A Bluestocking Knits

“Historical Knit Challenge””, Historical Costuming, Historical Knitting, Knitting for Men, Mittens, Gloves, and Hats

An Ytre Norskøya Hat, ca.1700 — Part 2 (Knitting)

Published by

Bluestocking

on

28th June 2016

Without having the original Ytre Norskøya hat in hand, or at least a first-generation photo, it's difficult to do much more than improvise the shaping, and so this isn't really a pattern so much as a guideline. You will need to adjust the shaping both to accommodate your yarn gauge and to fit the wearer, anyway.

A little less than 40 sts are visible in the photograph of the original hat, so there would be about twice that in the knitting. A circumference of 50cm at "1.6-1.8 stitches per cm" works out to 80-90 sts total, but remember that this measurement is after fulling.

As for shaping, Vons-Comis says that the stitches are "decreased regularly at two points in the cap which lie directly opposite one another", which is certainly how it looks in the photograph, where there are no decreases visible at all, even when by the shape of the crown they must surely be there! It might be wishful thinking on my part, but it looks to me as though in the last few cm there really are some decreases spread (evenly?) across a decrease round, so for my reconstruction, I've used a slight modification of the round-toe shaping I used on my blue Smeerenburg hat. There certainly might also be some shaping in the now-damaged parts.

I am a bit puzzled, I admit, by this description of only two shaping points lying directly opposite each other, since in my mind's eye this makes something more like a garrison cap, though perhaps the fulling and subsequent wearing of the Norskøya one makes it more rounded. I decided to shape my version more according to the general shape in the photograph, than to the description —

In full, Vons-Comis’s paragraphs about the cap are as follows (all question marks in the original):

The deceased [in grave 579] wore a woollen cap on his head (fig. 20.3). This is a single thickness (red?) brown cap with a turned-up brim, with light brown (originally white?) and dark blue stripes. The cap is 26 cm long including the 5cm turned-up brim. The circumference of the cap at the junction from crown to brim is 50cm, with the greatest circumference, 60cm, reached at the lower end of the brim.

Knitting probably began at the lower edge, by casting on stitches with (red?) brown wool and knitting one row in plain stitch. After this, two rows in purl stitch were knitted alternately light brown (white?) and dark blue. There are 1.5 sts per cm, and 4 rows per cm (table 1) [which is a chart of the various twists, plies, thread counts, and colors of the Grave 579 textiles]. As the brim is felted it is not entirely certain whether the yarns are (Z-?) plied or not. The number of stitches is decreased regularly at two points in the cap which lie directly opposite one another.

After 5cm, one round was knitted in purl with (red?) brown, thinner wool. Then the cap was continued in the same colour using plain stitch, so that when the brim was turned up only plain stitch would be visible on the outside. Yarn composed of two 8-twisted threads which were not plied, or hardly plied, was used for the crown. The count also differs: 1.6-1.8 stitches per cm and 3 rows per cm. The cap is slightly felted inside. Some damage seems to have occurred in the coffin as a result of either the effects of the decay of the corpse or soil conditions. No patches or darns were discovered.

I have used Paton's Classic Wool because it was to hand and is 100% wool, so fulls easily. After over 250 years in the ground, the colors of the original cap have apparently browned considerably, and Vons-Comis suspects though is not quite sure that its original main color is red, with dark blue and probably white (now light brown) rounds on the brim — Classic Wool's "Cognac Heather" is a brownish red, which may at least roughly substitute. I chose "New Denim" as a mid-range blue, and "Natural Mix" as a compromise between the original "white?" and the aged light brown. At 20 sts per 10 cm, the gauge is finer, though, than the 15-18 sts of the original wools. I have not tried to use two different weights of wool, as in the original cap.

You will probably want to work a swatch in your chosen yarn and full it, to get an idea of how much the knitting will shrink, though I did not.

By the way, I seem to be using "hat" and "cap" interchangeably. Technically there is a difference, but it still isn't a simple matter to place the Smeerenburg/Ytre Norskøya ones on one side of the divide or the other. "A hat has a brim, a cap doesn't, or only a bill" = this is a hat (though some of the other Rijksmuseum ones are therefore caps). "A cap is usually made of [some] soft material, whereas a hat is grander" = this is a cap. "A cap fits closely to the head" = this is a hat. I don't know!

Ytre Norskøya Cap 1

The finished dimensions of the original cap — after fulling, mind — are 5cm for the height of the brim, then 21cm from there to the top of the crown, 26cm total, and 60 cm circumference at the cast-on edge, narrowing to 50 cm at the join between the brim and the beginning of the crown, though it is not clear if this is through shaping of the knitting or stretching of the fulled cap.

Use slightly larger needles than usual for the yarn, to allow for shrinkage later.

Cast on 80-90 sts plus 10, or desired number (also plus 10, to allow for slight shaping on the brim) using either the long-tail or Old Norwegian cast-on, in red wool. Join for working in the round.

Work 1 round in red.

Work 2 rounds in natural in reverse st st, then work 2 rounds in blue in reverse st st. Rep these 4 rnds 3 times more, or until brim measures about 5 cm; at the same time, dec 5 sts evenly on 5th rnd and 10th rnd. Cut natural and blue yarns, and work on in red.

In red, work either 2 rnds reverse st st or 4 rnds garter st. This completes the brim.

Work in st st. The decreases in the original are apparently made at beg of rnd and at midpoint of rnd. Work for about 16 or 17 cm, decreasing occasionally as desired at first, then more rapidly, to make a pleasing shape, until the piece will be about 24 cm after fulling.

In order to have the shaping start rather gradually, before starting the crown shaping proper, I worked [dec 4 evenly around circumference, work 4 rnds st st] twice, with the second dec round offset, so that the second set of decreases came roughly centered between the first set.

I used the following crown decrease:

Rnd 1: K5, K2tog, rep to end [substituting K1 for K2tog 4 times because I had 74 sts total].
K 5 rnds.
Next rnd: K4, K2tog, rep to end.
K 4 rnds.
Next rnd: K3, K2tog, rep to end.
K 3 rnds.

and on in this manner until there were 11 sts rem, the previous rnd being all K2tog — then K2 tog twice, K3tog (why? I don't know!), K2tog twice, then cut the yarn and draw through the rem 5 sts.

This made a fairly similar crown shaping, though as I said, without having the original in hand or photographs from different angles, I'm a bit puzzled as to its shaping.

I fulled mine in the sink, since the stitches in the original cap are quite visible, and it is easier to stop when the fulling is "done" if you can see it. I did decide to safety-pin the brim to the body of the cap to keep it from rolling during this process, though, not having enough experience with it to know if it would lie flat — this worked pretty well, and it stayed flat without markedly-obvious "waves" at the pin placement points (though these are a little more visible on the purl side of the brim, as in the photo just above!). My version did shrink a bit more — to the point of obscuring the stitches, I mean — on the crown than on the brim. Interestingly, the brim shrank only a fraction of an inch — I noticed this as I was fulling it and worked at it a bit more than the crown, though as to whether this slow shrinkage is because of the different dyes in the wool, or because I'd pinned it up, or some other reason, I've no idea.

Dimensions before fulling: brim 3", total height 17", width 12". Dimensions after fulling: brim 2.75", total height 10" (with brim folded), width (just above brim) 9.75".

Let me add my praises, by the way, to the numerous ones already being sung in favor of Classic Wool's feltability! It has a lovely, rather velvety texture after this mild fulling, and would have a bit more body (which this particular hat does need) after a bit more time in the hot bath, perhaps, but the ease of the process and the resulting hand of the fabric make up for that.

On the whole, I think this a fairly reasonable reproduction, though obviously not a strict one, of the original Grave 579 cap, with the caveats I've mentioned above. Taking into account the differences in wool and in the unpredictable results from fulling — mine is definitely more splayed towards the bottom than the original! — I'm quite pleased.

