitch" — it wasn't on my list, but rather quickly found its way up there close to "Lady Brittany" (!).
This one is also intriguing, the "Strawberry Sampler," which might be on my list someday. You can see a definite family resemblance to the "Froth and Bubble" I finished last spring, except that the "Strawberry" is all backstitch, of all things.
I can't say that I love unreservedly every design of hers — whitework, for one, does not move me much, to my loss or my discredit perhaps, but there it is. I should love this one —
— but through no fault of O'Steen's, for some reason I find the little manikins (now called "boxers" for want of a more period description) almost universally irritating, perhaps for their frequently simpering smiles. The Escher-like self-shaking hands are curiously Victorian to my admittedly-inexperienced eye — though I have to say that the bottom half of this sampler is quite perfect! Well, it is probably a good thing that I am somewhat rigorous in my selections, as I can already see how very easy it would be to end up with more charts than I could stitch in a lifetime, a situation that others who have been doing counted stitch longer than I have are already familiar with, judging by the number of bloggers I've seen who are either selling off large portions of their stash or posting numerous photos of their shelves before and after re-organization!
O'Steen collected her years of study into a book called, with intrepid simplicity, The Proper Stitch. It has no motif charts, no alphabets, but instead meticulous stroke-by-stroke diagrams, not unlike a calligraphy book in fact, of how to make dozens of counted-thread stitches, divided by chapters into "families" according to their basic structure — cross stitches, straight, satin, buttonhole, and looped, with another chapter on drawn-thread techniques. The first edition also contained a complete learning-sampler chart, while the expanded edition has no less than three.
She is quite persistent — some might say fixated — on reversibility, on making a particular stitch a certain way so that it is "reversible," if not looking exactly the same on both front and back then at least looking presentable (my word for it) on each side, perhaps in the way that in knitting, stockinette stitch can be used with the knit side or the purl side as the "right" one. I might be a bit put off by her stringent perfectionism if she didn't sound such a generous person on the whole — and I admit that I certainly have noticed in my own needlework, both petit point and cross-stitch, that the direction the thread comes in from on the back can actually make a difference in the way the stitch looks from the front.
I discovered, working petit point carpets, that despite any number of expert stitchers saying that half-cross is the way you should work them in cotton floss, mine usually came out better-looking somehow when I worked them in continental (the recommended method for stitching petit point in wool). Why? I don't know about the physics of it, but there is something in the way I hold the needle, I guess, that just makes continental look better for me. If you look at these diagrams, you can see that the thread travels differently on the back as you go from one hole to the next, and so it comes to the front from a 45° angle in half-cross, but at almost half that in continental. This makes the stitch sit differently on the threads of the fabric — you can see how they "hug" the crossing a little more snugly in continental than they do in half-cross. The effect is even more obvious in a cross-stitch sampler, where the crosses often have empty threads next to them, with no other stitches to support them, as it were, the way they do in needlepoint. I suppose the effect is amplified in cross-stitch yet again by the fact that you make essentially two stitches, one on top of the other, first one stroke of the X and then the other, and so the opportunity for the thread to go at a different angle is doubled — the first stroke could come out at upper left and go back in at lower right, or out at lower right and in at upper left, depending on which direction you're going, and the second stroke opposite to either of those! and it could all make your head hurt after not very long and take all the fun out of things. But the key I think is consistency, in making your stitches the same way as often as possible, whether you work them the "right" way or another way. I haven't yet had the opportunity to work anything from O'Steen's book, but while I'm giving myself permission to ignore some of her strictures (waste knots, for one — I've just never done it that way and don't see the need to start now), I certainly appreciate the depth of her study and knowledge, and am interested and eager to learn something old that is new-to-me!(If you are tempted to buy a copy of O'Steen's book, and I suspect already that it's worth it for those interested in historical needlework stitches, I will tell you now do not pay such reprehensibly exorbitant prices as sellers on Ebay and Etsy have listed theirs, as you can find the revised and expanded edition, as of this writing at any rate, at Annie's for a mere $20.)
Just as a side note, in case anyone is interested in which three full-sampler charts are included in the book — I hadn't seen this information anywhere before getting my own copy — they are the "Proper Stitch Sampler" (presumably the chart from the first ed.), the "Tudor Rose Sampler," and the "Pinkes Sampler" (as in the flower, a favorite of the Elizabethans).
