Yes, it deserves two exclamation marks. It's been a while!
These are the 1909 Ladies' Mitts I spoke of a few weeks ago, in the same yarn as the model — Cascade Heritage Silk — but in a different color, this one being 5730 Heather Rose. I started the mitts once before, but even with the same yarn as the model, they were far too big, so I've frogged and started again with two less repeats. We'll see how it goes now that I've got to the hand — but I should look sharp, before it gets too hot …
(Rather unbelievably, I took this photo with my camera using the manual focus. I can rarely trust my very-poor eyesight well enough to tell if a subject is in focus, but I don't have my contacts in this morning, so was double-checking the display with it about an inch away from my eyes, and didn't do too badly! The photo below is one of the few I managed to rescue from my phone, and the close-ups further down are from the camera. But, yes, the auto-focus is shot.)
I finished the "Zoé Elie" — the free chart from Reflets de Soie — and had a go at aging it, to look more like the original d'un certain âge. This is with coffee, Folger's Singles to be exact, which come in bags, and I used both the strongly-brewed coffee and the bags, the latter plopped down at the edge to get a liquid-stain look. It didn't come out quite the way I was hoping, but it was all a bit of an experiment anyway, and I do like the way it looks — plus it's a charming little piece in itself.
I found a puzzle yesterday at the swap meet. I picked up this charming family group photograph, and turned it over to find this:
which is in Swedish. An antique family photograph with all of the names written on it! That's unusual enough in itself, but of course I also do Swedish genealogy, and so my interest was piqued for that. And one way that I "pay it forward" for all of the help I've received over the years is to attach identified family photos to their records in FamilySearch. And so I bought the photo.
The writing says: "Från vänster [from the left]: [back] Gustaf Olsson o. Sven, Erland Gustafsson o. Inga-Maj; [middle] Axel Ericksson, Elsa o. Anna, mormor o. morfar, Tyra o. Svante; [front] Viola, Gärda, Elsa, Åke, Gösta". "O." is just short for och, "and". I can tell that it's Swedish from vänster (spelled venstre in Danish and Norwegian), and also because of some of the names: "Gärda" is a Swedish spelling for "Gerda", "Gösta" and "Åke" and especially "Svante" are much more common in Sweden that in the other Nordic countires. So, definitely Swedish, and from the house in the background, almost definitely in Sweden.
But I've spent a couple of hours now, on two different days, searching through the various databases for an Erland Gustafsson with a daughter named Inga-Maj, or a Gustaf Olsson with a son Sven (needle in a haystack), or an Axel Olsson with a wife Elsa and/or a daughter Anna, and I haven't found any yet who look at all likely, let alone with family members that line up with the other names. (I can hardly complain, after someone took the trouble to write the names on the back, that they didn't give the grandparents' names, but gee, that would have helped enormously!)
From Tyra's dress, this looks like early 1930s or maybe late 1920s. The mid-1920s, depending on the various Swedish parishes and the dates of their respective registers, is generally the cutoff date of when the registers are restricted for privacy, and so I suspect I'm being hampered a bit by that. I think I can presume that the babies being held by their mothers belong with them, so Elsa and baby Anna go together, and Tyra and baby Svante. But there is one too many "dads" in the photo — probably Axel Ericksson goes with Elsa (and therefore Anna as well), and probably Erland Gustafsson (and baby Inga-Mai?) with Tyra (and therefore Svante as well?). But what about Gustaf Olsson and baby Sven? And whose mormor and morfar are the older couple? I think I can see family resemblances in the faces, especially some of the mothers and daughters — and by their matching sailor suits, the two little boys are brothers — but I don't want to read too much into that, as they are probably all closely related, siblings and cousins, most likely first cousins. Since the photo has ended up in a Southern California swap meet, it's probably safe to assume that a few, if not a number of them ended up in America — or did the family who stayed in Sweden send the photo to yet-another sibling in America? or were some of the little ones in the photo actually born in America and the photo records a visit back to Sweden to see the grandparents?!