The Project: an Ytre Norskøya hat, based on the knitted hat from Grave 579 on that island in the Svalbard archipelago
Year or Period: ca.1700
Materials: 1 skein Paton's Classic Wool worsted (100g/3.5 oz.; approx. 192m/210 yds.) in "Cognac Heather" (MC), with less than 15g each in "Natural Mix" (CC1) and "New Denim" (CC2); US8 needles
Hours to complete: about a month of not-particularly-dedicated knitting, plus a few days for fulling/drying time (18 May-27 June 2016)
How historically accurate is it? fairly accurate considering the modern materials, but the lack of better photos of the original garment is a handicap
Sources/Documentation: "Kleren maken de man: zeventiende- en achttiende-eeuwse kleding van Spitsbergen" by S.Y. Vons-Comis (pp.97-118 in the book Walvisvaart in de gouden eeuw: opgravingen in Spitsbergen, ed. by Louwrens Hacquebord and Wim Vroom, De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1988); "Seventeenth century garments from grave 579, Zeeuwse Uitkijk, Spitsbergen" by Sandra Vons-Comis (pp.175-186 in “Textiles in Northern Archaeology”, NESAT III : Textile Symposium in York, 6-9 May, 1987); "Workman’s clothing or burial garments? Seventeenth and eighteenth century clothing remains from Spitsbergen" by Sondra Vons-Comis in "Smeerenburg Seminar" (Rapportserie, Norsk Polarinstitut, no.38, Oslo 1987), also containing the paper "Textiles from Danskøya" by Ingrid Lütken, plus others noted in the previous post
Historical Knitting, Knitting for Men, Mittens, Gloves, and Hats

An Ytre Norskøya Cap, ca.1700 — Part 1 (Researching)

Published by

Bluestocking

on

26th June 2016

While I was doing some online research about the Smeerenburg caps I wrote about a few weeks ago, I came across a pattern for one called a "Smeernberg" cap, which the author said was Swedish. Well, of course I was intrigued, not only for the historical knitting and the connection to Smeerenburg, but to the fact that it was said to be Swedish.

The page was pretty old — one version of it was in fact defunct — but with the help of a member of the HistoricKnit list I'm on, I sent an e-mail off to the author, Maeve Kane, who responded, as we used to say, "by return of post" and generously provided me with no less than four PDFs of her sources.

Spitsbergen is the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, some distance off the northwestern coast of mainland Norway. It was first used as a whaling base in the 17th and 18th centuries by the Dutch and the Danes, then for coal mining by the Russians and as a fishing base for various northern countries. For centuries, the whole archipelago was known as Spitsbergen (from the Dutch spits + bergen, "pointed mountains"), but after control was ceded to Norway in the 1920s, it was re-named Svalbard (sval + barð, an old Icelandic name for the place probably meaning "cold edge/coast") , and after 1969 the name Spitsbergen referred only to the largest island in the group.

Smeerenburg, the first and largest of the whaling settlements in the area, was on a point of Amsterdam Island, in the NNW corner of the archipelago. It was founded by Danish and Dutch whalers in 1619 and in its heyday had sixteen or seventeen buildings, including a fort, with cobbled alleys so that the men could keep their feet dry — an important consideration in a place where the summer temperatures average 4 to 6° Celsius (39-43° F) and polar winds with it. This 1639 painting by Cornelis de Man, "The Whale-Oil Refinery near the Village of Smeerenburg", was not painted from life, but is supposed to give a representative if somewhat clean picture of the settlement in its prime. Late-Victorian idealism gave the settlement a population in the tens of thousands, though the reality is more likely to have been at best about two hundred.

Here is another, closer map —

(Bree is Norwegian for glacier [breen = the glacier], and øya is "island".)

Another whaling settlement was about fifty km to the northwest on Ytre Norskøya, which settlement was founded around the same time as Smeerenburg by a rival whaling company. By the time it was abandoned fifty years later, there were at least 165 whalers buried in its cemetery.

(Click on the speaker symbol in the Google Translate box here to hear how to pronounce "Ytre Norskøya"!)

In this photo, seen from the south —

the settlement and burial sites are at the foot of the steep rise. As much of the area is now national parkland, visitors can still go to Ytre Norskøya and here is another photo, from the Norwegian Polar Institute —

facing the south (towards Indre or "inner" Norskøya) with the gravesite area outlined in yellow. Tourists are asked, I hope needless to say, to not land or walk in that particular spot because of the fragility of the graves, nor to remove anything.

From 1979 to 1981, archaeological excavations were carried out at Smeerenburg and Ytre Norskøya, where about a hundred and 150 graves respectively were found, those on Ytre Norskøya at least in danger of being eroded by the sea. Due to the polar conditions, much of the clothing in the graves was very well-preserved, and in one of the Ytre Norskøya graves, numbered 579, was found a man wearing these clothes —

Many of the whalers' garments were remarkable for the sheer number of patches and repairs made to them, and this particular jacket is singled out by more than one researcher for that very reason. It's a poignant reminder of not only the ingenuity and tidiness of the whalers, but also of their distance from home.

In full, Vons-Comis’s paragraphs about the cap are as follows (all question marks in the original):

The deceased wore a woollen cap on his head (fig. 20.3). This is a single thickness (red?) brown cap with a turned-up brim, with light brown (originally white?) and dark blue stripes. The cap is 26 cm long including the 5cm turned-up brim. The circumference of the cap at the junction from crown to brim is 50cm, with the greatest circumference, 60cm, reached at the lower end of the brim.

Knitting probably began at the lower edge, by casting on stitches with (red?) brown wool and knitting one row in plain stitch. After this, two rows in purl stitch were knitted alternately light brown (white?) and dark blue. There are 1.5 sts per cm, and 4 rows per cm (table 1) [which is a chart of the various twists, plies, thread counts, and colors of the Grave 579 textiles]. As the brim is felted it is not entirely certain whether the yarns are (Z-?) plied or not. The number of stitches is decreased regularly at two points in the cap which lie directly opposite one another.

After 5cm, one round was knitted in purl with (red?) brown, thinner wool. Then the cap was continued in the same colour using plain stitch, so that when the brim was turned up only plain stitch would be visible on the outside. Yarn composed of two 8-twisted threads which were not plied, or hardly plied, was used for the crown. The count also differs: 1.6-1.8 stitches per cm and 3 rows per cm. The cap is slightly felted inside. Some damage seems to have occurred in the coffin as a result of either the effects of the decay of the corpse or soil conditions. No patches or darns were discovered.

Presumably the brim is turned down in this photo, as the reverse side of the knitting is clearly visible, whereas when worn it would have been turned up as Vons Comis describes. (Note, by the way, that the drawing of the cap and the photograph of it show rather different proportions.)

Lars Vig Jensen dates the jacket found in grave 579 as ca.1700, so presumably the wearer’s cap would be the same. Jensen also notes that “No specific nationality can be assigned to any of the three cemeteries discussed [Likneset, on the Vasahalvøya peninsula of Albert I Land, Ytre Norskøya, and Jensenvatnet on Danskøya]; however, the graves must represent a majority of whalers from the Dutch and German provinces together with a minority of personnel from England and Scandinavia…. The textile finds should be generally characterised as being Northwest European” (p.52, emphasis in original).

Maeve also mentioned that Vons-Comis describes the 579 cap as single-knit, but at the time of her research she’d also found a similar cap with a double-knit brim in the Skokloster Castle collection, though the image doesn’t seem to be online now (http://emuseumplus.lsh.se/eMuseumPlus). I suspect that Maeve’s 2006 pattern was a mash-up of a number of descriptions of whalers’ caps, and that perhaps the “Swedish” description was simply a mistake. (Presumably there may have been a Swede or two among the whalers at some time or another, but there is apparently no surviving identification on any of the hundreds of burials except I think two, so really no way of knowing the nationality of any of the burials anyway.) Maeve’s version of the cap has the purled brim on the outside, where Vons-Comis clearly says of the 579 cap that the turned-up brim had the “plain” stitches on the outside – in other words, the stockinette stitch was reversed at the turn-up point. It also looks, from the drawing of the cap in Vons-Comis 1987, that Maeve’s version has a different proportion of brim-to-crown, as hers is about one-to-one and the drawing has the upper crown about 2-3 times the height of the brim. I did find a report from a “Smeerenburg Seminar” (Rapportserie, Norsk Polarinstitut, no.38, Oslo 1987) — containing, among other things, another paper by Vons-Comis, titled “Workman’s clothing or burial garments? Seventeenth and eighteenth century clothing remains from Spitsbergen”, and “Textiles from Danskøya” by Ingrid Lütken in a similar vein. But unfortunately, as I said, it doesn’t seem that the Ytre Norskøya clothing has been discussed since 1990 or so.