It was not unexpected, given the news of her illness and retirement, but still a sad confirmation to find an obituary for Darlene O'Steen, who died just a few weeks ago on October 22. May we remember her by her works.
-
The first motif on the "Quaker Virtues" sampler, finished this morning. I didn't find it as jarring as I thought, switching back to the soi-disant "Danish method" of working all half-crosses in a section, then going back to make them full crosses, so I probably could have worked on both at the same time, but as it happens the stitching on "Anna Ohman" is finished —
— and as I said, has been a pleasure every moment. I'm delighted with the color and the ThreadworX floss, and the linen from R&R Reproductions, and even more with all of these together. I "signed" it with my initials and the year in half-cross using a beige-brown strand — of I think DMC 840 — very similar to the background so that it would clearly not be an antique sampler but wouldn't jump out at you.
It has been good to have these calm, almost serene pieces to work on, these days. David was called back to work a few months ago, which was a great relief though of course these days few things feel particularly secure, and then this past Monday he was told that along with most of his department he is being furloughed again. It is what it is, of course, and we are all healthy, there is that.
I am still knitting, though admittedly not much at present, but when the weather turned suddenly cold last week, I decided it would be a good time for that Copilot cowl. I haven't got very far yet, as the rows are extraordinarily long, but the wool is deliciously soft, like knitting a cloud —
-
My math was off (there’s a shock!), so that the picture-frame mat I’m using to hold the Anna Ohman sampler is just not quite big enough at the top and bottom for me to work the whole thing. I had just removed it from the frame when I took this photo yesterday, before turning it sideways. As ever, I’m really delighted with this sampler, and find it very satisfying in spite of my mistakes. (Discovered late last night that what I’d planned would be a Golden-Spike moment with the two sides of the top line meeting in the middle, was off by one stitch, so I had to pick out the wrong half and re-do it. Now it’s more Lewis-and-Clark.)
I’m also auditioning some crochet snowflakes for a gift exchange next month. I like both of these, but am thinking that finer thread might be prettier —
-
I was going to shamelessly pinch an idea from Beyond Eden Rock and do an ABC of miscellanea, but found myself with multiple ideas for S (some of which I've redistributed to other letters — !) and nothing at all for Z, M-N-O, not even for E. And so rather than leave this post marooned in the Drafts folder while I flail about trying to think of what would work for D, I'll just go with what I've got …A = The “Anna Ohman” sampler continues to be a pleasure to work. (I have since gone back and put in the missing dot on the downward stroke of the R in år, Swedish for "year," florid though it is.)
B = This week's “Bookshelf Traveling for Insane Times” is one of our living-room bookcases. Most of the one on the right is science fiction and fantasy. Dedicated shelf-readers might spot in the other case my set of Laura Ingalls Wilder companionably next to my set of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturins, and the Ransomes on the shelf below. What you do not see is the Golden Lion, aka Hardy House, which has resided in front of these shelves on a pair of sawhorses for the past two years or so. It was a bit of a wrench to even decide it was time to give it away, let alone do so, but I realized that not only was I not able to devote the time to fixing it up that it deserves, but that it was keeping me from even beginning the project that had got me started in miniatures in the first place. Luckily for me, its departure was as gentle and sudden as its arrival three years ago. So — bless you, dear Lion, and fare well!
C = I asked David to put up some shelves in the closet in our front bedroom — which we continue to call a bedroom though in the twenty-some years we've lived here has never had a bed in it, but is our family/catch-all room. All three of our bedrooms still have the original 1929 built-in dressers, but we have added to the shelves that other owners have added, because, really, can you ever have too much storage space? I had suggested merely a plank resting on the existing 2x4s attached to the walls on either side, and another across the top of the window frame, but David either didn't believe me or knows me too well when I said that there would still be enough light from the window, and so he decided this was a better idea. Which it probably is, mind you, as I can put my boxes of embroidery floss (just about to perform a sort of meiosis into at least one more box) on the little shelves as the boxes are not heavy and will be quite easily reachable, with the much-larger shelf on top for heavier seasonal things. I have also made the promise to weed things out as they go into the closet …
J = I'm very much enjoying my re-read of the Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series — am on the fourth at the moment, The Mauritius Command.