Since my camera is still hors de combat, I will instead share my short list of charts-awaiting-stitching. This is not, mind you, all of the charts I have, as I've managed to collect any number of free charts in the three-ish years that I've been interested in samplers — and certainly more than a few of them I still hope/intend to work! — but I can definitely see that my tastes have changed a bit with my increasing experience. It is also, I now know not only from seeing other people's photos of boxes upon boxes of charts that they would need multiple lifetimes to work, but also from my own stash, how very difficult it can be sometimes to resist temptation! I actually try purposely to be circumspect now in my purchases. And so, until I can get my own photos, here is my list. The first two are the ones, along with the "Quaker Virtues", that are actually in progress; the rest are in no particular order.
Above, "The Wisdom Sampler" by Donna Vermillion Giampa of Vermillion Stitchery. This was on someone's "100 Best Samplers" Pinterest page, and I was quite intrigued by it. It was long out-of-print at the time, after Donna Giampa's death in 2015, but recently her sister began selling the chart again. It is in style sort of halfway between "reproduction" and "new", definitely with an antique flavor, as it were, but a sort of modernity that I can't quite pinpoint. Charming, though, clearly! I have just started it, at the area around the picket fence.
"Zoé Elie," a free chart from Isabelle Mazabraud-Kerlan of Reflets de Soie. So very pretty! I started this as a small project to take on our vacation, when we went to Tahoe for a week, and am perhaps not quite halfway along.
"Quaker Friendship Sampler" by Becky Dorrie. I keep passing this over for more difficult things, it seems, but that does it a disservice, for it is a classic new old-style Quaker sampler, and that really speaks to me.
"Virtue Outshines the Stars" by Darlene O'Steen. The last of my "O'Steen Big 3", the three charts of hers that I felt I utterly must do. Not that I would mind doing others of hers, of course — and there are no less than three band-sampler charts in the revised edition of The Proper Stitch — but the "Pomegranate," the "Floral," and this one just really speak to me. I admit that I'm actually putting off doing this "last" one, so that I can continue to anticipate it!
"Laurence Briquet" by Reflets de Soie. Oh, it is so difficult to choose between Mazabraud-Kerlan's beautiful reproduction samplers! I think the little waterfall on this one won me over. I still have "Marthe Sallé" on my wish list as well, but have restrained myself so far, though with great difficulty. I actually have both fabric and threads for this, so it may be next in the frame.
"Ragamuffin #2" by Shakespeare's Peddler, my most-recent purchase. I fell rather hard for this one, I admit, the moment I saw it. The muted greys and greens, the flowers, the unique border — oh my!
And "Quaker Samplings III" and "II" by Ellen Chester of With My Needle. The last two of my quintet of "Samplings" — I have already worked I, IV, and V. I'm leaving the dated one for last (!). I know that Chester has released at least two more in her series since I discovered these, and it is not without difficulty that I restrain myself, but it seems to me that they should go together on a wall, and five is rather a lot, after all …
So this has been finished for a while — erm, quite a while — but my camera has been having some problems, slowly worsening, and so the other day, well into another two sampler projects, I thought, "ack, I'll just take photos with my phone!" So I dug out my light box and took some photos, not completely satisfyingly, as the sampler is just a little too large to reach into the light box comfortably — but I was getting fed up with the problems — and then when I sat down at the computer, I remembered why I keep getting messages that my storage is full, that I can't download the photos on my phone because no matter how long my IT guy (David) spends on it, he can't get my iPhone to play nicely with my PC. Apparently the problem is that my phone takes photos in one format, and even though he got it to convert them into ordinary JPGs the last time, it refuses to do more than about a half-dozen now (and those it just throws any-old-where onto my computer — directories, schmerectories). My IT's assistant (Laura, no mean whiz with an iPhone herself) spent an hour or so on it the other day, and gave up in frustration. She had to air-drop these from my phone to hers, then e-mail them to me. And I'm not even that happy with them! Gaahhh!
Sigh.
Anyway, I was much happier with my new colors for what I will now call the Lady Floral Brittany sampler, as it's very nearly a mash-up of the two, as far as I can tell — having the chart for the Floral but only a picture of the Lady Brittany. I modified the Floral (the one on the left in the image below) quite a lot, starting with switching out the long signature for a motto and a short signature,
and the alphabet, though I think that was mostly because I disliked the Victorian Pink so much in the numbers line, and the amount of contrast between the Midnight and Brandy in the alphabet. After deciding to revise that, things kind of snowballed. I had to revise the date line, as "2023" literally wouldn't fit (!), so I thought I might as well add in another pair of those Algerian-eye flowers. And I liked the Tudoresque flowers of Lady Brittany (on the right) so much that … might as well!