So, reluctantly, I must venture that the "Smeernberg" cap is unlikely to be Swedish at all, and that while the construction of the reconstruction (!) is interesting and thoroughly attractive, and certainly produces a cap that could have been worn in the period, it does not actually look like the cap from grave 579 or even any of the other Smeerenburg/Ytre Norskøya finds — this may very well be why the webpage with the more extensive version of the pattern does no longer exist.

It may be possible at a later date to learn more about this particular cap. It isn't at all clear from the research papers where the cap from grave 579 is now, but the Norwegian Polar Institute writes, "Any preserved whalers' outfits and other textiles from the [Smeerenburg and Ytre Norskøya] graves were taken to the Netherlands and are today a part of the Smeerenburg Collection, large parts of which were returned to Svalbard in 2005. Today parts of the collection are on display at the Svalbard Museum," so presumably it is either at the Rijksmuseum or back at Svalbard.

The reason, by the way, that these clothes are so interesting to researchers is that very few actual garments of ordinary people survive from this period. Paintings are all very well and good for seeing how clothing looked, but they are no substitute for seeing how the seams are constructed, or what kind of fabric was used, or how something was mended!

Sources

Map of Albert I Land.

"The history of place names in the Arctic" by Oddveig Øien Ørvoll, at the Norwegian Polar Institute.

"Kleren maken de man: zeventiende- en achttiende-eeuwse kleding van Spitsbergen" by S.Y. Vons-Comis (pp.97-118 in the book Walvisvaart in de gouden eeuw: opgravingen in Spitsbergen, ed. by Louwrens Hacquebord and Wim Vroom, De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1988).

"Seventeenth century garments from grave 579, Zeeuwse Uitkijk, Spitsbergen" by Sandra Vons-Comis (pp.175-186 in “Textiles in Northern Archaeology”, NESAT III : Textile Symposium in York, 6-9 May, 1987).

"Spitsbergen" at Wikipedia.

Map of Spitsbergen from Trichinella.org.

"The train oil cookery of the Amsterdam chamber of the Northern Company at Smeerenburg" painting (1639) by Cornelis de Man (1639), based on a painting of a "Dansk hvalfangststation" (Danish whaling station) by ABR Speeck (1634), via Wikipedia.

"Whalers's [sic] clothing from a 17th-18th century cemetery at Likneset, Northwest Svalbard" by Lars Vig Jensen (pp.36-55 in “Acta Borealia” 7:2, 1990).

"Workman’s clothing or burial garments? Seventeenth and eighteenth century clothing remains from Spitsbergen" by Sondra Vons-Comis in "Smeerenburg Seminar" (Rapportserie, Norsk Polarinstitut, no.38, Oslo 1987), also containing the paper "Textiles from Danskøya" by Ingrid Lütken.

"Ytre Norskøya" (English) and "Ytre Norskøya" (Norwegian), at Wikipedia.

"Ytre Norskøya" and "Smeerenburg" by Øystein Overrein (ed.), Jørn Henriksen, Bjørn Fossli Johansen, and Kristin Prestvold, at the Cruise Handbook for Svalbard from the Norwegian Polar Institute.

Photo of "Ytre Norskøya seen from the south" by Erlend Bjørtvedt, at Wikipedia.no. (The caption says that the settlement and burial sites are scattered across the coastal plain nearest the viewer, with the lookout point to the right. It is not clear to me why the so-called look-out point would be on a much lower place than most of the rest of the island, as well as facing the other islands instead of the sea, but there it is.)
Dollhouses, Miniature Needlework, Shawls and Scarves

Minis, Minis, and Yarn

Published by

Bluestocking

on

24th June 2016

As a consolation for David being gone so long this past spring, I had treated myself to two petit-point cushion kits from Frances Peterson, whose miniature carpets I have long admired, even before I joined the Petitpointers list and discovered that she is a member. I was a bit daunted by the thought of working at 40 stitches per inch — since the finest I have done before this is 28-count! — but they are so beautiful that I thought I'd try a cushion, to get my feet wet, as it were. And since I blocked my Shirvan carpet Wednesday, I felt entirely justified yesterday in starting one of these!

This design is "Repeating Diamonds" and as it happens it was a good choice for a novice, as the pattern is quite logical and I could just concentrate on the itti-bittiness of it. I had to take out my contacts and use my Super-Microscopic Up-Close Vision^TM, but aside from feeling like the needle was the size of a telephone pole, it went very smoothly. (I will say, though, to anyone who is tempted to work at this gauge in cross-stitch, well, as Jeeves would say gently, I couldn't advise it. It's partly the gauge itself, and partly the way the twists in the silk lie nicely in one direction, and not-so-nicely in another I suspect — it just didn't work, and then it took me twice as long to pick out the two strands I did in cross-stitch as it did to work them in the first place. And as it turned out, at this scale the funny dashed 45-deg. lines read much better than they logically should.)

I worked the needlepoint all in one day, despite having to stop for boring things like getting dressed and going to the market — which is not so much a compliment to my stitching as it is to Frances's design, which is a happy blend of detail and simplicity.

Here's the back, if you're interested —

but my focus was more on security than on neatness, since it would be a cushion after all, and no chance of flipping it over to look at the back, after it was sewn up. I actually don't really know if this is considered messy or not, but I have seen some photos on the list that you can hardly tell back from front, they are so meticulous!

The only modifications I made were to add two extra lines of plain border all around, since I wanted a rather bigger cushion than one inch — though to be honest, at 40 stitches per inch, four stitches don't increase it that much — and to sew on the "piping" (which is perle cotton) instead of gluing it, as I trusted my sewing skills more than my gluing ones. As you can see in the first in-progress photo, I decided to be clever and sew on the perle cotton before I even removed the worked canvas from the frame, which to my pleasant surprise turned out to be a good idea. The ultrasuede backing was a bit of a challenge, and I might use linen next time just for ease of handling, especially around the corners — my cushion ended up a bit wobbly, though that might just have been me. I didn't fill mine very full (I used size 16 beads), since these are for my Elizabethan house-to-be, and I have the notion from somewhere that Elizabethans used cushions more for sitting on than for leaning against, so I think they'd be a bit flatter than what we like today.

I highly recommend Frances's kits, which have literally everything you need to make a cushion except stuffing!

Ebay is kind of like the lottery — you can't win if you don't play! — but frankly, Ebay gives me the heebie-jeebies. The second auction I ever tried my hand at, I lost at the last minute (by about two dollars), and was crushed to find in my inbox, only seconds later, an e-mail from Ebay taunting me with having LET IT GET AWAY. Ever since then, my heart starts palpitating even as I'm logging in. I've done a number of auctions since then, but really I just don't have the nerves of steel required for Ebay, so usually I just don't even look, willing to pay more on Etsy for not having to deal with the stress. But last week for some reason, I found myself poking around to see what was there, and there were not one but two auctions I was interested in, both for pieces of miniature furniture, and bargains with it, certainly to my eye.

I won both, the only bidder each time.

The first is this charming bureau, a little wonky at the upper-right corner but with charming lines and a wonderful patina.

I was won over by those long spade-foot legs on the front, I must say.

The second arrived today — with each leg carefully swathed in bubble wrap! —

a half-moon table with exceptionally pleasing lines and the most wonderfully delicate Hepplewhitey/Shakery legs.

I would have really liked this piece anyway, but this was a real bonus —

The maker? or the owner? I don't know. It just pleases me very much that it's there.

As for the "yarn" part of this post's title —

a skein of Blue Moon's Gaea yarn in "Say Nevermore" for the Baker Street Scarf from Knitty ..
“Knitting with D.E. Stevenson”, Books and Reading, Dollhouses, Miniature Needlework, Needlework

Shirvan Home Stretch, Etc.

Published by

Bluestocking

on

14th June 2016

I'm enjoying working this carpet, but it does seem to be taking a very long time! But it's apparent even to me now that it's nearly done. The border figures are surprisingly easy to get wrong, so that I find I still have to count, and so every so often I work a strand of that last bit of navy-blue background in the center for some mindless filling-in.