[Jack] sighed, smiled, and was about to seal when Stephen walked in, looking mean and pinched. "Stephen," he said, "I have just written to Sophie. Have you any message?"
"Love, of course. And compliments to Mrs. Williams [Jack's mother-in-law, a tartar]."
"Lord," cried Jack, writing fast, "thank you for reminding me. I have explained about Lady Clonfert [a fellow-officer's wife who has begged passage on Jack's new command]," he observed, as he closed the letter up.
"Then I trust you kept your explanation short," said Stephen. "Circumstantial details destroy a tale entirely. The longer, the less credible."
"I merely stated that she did not appear at the rendezvous, and passed on."
"Nothing about three o'clock in the morning, the hocus-pocus at the inn, signals disregarded, the boat being made to row as though we were escaping from the Day of Judgement, and the lady ditched?" asked Stephen, with the unpleasant creaking noise that was his nearest approach to a laugh.
"What a rattle you are, to be sure," said Jack.
L = Two lace samples from an 1849 lace collar pattern that I'm trying to figure out from the both complex and somewhat cryptic period instructions. These are the two choices for edgings once the collar is knitted — I did these in crochet cotton at a much-larger gauge, just to get it worked out before I started the real thing. As it happened, I recognized both of them after a few repeats — the bottom one is a variation of the "Hearth and Home Lace" edging and the top one a variation of the "Clover Leaf Lace" found in Nancie Wiseman's Lace from the Attic, and probably numerous other Shetland edgings sources. I started knitting the collar in no.80 tatting cotton on the smallest needles I have, but got interrupted enough times by Julia wanting another length of the cotton for her elaborate bobbin lace project that I decided it would be better to just give her the rest of the spool and start again with a fresh one! which I haven't got hold of yet.
Q = I had already heard, around the internet and from the local needlework shop owner, that if you work cross-stitch with overdyed thread, you should do it in the "English style" and not the "Danish," which is making each X before going on to the next, instead of a line of //// as long as necessary then returning to work the \\\\. Why "English" and "Danish"? I don't know! but the reason is that because, unlike in the days when unevenly-dyed thread was something to be disguised, now we celebrate it, and making all of the strokes in one direction then coming back to finish the Xs tends to even out the variations, whereas making the whole X at once keeps them prominent. It seems that I have been working Danish-style all my life without knowing it (also "left-handed" with my right hand, though that's another story)! Because I wasn't sure if I could go back and forth between the two methods without driving myself crazy, or if concentrating hard on making sure that I was keeping to one or the other would spoil my enjoyment of both projects, I decided that a bit of prudence was in order and I will set the “Quaker Virtues” aside — but not very far — for the much-smaller "Anna Ohman".
S = Yeah, I also needed a knitting project, because the gauges are small enough on the samplers that it's easier for me to work them without my glasses or contacts. I can't watch television without my glasses, obviously, so having a knitting project means that I can watch the new season of the "Bake Off" or "The Good Place" while I knit! and save the samplers for the quiet hour after my usually-early breakfast, before anyone else gets up. The S is for Savannah cashmere/nylon/superwash merino, wonderfully soft, which is on its way to becoming the “Copilot” cowl.
T = Skillet Turkey Chili from Smitten Kitchen — impressively delicious for something so quick and so simple!
-
Probably most of us could use some de-stressors these days, so here's one to help start the week in a calm frame of mind — it was originally posted at DeStress Monday. Just "breathe with the shape" ten times or so — but it's better to relax and not count than to exacerbate your stress by wondering if that was the ninth breath or the eleventh!
-
There is a new-to-me meme hosted by Kate of Books are My Favourite and Best, called "6 Degrees of Separation", one of two that I came across unexpectedly the other day — this one has you take the book chosen by Kate, and link it in succession to five more books, and see where it takes you. (You don't have to read, review, or even have read them, just link them together by whatever occurs to you!) The given book for October is The Turn of the Screw, which I confess I've never read, but I think you cannot get a degree in English lit without knowing all about it, so I lighted on the governess theme and went to Jane Eyre, which I have read, multiple times in fact. It was happily part of a class I took in Victorian lit, in which we also read North and South, which was new to me but I liked very much. (Also the series, which I thought was very well done.) Gaskell reminded me in turn of Cranford, which I had started reading some years earlier but didn't get very far into before giving up, and then just a few months ago, after watching the series for the umpteenth time, I gave the book another chance — though I was aware that there are quite a lot of differences between the two — and really enjoyed it. For nos.5 and 6, I made quite a jump — I was looking at the cover illustration for Cranford, and I still don't know which came first, but I thought of bonnets and Laura Ingalls' perpetually-slipping bonnet ("Laura! Ma says you'll be as brown as an Indian!"), hence Little House on the Prairie, and of that fellow peering over the top of the fence, who reminded me immediately of Mr. Collins, hence Pride and Prejudice! (To be honest, I'm more bothered now, looking at the Cranford cover, about that chair leg! I'm sure it will give way under that poor girl at any moment!)