Yes, picking out so very much of it was a pain, but it was a pleasure working the new colors, so I came out ahead. The photos aren't quite true-to-life, unfortunately … but, well, it isn't that I don't want to do them over, but I just can't face it right now (see Issues, above). The Gold Leaf, especially, looks more reserved and stately in real life.
I think I got a bit tired of referring to both the stitch instructions and the chart, and forgot to look at the former for the roses band, as there is supposed to be some rice stitch in there somewhere — I think in the little green leaves — but I just blithely did crosses, and there are some other wobbles that I'm just going to gloss over now (innocent smile). That Weeks Dye Works "Collards" has rapidly become my favorite green, possibly one of my favorites of any floss color, and so I'm just going to admire it happily. I do like the way the satin-stitch petals came out! —
(Not sure why there is so much difference in the color of the linen between the photo above and the one below — same phone camera, same lighting, seconds apart! Go figure! It is a bit in between the two, not a bright white, but not quite "yellow" either.)
But — this has been one of my sine qua non samplers for some time now, so I'm very happy to have worked it, and really did enjoy the process more than enough to win out over the annoyances!
Oh, it’s been so long since I’ve knitted that I completely forgot to participate in my own virtual knitalong! Here, then — better late than never — is my newest contribution to “Knitting with D.E. Stevenson,” for my recent re-read of Fletchers End. The book was published in 1962, and I had to take some time finding a pattern that would suit the classic “shrinking violet” character of Bel Brownlee, née Lamington. I doubt that Bel — unlike, perhaps, her friend Louise — would throw herself into Swinging Sixties fashions much, and so this modest-yet-au-courant suit works rather well for her. (I don’t think that a metallic Christmas tree is at all Bel’s thing, though, so to that fellow leaning out of the window we’ll just have to say, sorry, that will not do!)
I had a sinking feeling as I began to work this over with the new colors, that I'd miscounted the first time. Of course when I picked it up again the other day, I started with the next dividing band under the little filip on the end of the ribbonwork, and carried on blithely (wanting to start with positive new colors instead of negative picking-out). I kept trying to tell myself that it was okay, it just looked a bit longer than it should because there was nothing beside it for scale (!), but no — I had counted not just slightly wrong, but very wrong, when I started the ribbonwork of the floral band last summer. Not just "threads" wrong, but "inches"! so that new signature line will have to come out.
Well — (sigh) — I am certainly enjoying the new colors, that's something! And I must say, I do like a nice bit of satin stitch …
Despite having a modest-but-tantalizing list of new sampler charts at my elbow, I dug out my poor half-worked "Floral Sampler" the other day, and my bundle of potential thread substitutions, and began the onerous task of picking it all out a band at a time, from the ribbonwork that seemed the best place to start, then on upwards. I've now re-started the large floral band, and re-worked the red Montenegrin-stitch divider and the last line of the motto in the new colors. Queen stitch is a bit of a pain to work, but it's rather hellish to pick out, I must say — I am not looking forward to that little floral band about a third of the way down from the top, but I like the "Charlotte's Pink" miles better than the bubble-gum "Victorian Pink," so I'll just have to get on with it.
Well, the new issue of "Piecework" has a rather handsome pair of knitted mitts from a 1909 Weldon's magazine, and I must say that I'm tempted to dig out some needles and see if I have a suitable wool —
I wanted some comfort reading last week, and so as I was heading out the door I went to my shelf of D.E. Stevensons and chose one of my favorites, Fletchers End. I like the main character, Bel (Lamington in her eponymous earlier story, now Brownlee and happily newly-wed) but I love stories about houses, and Fletchers End charmingly combines both. Fletchers End is a cottage in a small village somewhere in the Cotswolds, which has been in the Lestrange family for generations but has been left by the late owner to her nephew, a navy man away in foreign parts who, being chronically short of funds, has not only neglected the cottage but wants to get it off his hands as soon as possible. Louise Armstrong, one of Stevenson's characters who reappears in other novels, comes to see Fletchers End, looking for a house for Bel and her husband.