I have been knitting too — finished David's Elizabethan stockings but as it happened we didn't get to go to the Renaissance Faire this year, so it didn't really matter that I hadn't finished his Venetian hose. Must photograph these and write them up. I also find myself making another Svalbard hat, with a set of long posts accompanying, but the hat is as yet still on the needles.

I have been reading quite a lot, though. And three of them are on my TBR list! — so I am a quarter of the way up "Pike's Peak," as it were. I read — and very much enjoyed — the two new Alexander McCall Smiths, The Revolving Door of Life from the "44 Scotland Street" series and The Novel Habits of Happiness from the Isabel Dalhousie series, and D.E. Stevenson's Found in the Attic. If you haven't read and enjoyed the major novels, this last would not be as interesting as it might otherwise, but as a curiosity, being a collection of short stories, poems, one-act plays, and talks given by Stevenson, it is a pleasant sidelight on her non-novel writings.

So for my virtual "D.E. Stevenson Knitalong," here is a girl's three-piece suit — collared jumper, cardigan, and pleated skirt — from the 1930s of, what else, "Scotch Wool" (pattern image from The Vintage Knitting Lady, who adds "I had one of these for school in grey and yellow in the early 1950s!"). I was looking for a "sensible cardigan" like the one Stevenson herself is wearing in the photo on the cover of Found in the Attic, of her writing on a sofa, but "sensible cardies" are in rather short supply, I find — I guess most people already had a pattern for those in the 1930s, and wanted something with a bit more S.A.

So as it happened most of the books I've read recently were not on my TBR list, so technically I don't think those count towards knocking off my list. I read Helen Simonson's long-awaited second novel, The Summer Before the War, which I am reluctant to say left me feeling rather flat — not sure why. I wasn't sure what to expect, after Major Pettigrew's Last Stand which went (as it seemed to me) from quiet romance to farce, and this seemed to go from farce to brutal, shocking carnage, though, really, one shouldn't expect anything else from a novel set during the Great War, which of course the reader knows very well is coming. I hope Simonson writes more, as this just felt like a "sophomore" book, and I'm looking forward to her really hitting her stride.

I have long had a soft spot for Celia Johnson, whose quiet humor and, well, Englishness I find appealing. She never wrote an autobiography, she said, "because I never had an affair with Frank Sinatra, and if I had had, I wouldn't tell anyone," wh. I think really captures much of her personality. Her daughter Kate Fleming did write a biography after Celia's death, and I found a second-hand copy recently and, although it did — because Celia was reserved and in that way of 1930s Englishwomen didn't fuss much — tend to fall into the "Celia played bridge with X, Y, and Z on Tuesday, Celia went to the theatre with L, M, and O on Friday", it was nevertheless a gentle and fond portrait.

There was a very complimentary review of Philip Norman's new biography of Paul McCartney somewhere a while back, and somehow I found myself the very first on the list for it at the public library. I was won over by Norman's admission at the very beginning that he'd always rather disliked Paul, and after many years — and many years of resisting it — had come to the realization that Paul had got a lot of bad press. Well, this goodwill towards Norman carried me through the book, which on the whole I thought was good though perhaps not great, but I can understand that it's difficult to really get hold of a person's character when that person is, despite being familiar to millions around the world and having the minutiae of his life examined by many of those millions, a master at keeping things close. I was disappointed, though, at some of the typos and infelicities, including a reference to Isaac Azimov — and why does Norman feel the need to explain to us that "Apple Corps." is a pun ("pronounced 'core'")?

(I was charmed to see a photo of Paul around the time of "Magical Mystery Tour" wearing a granny-square vest — very 1967! —

This is a different photo than in the book, but it's about the vest here, so it's a "better" one in that respect! It was not a surprise, though, it being Paul McCartney, that more than one person has already re-created it, so here is a free pattern for a similar one.)

At the same time as I borrowed the McCartney book, I also took home from the new-books shelf at the library David Mitchell's latest, Slade House, wh. did not "creep the pants off me" as some reviewer assured me that it would, as I found it far more camp than creepy, and Judith Flanders's second murder mystery, A Bed of Scorpions, which zipped along like nobody's business, though I must admit I found the brassiness of the heroine a bit tiring. I was very sorry to find, though this isn't really Flanders's fault, that bar the odd reference to, say, Tottenham Court Road tube station or Highgate, most English novelists now sound pretty much like Americans — a pity.

So that's what I've been doing lately and not blogging about, and we are just about to start day 2 of Girl Scout day camp, so I suspect I will not be doing much of anything else for the rest of the week either — one of my high-school aides said yesterday "it's like trying to get eighteen cats into a box!" wh. sums it up pretty well — so keep your fingers crossed that the weather stays cool for us!
“Historical Knit Challenge””, Historical Costuming, Historical Knitting, Knitting for Men, Mittens, Gloves, and Hats

Thoughts on the Smeerenburg New Hat

Published by

Bluestocking

on

13th May 2016

Ever since I saw the Smeerenburg hats, I've rather wanted to make one. I have a stash of deep-purple alpaca which I already I know that I can't wear because it makes my nose itch, so I wondered if I could felt it (or more properly, full it), but after working a few samples I realized that even the fulled swatch is probably too soft for this kind of hat. Poking around in the remotest of my yarn cubbies, I found a bag of DMC Laine Colbert wool "pour tapisserie" which I'd inherited and completely forgotten about — no less than eighteen skeins (360g!) — which I couldn't really see myself doing needlepoint with, but it's about DK weight, and certainly knittable.

The wool is moth-proofed, and I wasn't sure how it would behave with either fulling or dyeing, so after I knitted up a swatch I dyed it with a packet of Blue Raspberry Lemonade Kool-Aid, which produced this striking but not very 17th-century turquoise —

so per the helpful and inspiring folks at Dye Your Yarn, I bought a small pot of Wilton food dye in Royal Blue — I was aiming for a quintessentially-period woad blue, but luckily for me woad-dyed fabric comes in a wide variety of shades. Dyeing with Kool-Aid couldn't be simpler, as the citric acid in it means that you needn't mess around with mordants etc., but the Wilton on its own does require that, so I decided that I would use the two together, and just darken the Blue Raspberry as much as I could.

David liked the shape of this hat —

with the smart little brim, so for a pattern, I bashed together the brim from the "Gagiana" barret (flat cap) by Mistress Mairghead de Chesholme and the crown partly from the "acorn" hat by Cecilia Rosa de Sancta Maria (Dani Lawson), (whose PDF with the actual pattern has since disappeared), and partly just with the same shaping as a "round" sock toe, cribbed from Nancy Bush, and all adjusted to accommodate the size and shape I needed.

(I did appreciate Dani Lawson's comment that "based upon [the fact that there are no extant knitting patterns pre-17th century and] the generalisations used in period cooking recipes, it is suggested that period knitters either passed their patterns to one another verbally, following the oral/practice tradition of other craftspeople, or crafted items without a pattern, merely adding and subtracting stitches as needed to shape garments," and that this is why she decided to improvise her own pattern instead of simply knitting one of the patterns given by other historical re-enactors, since surely this is what knitters all through history have done, adapting a pattern to fit their own needs and materials. There is much to be said for historical accuracy, but when you are making something that a real person will be wearing, you want it to fit them!)

I was a bit puzzled by the dimensions of the hats given by the Rijksmuseum, which average about 60cm "width" (presumably circumference, as the average man's head size is said by Google to be 57 cm around) and range from 22cm to 30cm, so I decided to aim for around 25cm, not wanting it to be more Seussian than anything else.

My gauge on US7 needles was about 18 sts and 24 rows to 4 in./10cm, and the swatch shrank by an astonishing 45% in height, and about 20% in width. So the instructions are basically to calculate how many stitches you'd need to fit your wearer, multiply that by at least 45, and add 67 for good measure — and I am almost serious. That thing was huge. I could have hidden a baby in it, easily — could probably have carried my laundry in it.

The brim is started on waste yarn, shaped, then folded and knitted together before continuing up the crown. I suspect this is not strictly period, but the original Smeerenburg hat has no obvious join or seam at that point on the outside, so it's difficult to tell from the photos.