I have also chosen these particular covers because I find them both appealing and appropriate to the book! (Except for that wretched chair leg, of course — do let me fetch you another chair, my dear! …)
Steady progress on the "Quaker Virtues" sampler. I like the "Driftwood" taupe-y brown, but I'm not entirely convinced yet, so I've put the one letter in so that I can think about it for a while. A dark coffee-brown would be handsome, too.
But, oh, what is this?
I had ordered a piece of linen and the "Anna Ohman" sampler nearly a month ago, and shipment of the linen kept getting delayed — one of the reasons I decided to go ahead and start "Quaker Virtues" — but the linen arrived at last a few days ago, and looking at it and the chart, well, can you blame me? I braved the 25 minutes' drive to the nearest needlework shop, which I was doubly happy to find open, in these uncertain times, and spent a happy hour browsing the racks and chatting with the owner on the other side of the shop. The thread I was interested in trying, Classic Colorworks, didn't have enough in very many of the reds I liked, and so the owner recommended ThreadworX, which is not only a local company but comes in twenty-yard skeins, compared to Classic Colorworks' five. I was hoping for a Falu red, that deep red so often seen on Swedish country houses —
so was delighted to find one that comes very close, and goes beautifully with the café au lait supplémentaire of the linen.
This is just the first piece of floss! worked with one strand, as the linen is 40-count. Very small stitches —
— but, oh, isn't it pretty?!
The other bookish meme I came across, when I was replying to a comment on my "Swallows and Amazons" post last week, is the weekly "Bookshelf Traveling for Insane Times" — it was started by Judith of Reader in the Wilderness, and is now being run by Katrina of Pining for the West. The idea is to share a bookshelf or stack of books in your house, and write a bit about them (read Judith's two original posts here and here) — simply to share discussions about books literally and figuratively "un-hemmed in by spatial constraints or parameters". I suspect that we are not the only bookish household to find ourselves short of shelf space, and one day I was looking without quite seeing it at the fireplace we'd been so disappointed to realize, after the excitement and confusion of buying our first house, was only a dummy with a gas hook-up and no chimney, and I thought now, "well, nothing's burning in there, might as well put books in it!" It is clearly not ideal, having to stack books vertically, and it's even harder to dust than a proper shelf, but needs must ….
Most of our bookshelves have general themes — the travel books are all in one place (along with foreign languages), the science fiction, mysteries, knitting, and so on — but the fireplace, being a catch-all, didn't have any sort of plan, though as it turned out most of the books in it are history-related in some way, except for the D.E. Stevensons, the hardcover copies of which somehow found their way here from other places in the house. I guess we've been on a history kick lately, though I do spy a few novels in there, and the Shakespeare books that wouldn't fit on the Shakespeare shelves. Seeing this photo reminds me that I must finish The Wake — it was very atmospheric and dense, I remember from the first chapter or so, but required considerably more of me than I quite had at the time, not unlike W.G. Sebald.
-
A sampler of a thousand stitches begins with a single floral motif. Or something like that. I suspect it's considerably more than a thousand stitches, actually — this is a week's stitching, an hour or so most mornings, and there is still the rest of the "flowers" and the vase and quite a lot of curlicues to go, in just the one motif! Not that I'm complaining, mind — it's very peaceful and meditative, especially with the single color. I decided to use the DMC 931 since there is a good chance that I will not be able to find thirty-some skeins from the same dye-lot, so that any variations thereof will actually be a good thing.