Mrs. Warmer, a local woman who has been looking after Fletchers End during the long absence of the new owner, has grown unexpectedly fond of the house during her six years there, finding herself strangely reluctant to show the house to prospective buyers — though of course she does, honestly and dutifully, but she is secretly relieved when they go away again and don't come back — and it soon becomes an indicator in the story of her approval of a certain few of these prospective buyers that she offers them tea, which includes freshly-baked whole-meal scones. Now, being a reader who also appreciates good food in books, and better still being able to make something very like that good food myself, I had a go at some whole-meal scones. These are my own bash of a couple of different recipes — not quite up to Mrs. Warmer's yet, I expect, but not bad, even without clotted cream —
And for something completely different, a Lemoyne Star block auditioning for a 1:12 quilt, with some small-pattern fabrics I picked up on Etsy (the brown ones). I think this turned out well, so I will throw a backing on it and see how it goes —
I took this photo the other day to write a progress post, and I turned around and the thing was done! It is, of course, the "Pink Sparrow Sampler" by Brenda Gervais of With Thy Needle & Thread.
I substituted "Gingersnap" for "Burnt Orange" before I'd even started, as it looked awfully vivid even in my shopping cart. It wasn't until I started stitching with "Pumpkin Patch" that it, too, did not impress me overmuch — it looked exactly like orange sherbet. I've nothing against orange sherbet per se, you know, but it just didn't seem to go with the rest of the colors — and so I overdyed it with some black tea. I think I could have left it in the tea a bit longer, but at least it isn't quite as sherbet-y as it was. I left the "X Y" I'd done pre-tea, and a good portion of the zig-zag just above it, but everything else is over-overdyed (as it were) — the "E F" in the above photo is the tea-dyed batch. "Gingersnap" is actually a rather lovely auburn — it's the flower at bottom right —
There is no signature on this sampler, although it is said to be an antique, and I don't always sign my reproduction pieces, but I decided to sneak my initials in there this time, and did the capital J and S in four-sided stitch. They don't show up particularly loudly, but that's alright with me.
It wasn't until I had finished the lower-case alphabet and was working my way around the lower field that I realized there is no y or z! I suppose the original stitcher felt there wasn't enough room. It is a bit well-populated, I guess, but it seemed a bit harsh to leave off y and z simply because they're at the end and "there wasn't room," and so I tucked them in, one on each side, in one of the quieter colors ("Raspberry Frost") — before (above) and after (below).
The eponymous pink sparrow, although to be honest it isn't very pink. I'm pretty sure it isn't a sparrow, either, but there it is — I'm still quietly pleased with the effect.
The downside — one of the downsides, I guess — to not blogging for a while is that you end up with a half-dozen or so posts coming down the pike, and you wonder, should I post them one-by-one or all at once?! And of course you forget things, or end up with a photo that you can't remember why you took, &c. &c. &c. All of the above.
Here is the "Pink Sparrow" sampler by Brenda Gervais of With Thy Needle & Thread. Unlike "Philadelphia Vine," which sang to me joyfully at once, metaphorically speaking, the "Pink Sparrow" whispered softly, and I thought about it a number of times as I kept coming across it on various journeys around the interwebs, and eventually succumbed to its quiet charms. Started, I admit, the same day that I finished "Philadelphia Vine" …
This has been on my to-be-read list for quite some time — since it was new, I guess. I couldn't find the book I wanted to start, which was Stalky & Co., and so for a complete non sequitur — no, not really, it was just nearby on the shelf where Stalky should have been — I started this. It's very dense, and I'm afraid that Greek names still puzzle me more than a little, so that it's hard to keep everything straight. My only quibble with the book from an editorial perspective is the maps — there are many, but they are pretty clearly cropped down from some antique map so that often there is a great deal of extraneous detail, when one is hoping to focus on the particular episode at hand — the Peleponnesian War was ten years long, so a very great deal happened — but worse, there is no highlighting of what we are supposed to be looking at. If a map is called "The Corcyrean Revolution," say, and it has just a vaguely topographic map with Corcyrea in one corner, I still have no idea what is going on! But Lendon writes wonderfully, and sometimes he slips into Homeric mode and we get sentences like this, on the very first page: "A few days later unfolded the thousands-strong procession from Athens to holy Eleusis, when the initiates carried branches of myrtle tied with wool and bellowed as they marched the sacred roar Iaccho! Iacche!" That is certainly not a stuffy-academic sentence! I can almost forgive him the grating ones that start with "For," when he gives me sentences like that.