I was charmed, by the way, to find that the Laine Colbert had on every skein a très utile metal clamp holding the two ends together — no tangles here! I've never seen this in knitting yarn.

I did offset the shaping on the brim on alternate increase/decrease rounds, since I wanted a nice, smooth curve to the brim, not the "octagon" effect of stacked shaping — you can see this staggered shaping most obviously in the "before" photos. I suspect that the smoother edge is more historically accurate also. Most of the reconstructions I've seen just stack the shaping without comment.

The top of the crown is basically a round toe, with the decreases starting at every 10 sts (K8, K2tog, with a couple of K3tog to get the stitch count even), and with the decreases staggered as on the brim. The last sts are drawn together with the end of the wool — I did pull them down a bit as I wove in the end, since I didn't want that little nipple that sometimes shows up, but more of a sugarloaf effect.

This is three packets of Blue Raspberry Lemonade Kool-Aid on the left, and on the right that mixed with about a teaspoon of Wilton Icing Color in Royal Blue (which I added in 1/8-teaspoon increments until I thought it was about dark enough). The streaks are just reflections on the surface of the water. The color wasn't as dark as I would have liked, but I wasn't sure how much I could add in without changing the chemical properties of the stuff, and I had a hard time getting the gel to dissolve as well, so I decided to stop at "acceptable"! It took off most of the artificiality, at least.

The Wilton Royal did "break" a little — which is when the component colors separate — and this was apparent early on in the dye bath, with faintly purple splotches on the fabric where the red had come out. Luckily the results were fairly gentle, and I think the fulling tended to integrate it a little more, though you can see in the finished hat that the color is not completely uniform. It is, on the whole, much more woad-like than the Blue Raspberry Lemonade on its own, though, as I said, so I am pleased.

The texture is on the bouclé side, to be sure, but I wanted to full it pretty thoroughly, not knowing how much body the finished hat would need — it has to be fairly sturdy to hold itself up, I suspect, the taller it is — and I'm not experienced enough with fulling to know how much is "enough". This is after one cycle on a front-loader washing-machine, regular setting, before it got to the spin stage. It is obviously fulled considerably more than the original hats, most of which still have the stitch shapes clearly visible — but there it is. In future I might try knitting at an even looser gauge, and maybe it won't spaz quite so much. I stretched the lower part of the crown a bit before drying, as it seemed a little small on my head, which is why the crown does not rise straight up from the brim.

The finished size is about 8 in. (20cm) high and 9 in. (23cm) in diameter. I'm actually glad it shrank so much, as it's already teetering on the edge of silly-hat territory! and this way it's merely amusing. I might try blocking the brim again to get that snappy tilt to it, though I'm pretty sure that a hidden pin would also do the trick.

To my pleasant surprise, David is so delighted with the hat that he spontaneously showed it off to visitors the other day!

Details (with a nod in the direction of The Dreamstress' "Historical Sew Monthly") —

The Project: a "Smeerenburg New Hat"
Year or Period: ca.1650-1700
Materials: about 220g DMC Laine Colbert tapestry wool (approx. DK weight), not counting swatches
Hours to complete: about 3 days of knitting and fulling, plus another for dyeing with blocking/drying time before and after (5-10 May 2016)
How historically accurate is it? points off for using stash moth-proofed tapestry wool (!) instead of something more appropriate, and possibly a point off for the brim being knitted-together instead of sewn, and points off for using Kool-Aid instead of woad (!!), but on the whole I think it's a fairly accurate reconstruction
Sources/Documentation: extant whalers' hats from Smeerenburg (which I posted about here), plus tips from reconstructions of the "Gagiana" barret and the "acorn" hat as mentioned above
Good Things

“Hidden Histories of a Million Wartime Women”

Published by

Bluestocking

on

9th May 2016

Members of the Royal Engineers help with the washing-up after tea, served at a mobile canteen by a WVS volunteer, London, 1941. The mobile canteen vehicles had the names of their donors painted on the sides.

Having a longtime interest in stories of the Blitz, and in women's history, I was especially intrigued to learn of a Kickstarter project collecting funds to digitize, and make available free on the internet, the first of the series of wartime accounts kept on behalf of the Women's Voluntary Service, as the members worked running clothing, scrap, and paper drives, driving ambulances and mobile canteens, providing services during and after air-raids, organizing evacuations of children to foster families in the countryside, and surely a thousand other things at least. Each local WVS center submitted a monthly report outlining its activities and services, giving us, in some 28,000 now-fragile documents, a fascinating and invaluable look at life on the home front in 1940s Britain.

Kitchen scraps are collected by this WVS volunteer, East Barnet, Hertfordshire, 1943. Another volunteer helped load them up, and drove them to a local pig farmer for use as food for his animals.

"May 1941 … 3 Cases of clothes for bombed out people have been forwarded by the Mayor to W.V.S. They had been sent by Red Cross workers in Bolivia …."

WVS ladies in Welshpool with donations of scrap metal, July 1940.

"May 1941 … W.V.S. is undertaking to make a particular type of bed jacket to be worn by spinal cases under plaster-of-paris. They are also making special pyjama coats for cases of burns …."

Ambulance drivers and members of a stretcher party have a tea break from a WVS mobile canteen, 1941.

"July 1944 … During May W.V.S. Old Town Dining Centre served 5,402 main meals, 688 tea meals and 5,035 cups of tea …."

A WVS volunteer cuts strips of cloth to use in making camouflage netting, London, 1943.

"November 1943 … The amount of knitting done for the Merchant Navy has increased. We have sent off two parcels; containing a total of 54 garments (Sweaters, scarves & socks) …."

Two WVS volunteers sorting clothing sent by American donors, London, 1941.

"December 1940 … One of our elderly canteen volunteers, who had the previous week been in the office to see if she could do night work for us — was in the Town Hall W.V.S. Office the morning after the Sunday night raid, fitting herself out with necessary clothes. We asked her if we could do anything for her, and she replied that if we could send two wires to her soldier sons she would be grateful. Our Secretary took the addresses and the message down — and the wires both said 'Bombed out — but still smiling — Mother.' She had no home, no clothes, no money — and tears came to her eyes, but her desire to avoid worrying her sons as shown in her telegram was, we considered, almost heroic…."

You can see two videos about the project, including one about the archival digitization process, and a representative sample of the reports, on its Kickstarter web-page.

All of the photos are from Wikipedia.
Historical Costuming, Sewing

Remaking the Green Jerkin

Published by

Bluestocking

on

15th April 2016

This morning I finished replacing the sleeves of David's Tudor jerkin with wings. When I made this three years ago, I didn't think to put in some extra ease to accommodate the shirt sleeves, which are rather voluminous — so the jerkin was always snug in the arms, which was not only a little less than comfortable in itself, but a little warmer in Southern-California-Elizabethan climes than David quite liked. He didn't complain, as it happens, but when I offered to remake the jerkin, he said, "Yes, please!"

First, I carefully picked out all of the stitching and removed the sleeves.

Since I needed just the one pattern piece and I am still not very good at drawing curves freehand, I scanned the pattern from the Tudor Tailor book, cropped it to the surrounding gridlines, then resized the image so that each square was more-or-less one inch, and printed it out. Luckily, I had scraps of the same fabric exactly the right size!

I folded and pressed the new wings, pinned them into place — made sure they were symmetrical — and sewed them to the armholes.

I graded the seam allowances this time, which I hadn't before as it was only the one turning of the outer fabric and lining each, but now it's three layers of the outer. Since I'd clipped the lining quite a lot around the armhole curves, I had to press all of the little resulting tabs, because they were more than a little wonky after three Faires and laundering, but I wanted to understitch the lining, and so it needed to be fairly smooth.

That was the easy part — then I pinned the lining and outer fabric back together at the original fold lines, with a lot of pins, and sewed it all up by hand.

The wings look a bit newer than the rest of the jerkin, but I'm sure this won't last long!

Understitching was a must, since despite a thorough pre-washing, the unbleached muslin I used as a lining fabric shrank more after sewing, and some of the hems are pooching rather unattractively.

I couldn't seem to find any information about historical methods of understitching, so I just worked a line in a zig-zag, so that what is visible are the zags, as it were — thought it might hold down all of the little clips in the lining seam allowance better than just a straight line, but also I rather like the little slants!