I forgot to add Molly Clavering to my summer reading — looking for something cozy, my thoughts naturally turned to D.E. Stevenson, but as I knew there was a group read of Amberwell that I would join, I thought I would fill the gap until then with Clavering's Mrs. Lorimer's Family, which I enjoyed as much this time as I did the first. I also found out that there was a recent-ish reprint from Greyladies of Clavering's Near Neighbours, and so I splurged on a copy. Opinions on the DES list vary as to the similarities between Clavering and Stevenson (who were in fact friends and neighbors, as well as contemporaries), but I enjoyed Near Neighbours thoroughly, and thought it on a par with the best of Stevenson, with its gentle intelligence and wit woven throughout a plot in which "nothing much happens" but which one closes at the end with a smile of satisfaction that everything has come out all right.
It occurred to me yesterday after writing here that the Ransomes were on my "Mount To-Be-Read" list and that since there were six of them I might have scaled the first peak, as it were — and so it proved to be, as the first goal is twelve books and Great Northern? made my total fourteen! I took the liberty of making a new badge, with a less time-sensitive title. (The original Mount TBR challenge is at Bev Hankin's blog My Reader's Block.) -
I was sitting here some weeks ago thinking suddenly, I need to read more, and so I pondered for a while what to choose. I decided that it was time, after a great many years, to reread the Narnia books, and though I finished Prince Caspian with a sigh of pleasure and my hand was reaching, metaphorically, for Dawn Treader, it occurred to me that there were six volumes of Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" series on my shelf still utterly unread. I had picked up Swallows and Amazons at our beloved local children's bookstore, and enjoyed it very much, enough that when the owner decided to retire and was selling off her stock at half-price, I went over and bought all of the rest of the series that she had — and yet, there they sat on the shelf, for years. And so I thought now that they would be just the thing right now, in these difficult times when one wants children's stories with plenty of adventure but the assurance of a safe homecoming at the end. It had been long enough that I thought I should read the first book again, just to get the sail filled, as it were, and I enjoyed it just as much as the first time around. But I have to say that, while the first book is certainly good, Ransome really hit his stride as he went on. He clearly knows his stuff, both boats and the Lake District in which many of the stories are set, and better still, he has that rather rare ability to write from a child's perspective that makes you forget that he isn't one himself — as I say, I love the Narnia stories, but it is always clear that they are being told to you by an adult, where Ransome reminds me quite a lot in this respect of Elizabeth Enright's Melendy family series, a different sort of story but with that same feeling of immediacy, of being immersed in it yourself, this is what it's like.I read, in rapid succession, Swallowdale, Winter Holiday, Pigeon Post, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, Secret Water, and Great Northern?, coming suddenly to the end of my collection with a sigh of dismay. They are all, of course, boat-related but the focus is on different things in each, and new characters come in here and there, so that each book is quite different — especially, I thought, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, as throughout the series there are adventures and risky situations of course, but, perhaps because I'm a parent now and long past being the same age as the Walker children, the very real danger they are in at being literally swept out to sea was more than unsettling. (This one contains the only mention in the whole series of one of the children being seasick, and the physical reality of it comes as quite a shock.) But, as I say, I enjoyed the series immensely, and can see why so many readers still think of them as beloved favorites. I am amazed only at the fact that I had never heard of them before!
(The photograph is a still from the 2016 movie version of the first book. I haven't seen it — I found out about it not long after I finished the book the second time, but after reading in reviews that the writers felt it necessary to insert a completely new subplot about real spies, I thought, "oh no!" Hearing that Susan has been turned into a whiny bumbler who can't even manage to cook a fish made me shriek — apparently Peter has also been made "more real". Why, why, why take classics that generations of children have loved passionately, and change them?? Oh, well — it looks beautiful, at least. Sigh.)
The D.E. Stevenson list is reading Amberwell, and this time around I volunteered to lead a section, offering a summary of each chapter and some discussion questions. Mine turned out to be quite early in the book, chapters 4-6, which I estimate to be taking place around 1930. The Ayrton family live in a fine old estate on the west coast of Scotland — the story begins a few centuries earlier with the building of the house and the establishment of the Ayrtons, but by chapter 4 the main characters of the "present day" have been introduced, Mr. and Mrs. Ayrton, his two sons from his first marriage, and three daughters from this second, which daughters are all still under ten and in the care of their Nannie. One of the central events of this section, and a recurring motif in the story, is the dedication of Mr. Ayrton's contribution to the estate — others in the generations before him were a walled garden, a bowling-green, a stone terrace, and so on — Mr. Ayrton has decided upon a fountain with the statue of a little mermaid. On the day of the ceremonial Turning on the Fountain, the girls are sitting on rugs on the bowling-green in their best dresses and the boys in their kilts, waiting for the festivities, and Nannie is nearby keeping an eye on them, and knitting. This seems too good and opportunity to pass up, to choose something for my "Knitting with DES" virtual knit-along — so what might Nannie be knitting, I asked myself.