There will be some more fiddling with this jerkin, as the Venetian hose (sort of ur-trousers) stay up not with a belt but with "points" or ties to the inside waist of the jerkin — I'm not sure yet if I'm going to just tack on this eyelet-infused lacing strip or take the waist apart altogether to sew it in, and take the opportunity to fix that saggy hem at the same time.

What is the difference between a doublet and a jerkin? Not much, to be honest, but the Tudor Tailor calls this a jerkin, in both of its forms, viz. with sleeves or without. The Renaissance Tailor says that a jerkin is much less fitted than a doublet, which makes sense in light both of the Tudor Tailor's pattern's shape and in the jerkin's frequent appearance in period clothing as a garment worn over a doublet.
Historical Knitting, Knitting for Men, Mittens, Gloves, and Hats

Woollen Caps (“Muts”) Worn by Dutch Whalers at Smeerenburg, 17th century

Published by

Bluestocking

on

12th April 2016

From 1979-1981, an archaeological expedition at Smeerenburg, on Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, uncovered the remains of a nearly-mythological Dutch whaling station in operation from 1619 to about 1657. The expedition was apparently somewhat deflated to find that the station was no larger than about sixteen houses and eight blubber-boiling stations, not the bustling metropolis of 10,000 residents with shops, churches, and (of course) brothels they had been led to expect (Nansen apparently had much to do with the exaggerated claims of Smeerenburg's size) — but there was, poignantly, a cemetery with a hundred or so graves, and I suppose due to the conditions so far north, much of the clothing of the occupants was very well-preserved. Here are ten knitted caps from Smeerenburg graves, which caps are all on view in the Rijksmuseum today.

Above, NG-2006-110-2, ca.1650-1700, about 61 cm x 30 cm h. Knitted cap, double, in striped wool with ear flaps and a folded edge.

"The Whale-Oil Refinery near the Village of Smeerenburg" (1639) by Cornelis de Man (accession no. SK-A-235). De Man did not actually travel much farther north than Denmark, but created this painting of Smeerenburg (literally "blubber-town") in his studio at home from a Danish painting of a Svalbard whaling station and from other images. (Here, a whale is being carved into smaller pieces and rendered in vats on the beach at left, and the men's barracks can be seen at right in the background.) Perhaps tellingly in light of the fact that de Man was never at Spitsbergen, few if any of the men in his painting are wearing caps like the ones found in the graveyard —

— but there is certainly a wide variety here as well, from black burgher's hats to the rather-Mongolian one on the portly fellow in the foreground at right.

I can't seem to find much readily-available on the archaeological finds at Smeerenburg, only a brief mention in the Wikipedia article on the archaeology of Svalbard as a whole, except for a distractingly-interesting article from ScienceNordic, and another from the Basement Geographer. But knitted caps, that's what I was talking about.

"Muts" is specifically a knitted or crocheted cap in Dutch. Many of these Smeerenburg caps are knitted in two layers — obviously for warmth, although the Dutch whalers only rarely wintered there, and apparently not in great numbers even then. It is pretty cold in Svalbard, with average high-summer temperatures of 3 to 7° C (37.4 to 44.6° F) — the Rijksmuseum writes in each of their captions that the men were bundled up so tightly against the cold that "[they] recognized one another only by the pattern of stripes on the caps". It isn't clear, though, from the descriptions, if the caps are double-knitted or simply knitted and then doubled. Most of the caps are fulled to some extent, which certainly would make them thicker and warmer. The variety even among these ten is impressive, though there is definitely a "family resemblance" among some.

By the way, a number of these ten caps are noted as having "earflaps" but not a single photo shows what I would call earflaps, so it isn't clear what is meant, and images from various travelers' blogs of the caps on display, on short hat-stands, show nothing more than what is in the photos here, so if anyone can elaborate, I would be grateful! Presumably they are something like the ones on a cap at the V&A (acc. no.1570-1901) ca.1500-1550, which could be folded up inside the cap.

NG-2006-110-10 ca.1650-1800, about 58 cm x 23 cm h. Knitted cap, dark blue with horizontal stripes, in chunky wool. At the bottom edge, the stitches are reversed, so that the right-side of the stitches shows when the brim is folded (bij de rand is de procedure omgedraaid en zitten de tricot-steken aan de binnenkant).

NG-2006-110-5, ca.1650-1800, about 60 cm x 25 cm h. Knitted cap with double ear-flaps (sic) and folded brim, in fine dark-brown wool, with a small "tail" at the top.

NG-2006-110-12, ca.1600-1800, about 48 cm x 24 cm h. Knitted cap in green wool with horizontal stripes and blocks in dark and light brown, with ear flaps. The turned-up edge is about 5 cm deep.

NG-2006-110-3, ca.1700-1800, about 60 cm x 28 cm h. Knitted cap in fine wool, with ear flaps, striped in red, blue, green, black and light brown, with an inner cap also striped. "Each part [i.e. the outer and inner caps] has been cut at the top and sewn together" (elk deel is aan de bovenkant ingeknipt en vastgenaaid). The gauge is 45 rows per 10 cm, presumably after fulling.

NG-2006-110-6, ca.1650-1800, about 60 cm x 24 cm h. Knitted cap, double, with ear-flaps, in a chunky ikat-striping wool.

NG-2006-110-8, ca.1740-1760, about 64 cm x 33 cm h x 29 cm d. Knitted cap in fine wool with horizontal stripes in red, green, blue, yellow, and white, lined with a (much thicker) light brown knitted cap. The inner cap is apparently much smaller than the finer outer one, so that the top of the outer one falls to one side "and the whole therefore looks a bit like a nightcap" (en het geheel lijkt daarom een beetje op een slaapmuts). The gauge of the outer cap is 55 sts and 100 rows per ten cm, and it was cut and sewn from a piece of flat knitting.

It isn't clear if the Rijksmuseum dates these from other evidence in the burials or from the caps themselves; this one is obviously a step above some of the rougher of these caps, but I don't know if that can be assigned to improved manufacturing techniques or fashion changes, or simply because this one was brought from home where, say, the ikat-striped one above was knitted perhaps by the whaler himself. (Nor does the museum explain how a whaling station that was abandoned by 1657 could have a grave with goods dated a full century later, though other sources admit that some of the Rijksmuseum caps may have come from another Dutch station.)

NG-2006-110-14, ca.1642-1800 [sic], about 65 cm x 23 cm h. Knitted cap in fine light-brown wool, double, with ear-flaps and a folded brim. The brim is about 4 cm, 2 cm when folded, and has two blue stripes on the inside.

NG-2006-110-1, ca.1650-1700, about 52 cm x 22 cm h. Knitted cap in light, fine wool with a folded hem and a small "button" at the top.

NG-2006-110-4, ca.1700-1800, about 30 cm x 26 cm h. Knitted cap with earflaps, knitted in fine multi-colored self-striping wool. Much repaired. The inner cap is knitted in light brown, and the two parts are sewn together.

I find it really charming that each of these caps has a unique character, and yet poignant at the same time to think that the caps were buried with their wearers, who must have each had as unique a character as his cap.
Books and Reading

Mount TBR

Published by

Bluestocking

on

9th April 2016

I noticed the other day that the stack of books by my bedside is almost all either books I haven’t even started to read yet, or got only part of the way into before something — something bookish, something parental, something woolly, I don’t know — distracted me. So I decided, thinking it would be amusing, to walk through the house making a list of the books that I own that I haven’t actually read yet. Of course I’ve heard the joking reference to “Mount To-Be-Read”, but this morning I’m rather ashamed to find that my personal mountain is less like the photograph above, and more like this one —

There are all sorts of excuses, of course — I’ve added a number of free titles from the Gutenberg Project and others of that ilk to my Kindle faster than I can read them, I pick up things that look interesting from the remainder shelf, I buy up series from going-out-of-business sales, I buy titles from authors I’ve read previously and like, I get Christmas and birthday presents, I just have lots of interests. A good portion of the books on my list were for essays in college, when I was taking classes about women artists and Victorian literature and doing my senior project on feminist literary criticism — a number of the books I browsed and made use of, but did not actually read from start to finish. Some on my list are related to family history — the Swedish history, obviously, but also the coal one and the German villages one. One at least — the O’Brian — I keep wistfully putting off because I want there to be an Aubrey/Maturin story I haven’t read already.