This is a bit later than ca.1930, by about a decade, but how could I possibly resist three little girls in matching boleros? and just the right ages! This is in the Bestway 749 booklet, this pattern available for a small fee from FabForties.co.uk (who seems to have changed her name recently from The Vintage Knitting Lady, perhaps to specialize in the 1940s?).
(The house in the photo above, by the way, is Inchmarlo, not on the west coast as in the story but in Aberdeenshire. My Scottish-immigrant ancestors worked there, according to the 1840 census! The descriptions of Stevenson's Amberwell and a number of the dust-jacket illustrations in the book's long publishing history remind me of Inchmarlo, and so I was delighted to find this photo available for Creative Commons use at Geograph.uk — this one is by Stanley Howe.)
"Swallows and Amazons" leads quite naturally to a grown-up sea adventure, and I picked up Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander after many years — too long! I've only just finished the second in the series, Post Captain, enjoying every moment. O'Brian's prose is so complex yet wonderfully fluid that it is a pleasure to read, and his flashes of wit and deft characterizations are sheer genius.
(The photo — from Wikimedia Commons — is the stern of the Surprise built for the 2003 movie and now at the Maritime Museum of San Diego.)
It's been too hot lately for snuggling-under-a-blanket reading, so I just made one instead, and gave it away as a house-warming present — it is the simple-but-effective "Modern Granny Stitch Blanket" by Jess of Make & Do Crew. I used the recommended Lion Brand "Heartland" yarn, in "Glacier Bay", "Hot Springs", "Olympic", "Mount Rainier", and "Kings Canyon" (for a lark, try guessing which is which! I think I got only one right).
I ran out of "Olympic" just a little over two rows short — there had been only one skein of it in the store, so I bought a sixth color but decided that I'd risk looking for another skein somewhere else. And rather surprisingly, because it's 100% acrylic and therefore produced by recipe that isn't subject to the whims and eccentricities of natural fibers, the dye lots of "Olympic" at least are noticeably, even disappointingly, different. There is much less of the black in the second skein, leaving the color rather dull and flat — oh, well.
I'm not generally a huge fan of acrylics, but this is quite pleasant to work with, and I must say it makes yummy tassels!
-
I've long had a soft spot for the Quakers, I guess ever since reading Steal Away Home — maybe in third or fourth grade — in which two runaway slave boys are helped on their journey north along the Underground Railroad by, among others, generous Quakers, and from Jessamyn West's Except for Me and Thee which I read in high school, I think, coming away from the story not only with one of my early book crushes (after Tom Sawyer!) but also with a growing respect for a religious community that from its earliest days gave its women a place beside its men, not below them, that not only preached the values of tolerance, peace, and integrity but practiced them. It was an easy decision for me to choose a nearby Quaker college when I finally went back to get my degree, and although it was not a "religious" college at all, those values were nevertheless very much in evidence. When I first started becoming intrigued by antique cross-stitch samplers last summer, one of the first I saw was this "Quaker Virtues" by ByGone Stitches, and it spoke to me deeply, on many levels. There is the Quaker connection, of course, but I also loved its jigsaw-puzzle-like blend of small and large figures — that so often look like Scandinavian knitting motifs, another deep pleasure for me — and the intertwining of letters and words with the motifs, words that would speak to me deeply with or without the Quaker associations. I bought two sampler patterns at about the same time, and started with the "Froth and Bubble", then got sidetracked by the "Peace to My Friend" — but lately, stitching of a summer evening on a little freebie chart that will soon be finished —
which is by Beth Twist — my thoughts turned once again to the "Quaker Virtues". I had bought the linen at the same time as that for "Froth and Bubble" but held off on getting the threads, and when I started planning in earnest this week, I remembered why. The recommended threads are overdyed cotton flosses by Gentle Arts or by Classic Colorworks, both of which are extraordinarily beautiful — the downside is that the chart says you will need 38 skeins of the main color and 3 of the accent one, and 41 skeins of overdyed thread tip into three figures in one's shopping basket, I was rather aghast to see. Even with David back at work (huzzahs and relief all around), that's a lot to spend on thread — even on the assumption that 38 is probably a generous estimate. So I've wistfully but realistically set aside Classic Colorworks and Gentle Arts for smaller projects, and have been auditioning the more budget-friendly DMC —
Their "Antique Blue" is I think my absolute favorite DMC color family, so the 931 is a sentimental favorite, and I'm sure would be very handsome for this chart with the sand-y 3782, though I'm also really liking the way that the slightly-more periwinkle "blue gray" 161 plays with the taupe-y 07 — and there is a possibility of overdying at home, with my one bottle of RIT "Evening Blue," carefully saved in this 2020 shortage. (Would it stretch to 38 skeins?!)