It’s somewhat comforting to find that I am not the only one with a massive stack of unread books — there is even an ongoing challenge (in its fourth year, so you can see how perpetual it is) at Bev’s blog “My Reader’s Block” with different mountainous attainments for however many books you want to finish —

Pike’s Peak: Read 12 books from your TBR pile
Mount Blanc: Read 24 books from your TBR pile
Mt. Vancouver: Read 36 books from your TBR pile
Mt. Ararat: Read 48 books from your TBR pile
Mt. Kilimanjaro: Read 60 books from your TBR pile
El Toro: Read 75 books from your TBR pile
Mt. Everest: Read 100 books from your TBR pile
Mount Olympus: Read 150+ books from your TBR pile

I am somewhat consoled to find that my own list of a hundred and seventeen books is, though high, at least not at the very top, but as Bertie Wooster would say, I hardly know whether to laugh or weep. Does it put things into perspective that 117 is probably less than a tenth of the books in the house?

Ackroyd, Peter. London : the biography.
Ackroyd, Peter. The Tudors.
Bailey, Anthony. Standing in the sun : a life of J.M.W. Turner.
Beauman, Nicola. A very great profession : the woman’s novel, 1914-1939.
Benjamin, Melanie. Alice I have been.
Benson, Clara. The mystery at Underwood House. (Kindle)
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare : the invention of the human.
Brownstein, Rachel M. Why Jane Austen?
Burney, Fanny. Evelina, or, The history of a young lady’s entrance into the world. (Kindle)
Browne, Ray B., and Kreiser, Lawrence A. Jr. The detective as historian : history and art in historical crime fiction.
Brook, Timothy. Vermeer’s hat : the seventeenth century and the dawn of the global world.
Chesterton, G.K. The complete Father Brown. (Kindle)
Christiansen, Rupert. The Victorian visitors : culture shock in nineteenth-century Britain.
Crosby, Alfred W. The measure of reality : quantification and western society, 1250-1600.
Cunnington, C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington. The history of underclothes.
Delaney, Frank. Ireland : a novel.
Dickens, Monica. The house at World’s End.
Dickens, Monica. Summer at World’s End.
Ekirch, A. Roger. At day’s close : night in times past.
Englund, Peter. The beauty and the sorrow : an intimate history of the First World War.
Finlay, Victoria. Color, a natural history of the palette.
Fossier, Robert. The axe and the oath : ordinary life in the Middle Ages.
Freese, Barbara. Coal, a human history.
Gaskell, Mrs. Ruth. (Kindle)
Gaskell, Mrs. Sylvia’s lovers.
Gaskell, Mrs. Wives and daughters. (Kindle)
Gladwell, Malcolm. David and Goliath.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespeare’s freedom.
Greer, Germaine. The obstacle race : the fortunes of women painters and their works.
Greer, Germaine. Shakespeare : a brief insight.
Griffin, Susan. A chorus of stones : the private life of war.
Grudin, Robert. The grace of great things : creativity and innovation.
Hardy, Thomas. A pair of blue eyes. (Kindle)
Henry, O. Selected stories of O. Henry.
Heyer, Georgette. The black moth. (Kindle)
Hutton, Olwen. The prospect before her : a history of women in Western Europe, 1500-1800.
Ilich, Ivan, and Barry Sanders. A b c : the alphabetization of the popular mind.
James, M.R. Ghost stories of an antiquary. (Kindle)
Jekyll, Gertrude. Old English household life.
Juster, Norman. A woman’s place : yesterday’s women in rural America.
Kennedy, Annie E. and Bidwell, John. Dear General : the private letters.
King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance.
Kingsnorth, Paul. The wake.
Kohn, Alfie. The brighter side of human nature.
Kurlansky, Mark. Salt.
Lendon, J.E. Song of wrath : the Peloponnesian War begins.
Lerley, Merritt. The comforts of home : the American house and the evolution of modern convenience.
Levi, Primo. Other people’s trades : essays.
Lorénzen, Lilly. Of Swedish ways.
MacArthur, T.E. The volcano lady : volume 1, a fearful storm gathering.
Macdonald, Anne L. No idle hands : the social history of American knitting.
MacGregor, Neil. Shakespeare’s restless world.
Marshall, H.E. Our island story.
Masterson, Martha Gay. One woman’s west : recollections of the Oregon Trail.
McCall Smith, Alexander. The novel habits of happiness. (Kindle)
McCall Smith, Alexander. The revolving door of life. (Kindle)
Moberg, Vilhelm. A history of the Swedish people. (2 vols.)
Mortimer, Ian. The time traveler’s guide to Elizabethan England.
Mortimer, Ian. The time traveler’s guide to medieval England.
Morton, Kate. The forgotten garden.
Muir, Frank. An irreverent and thoroughly incomplete history of everything.
Novik, Naomi. Uprooted.
O’Brian, Patrick. 21.
Pargeter, Elizabeth. The brothers of Gwynedd. (Kindle)
Porter, Roy. English society in the 18th century.
Potter, Lois. The life of William Shakespeare : a critical biography.
Power, J. Tracy. Lee’s miserables : life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox.
Ransome, Arthur. Great Northern?
Ransome, Arthur. Pigeon post.
Ransome, Arthur. Secret water.
Ransome, Arthur. Swallowdale.
Ransome, Arthur. We didn’t mean to go to sea.
Ransome, Arthur. Winter holiday.
Richardson, Henry Handel. The getting of wisdom. (Kindle)
Ruck, Berta. The boy with wings. (Kindle)
Ruck, Berta. The disturbing charm. (Kindle)
Rybczynski, Witold. Home : a short history of an idea.
Sackville-West, V. Country notes in wartime. (Kindle)
Schama, Simon. Dead certainties : unwarranted speculations.
Schama, Simon. A history of Britain, vols, 2 and 3.
Scheer, Teva J. Our daily bread : German village life, 1500-1850.
Schlink, Bernhard. The weekend.
Schultz, Gladys Denny. Lady from Savannah : the life of Juliette Low.
Scott, Franklin Daniel. Sweden, the nation’s history.
Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz.
Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, marriage, and the law in Victorian England.
Shapiro, James. 1599 : a year in the life of William Shakespeare.
Smiley, Jane. Charles Dickens.
Spufford, Francis. I may be some time : ice and the English imagination.
Stabiner, Karen. My girl : adventures with a teen in training.
Stevenson, D.E. Five windows.
Stevenson, D.E. Found in the attic.
Tanner, Tony. Prefaces to Shakespeare.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity fair.
Thirkell, Angela. Pomfret Towers.
Thompson, Flora. The illustrated “Lark Rise to Candleford”.
Tillyard, E.M.W. The Elizabethan world picture.
Tinagli, Paola. Women in Renaissance art.
Tomalin, Claire. Samuel Pepys.
Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers. (Kindle)
Trollope, Anthony. Dr Thorne.
Trollope, Anthony. The last chronicle of Barsetshire.
Trollope, Anthony. The warden. (Kindle)
Turner, Thomas. The diary of Thomas Turner, 1754-1765.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. The age of homespun.
Unsworth, Barry. The songs of the kings.
Ustinov, Peter. Dear me : a memoir.
Vickery, Amanda. Behind closed doors : at home in Georgian England.
Vickery, Amanda. The gentleman’s daughter : women’s lives in Georgian England.
Visser, Margaret. The rituals of dinner.
Wainwright, Alfred. Westmoreland heritage.
Warner, Marina. Monuments and maidens : the allegory of the female form.
Welty, Eudora, and Ross Macdonald. Meanwhile there are letters.
Wickersham, Joan. The news from Spain : stories.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little house in the Ozarks : rediscovered writings.
Wiley, Bell I. The life of Johnny Reb, and The life of Billy Yank.
Wilson, A.N. The Victorians.