And, if you are wondering how a group that promotes simplicity and plainness can inspire designs full of such near-giddy abandon as the sampler above, you are not alone. I had to laugh when I pulled out the "Virtues" chart again this week, that after months of looking at antique Quaker samplers, how "modern" this one looks to me now! Like most sampler styles, different regions evolved different arrangements and styles of design, some quite distinct from others.
The earliest-yet-known Quaker sampler is this one by Elizabeth Pim, dated in different places 1729, 1731, and apparently 1750. The Pims were a noted Quaker family in what is now County Laois in central Ireland, and Elizabeth may have been associated with the Quaker school there at Mountmellick, or simply worked hers in the then-emerging Quaker style. Samplers were originally simply models for future reference, so it is not surprising that Elizabeth worked hers on different pieces of linen at different times, then sewed them together. Interestingly, the distinctive scattering of initials of family and friends is already in evidence on her second piece.
Eliza Swinborn's sampler of 1803 is already a "typical" Quaker sampler, with its border of half-motifs surrounding full motifs in the center, with scattered initials. The motifs of paired birds, swans, flower sprays, and eight-pointed stars, because of their association with the Quaker virtues of equality, community, simplicity, and peace, would quickly become used widely by Quaker teachers instructing their students.
The Ackworth and Westtown Quaker schools, in West Yorkshire and Pennsylvania respectively, took the alphabet-and-motifs sampler combination and went in different directions with it. Ackworth samplers were typically a selection of half-motifs around the edge of the sampler, with full motifs in the middle, and like Elizabeth Pim's with the initials of school-friends or family scattered in the spaces between motifs. I don't know if it was the girl's choice or the teacher's, but Ackworth samplers are found in both monochrome and polychrome, as these by Rebecca Blake in 1809 and Ann Grimshaw a few years later in 1818 —
(Nobody online wants to venture that the two Grimshaw girls were related, but as a genealogist that seems to me an interesting tidbit worth researching!)
Although some Westtown students worked samplers very much in the Ackworth style, some of the teachers went in a different direction and emphasized the alphabet with a plain set of letters like Rachel Ellis's above. (Perhaps this was for the younger girls, just learning to stitch?)
Susanna Furman's 1831 sampler has a less "typical" arrangement, but still shows the influence of the Quaker tradition with its central wreath of birds and a number of floral motifs that are found in other Quaker samplers. She may have been from the Delaware River Valley.
It was not a Quaker school, but you can see the relationship between Quaker samplers and the style that developed at the Bristol Orphanage. This one by Emma Sandford in 1867 is typical of the Bristol Orphanage style, with its lines of non-stop alphabets at the top that gradually decrease in size — sometimes surrounding a motif in the middle, sometimes not as the stitcher chose — then a closely-packed assortment of borders and motifs in the lower section. (Bristol Orphanage samplers were always hemmed, as the goal was for the girls, and sometimes the boys, to learn to sew and mark neatly and efficiently, in order to obtain good jobs in service to support themselves honestly.)
So you can see that the unusual octagonal shape and closely-packed assortment of motifs of the "Quaker Virtues" sampler give it a much more modern air than traditional Quaker samplers, but it bears a very close resemblance to them, especially to the Ackworth style!
(Sources for much of this historical information comes from here, here, here, and here.)
A Bluestocking Knits 