Well — I don’t think I will actually sign up for a challenge officially — I think I know myself too well for that — but now that I can see them all written down like this, I will make a concerted effort to read a good many of these before the year is out. (I was going to say, “before I buy any more” but, well, I think I know myself too well for that!) I also must say that I don’t really like the idea of churning through a list simply to be able to cross things off, and so I am in no hurry. Besides, I am already in the middle of two new books, Ruth Goodman’s How to be a Tudor and Helen Simonson’s The summer before the war — but after that, I know there is a lot of good stuff on this list, so I’ve no reason to put it off any longer. I have a bit of a hankering for something funny, so perhaps Frank Muir? (Does anyone else sorely miss “My Word” on the radio?) Though I must admit that both Pepys and Turner are very tempting, since I already know that their biographers are excellent writers, and I’ve been looking forward to reading these ever since they landed on my shelves….

The two photos are “Stack of Books” from the Ann Arbor Public Library, and “Books in a Stack” by Evan Lawrence Bench, both reusable under Creative Commons with credit.
Uncategorized

The “Cheapside” Stocking Foot (version 1.3)

Published by

Bluestocking

on

7th April 2016

The foot for these man’s stockings is a re-creation of a 16th-century stocking foot in the Museum of London (no.A13833). The original was knitted in silk at a gauge of 18 sts per inch (approx. 72 sts per 10 cm), a far finer gauge than is practical now. My version is knitted in Regia 4-ply, at a gauge less than half of the original, so that much detail is necessarily lost.

In the earlier medieval period people wore cloth hose or leg coverings. It was only during the reign of Henry VIII that knitted stockings started to appear in England. These were either in wool or silk but would have been relatively rare. This skilfully knitted silk stocking-foot is the only example of its kind in England. A highly fashionable garment, it was probably imported from Italy or Spain. It may have been sold in one of the luxury drapery shops in Cheapside.

Cheapside, a street in the City of London, has been from its earliest days a center for markets (the name is from the Old English “cēap”, a trade or bargaining) and later in the Tudor and Stuart periods was lined with numerous shops selling luxury goods.

This particular stocking foot is clearly related to the “Barnim foot” with its inverted gusset opening from the center bottom of the heel outwards to the toe along the bottom of the foot, but it is clear even from the single photograph available that there are certain details rather unique to this stocking: the heel flap has a gentle decrease that narrows it towards the bottom of the foot, there is a double line of garter stitch not only along the edge of the heel flap but also along the top of the gusset and a single line along the edges of the sole gusset as well, and the line of garter stitches along the top gusset continues around the wedge toe. I have therefore included all of these details in my version below.

Please feel free to comment on the historical accuracy (or not), or with any suggestions for improving it, or clarifications!

Note that on the first section of the instep gusset, where the decreases come more rapidly than they do later, in order to keep the instep and sole gussets traveling towards each other consistently, you will need to omit some of the decreases at certain points. This is because the sole gusset is decreased at its outside edge every 5 rounds but the instep gusset is decreased (at the same spot!) every 2 rnds, so that if you just work the two gussets side-by-side, as it were, you would have some places where the instep gusset would decrease on 3 successive rounds, creating a crooked line. This omission comes every fifth round, up to rnd 30.

These instructions presume some familiarity with sock foot knitting, and, obviously, that you have just knitted the leg of a period stocking with a center-back “seam” stitch.

Cheapside Foot (v.1.3)

Heel flap

Work all sl sts p-wise with yarn to WS. You do not need a marker for the center of the sole at this point, because the seam st will indicate it.

Set-up: From beg of previous rnd (center sole/seam st), work ¼ the total number of stitches in the stocking. Turn, and working flat, work these sts and the same number of sts on the other side of seam st, for ½ of the total number of sts in the stocking less 1 (the seam st). You should have the same number of plain sts on either side of the seam st, i.e. an odd number of heel sts. Work heel flap over these sts, keeping seam st as set.

• Row 1: Sl 1, K to end, keeping seam st as established.
• Row 2: Sl 1, K2, P to last 3 sts (keeping seam st as established), K2, P1.
• At the same time, work mirrored decreases at each side of heel flap (just inside the garter edging) 4 times evenly down length of heel flap (e.g., on rows 9, 17, 25, and 33 of a 34-row heel flap).

Rep these 2 rows until you have worked the same number of rows as there are sts at the top of the heel flap. (8 sts dec’d)

Turn heel

• Row 1: Sl 1, work to 2 sts before marker, K2tog, sl m, SSK, work to end — 2 sts dec’d.
• Row 2: Sl 1, P to last 3 sts (keeping seam st as established if desired), K2, P1.

Rep these 2 rows 4 times more, for a total of 10 rows except on the last row work the seam st together with its neighbor, for an even number of rem sts — 11 sts dec’d.

Work half of the sts. Fold heel flap inside out, RS together, and work a 3-needle bind-off on these sts. 1 st rem. Do not cut yarn.

Place marker, pick up and K 1 st for each sl st along edge of heel flap, plus 2 more at join to avoid a gap at that spot. Place marker. Work across instep sts, place marker, pick up and K 2 sts before heel flap (again, to avoid a gap later), then 1 st for each sl st along rem edge of heel flap, place marker, pick up and K 1 st, place marker for beg of round. There is 1 st on either side of beg marker at the sole.

Shape instep and foot gussets

Work in the round, beg at center sole. Right-leaning lifted increase (RLI) = With the right-hand needle, lift the stitch below the next st on the left-hand needle, and place it on the left-hand needle, being careful not to let it slip under the next st; K the new st. Left-leaning lifted increase (LLI) = With the left-hand needle, lift the stitch two stitches below the st on the right-hand needle, leaving it on the left-hand needle, and K this new st.

Note that on the very first round worked only, there is only 1 st on either side of the round marker, so Kfb may be easier — on all successive increase rnds, work mirrored lifted increases. It is easier to work the RLI one st to the left, which is a knit st, rather than in the garter column.

**Important: In order to keep the two gusset shapings consistent, you will need to omit the sole gusset decrease on every fifth round, from Rnd 5 to Rnd 30 — see note above.

• Rnd 1: K to 1 st bef m (first sole marker), Kfb, sl m, K to 2 sts bef m (first instep marker), K2tog, sl m, K across instep sts to marker (second instep marker), sl m, SSK, K to marker (second sole marker), sl m, Kfb, K to end.
• Rnds 2, 4, 6, and 8: K to m, sl m, P1, K to 2 sts before m, K2tog, sl m, P2, K across instep sts to 2 sts before m, P2, sl m, SSK, K to 1 sts bef m, P1, sl m, K to end — 2 sts dec’d.
• Rnds 3, 7, and 9: K.
• **Rnd 5: K to 1 st before marker, LLI, sl m, K to marker, sl m, K across instep sts to marker, sl m, K to marker, sl m, RLI, K to end — 2 sts inc’d.
• **Rnd 10: K to 1 st before marker, LLI, sl m, P1, K to 2 sts before marker, K2tog, sl m, P2, K across instep sts to 2 sts bef marker, P2, sl m, SSK, K to 1 st before marker, P1, sl m, RLI, K to end.

Work as established, keeping the two gussets increasing or decreasing as established with the exceptions noted above, and at the same time keeping as established the column of 1 garter st each side on outside of sole gusset and the column of 2 garter sts on instep side of each instep gusset.

Work until you have the desired number of foot sts.

Continue sole gusset

Next rnd: SSK, K to m, sl m, M1, K to m, M1, sl m, K to 2 sts bef instep sts, K2tog, K to end.

Work 3 rnds even.

Rep these last 4 rnds until all sole sts are between the two markers.

If necessary, work even until desired length of foot less 2 inches.

Toe

• Rnd 1: Work to 3 sts from end of needle 1, K2 tog, K1; on needle 2, K1, SSK, K to end; on needle 3, K to 3 sts from end, K2tog, K1: on needle 4, K1, SSK, to to end — 4 sts dec’d.
• Rnd 2: Work plain.

Rep these 2 rnds until sts have been reduced by half on each needle. Work Rnd 2 only, until there are 2 sts on each needle. Work a 3-needle bind off, graft, or cut yarn and draw the end through the remaining sts — though note that grafting is probably not correct for a period stocking. (The ones in these photos have a drawn-up finish.)

Common heel and wedge toe adapted from Nancy Bush’s Folk Socks (Interweave Press, 1994), and foot adapted from Anne DesMoines’ “Barnim-Style Stockings” in Knitting Traditions magazine, Spring 2014 issue.