I came across Brendon Chase after reading about the "Swallows and Amazons" series — I don't remember now quite why it piqued my interest, but I managed to get hold of a second-hand copy, and began reading it a week or so ago, as a bit of light relief from the Peleponnesian War. I suppose I can see the connection to Ransome's books, in that it centers around children off on their own in the countryside for weeks on end, but certainly the Walkers are doing so with the full permission and approval (because the children are seasoned sailors and campers, mind you) of their parents, whereas the three brothers in Brendon Chase have run away from what is called somewhat sneeringly, about a third of the way along the story, "petticoat government." Perhaps it is because I am now a parent, but it seems to me that the boys — whose parents are in India, so they are staying with a spinster aunt, apparently somewhat elderly — don't have a particularly onerous life with their aunt (certainly not an Oliver-Twist existence), but just have a thing for Thoreau and Tom Sawyer and Robin Hood, and I can't help feeling quite a lot of sympathy for Aunt Ellen, who naturally is worried about them and very cross indeed.
I must have been crazy to agree, as there are a ton of rehearsals and at a considerable distance, but my choir was asked for volunteers to join up with another for a grand-scale production of "Carmina Burana," and I was one of the dozen or so who said yes. It's a weird piece, and challenging, and loud, but wow, is it ever fun to sing! I spent a whole semester on it in college, and then have done it at least twice since then, so luckily for me I know it pretty well, and got to jump right in. I still have some post-pandemic creepies about singing and therefore wear a mask, which is a bit of a downer, but there it is (I am in the minority in the very large group) — it's not so much about me as about the possibility of my passing something all unknowingly along to someone else. Well, on the lighter subject — after years of venturing to suggest to my director that I be freed from the first-soprano section after a decade, back to my beloved first-alto, it was at last agreed that I may do so, and I am happily back where I feel most at home. The soprano section is a nice place to visit, but, no, I don't want to live there! And in the "Carmina" theme, here is a clip of one of my favorite bits — I've chosen one of the more spirited versions on YouTube! —
The "Philadelphia Vine, 1755" sampler from The Scarlett House. I fell head over heels for this the moment I saw it. The colors! the silks with each other, and the silks on the grey-brown linen! the neatly-turned corners! Oh my. Being more than a little late to the reproduction-samplers party, I was surprised to see that this is a nearly-brand-new chart, since so many of the ones I've fancied have been long out-of-print and required combing through second-hand sales to find!
Surprisingly, I had no trouble getting the same fabric as recommended, though that was after I discovered that Weeks Dye Works' "Confederate Grey" is now called simply "Grey". The harder part was getting the silks. Since the colors were what caught me in the first place, I wanted to not substitute for any of them — but fate was against me. The three Dinky Dye silks were quite easy, but Gloriana "Summer Gold" was in short supply, and I could not find "Evergreen" for love or money, and I even came to the point of figuring out DMC substitutions, but then I decided that "Evergreen Dark" seems actually pretty close. Gloriana's "Old Red Barn" was another problem, as it looked quite, well, barn-ish in the pictures I saw, and so when I found a shop in Michigan that had the "Evergreen Dark" and the two other Gloriana reds I figured were most beautiful, I nearly jumped with joy. The colors above are Dinky Dye's "Cottesloe" (the creamy-white), "Saltbush" (light green), and "Seagrass" (dark green), and Gloriana's "Summer Gold," "Evergreen Dark" (dark blue-green), and the two deep reds, "Rosewood" and "Cranberry."
These last are very similar, and probably could easily be substituted for one another without much problem. This skein of "Rosewood" seemed a little deeper to me, and didn't have quite as much variation as the "Cranberry," wh. I now have a full skein of for another project (!).
And after that, this was a pleasure to stitch. I almost wish that I'd had longer to enjoy the process!
The chart is clear and easy-to-read, and aside from those little gold "plusses" in the lower floral border being red on the model and gold on the chart there were no inconsistencies.
The over-one section looks much more cramped on mine than on the model in Scarlett House's photo — I remember seeing somewhere the recommended fabric being 30- or 35-count, not the 40 that is on the chart now, so perhaps the model was worked at a slightly larger scale?
Curiously, considering the trouble that I had in getting hold of it, there was quite a lot of the silk floss left over — maybe even enough to do the whole thing again. (I did not, by the way, have any issue with the silk being wound on a paper bobbin this way — no creases, dents, etc. I suppose that the end closest to the center will have some creases on it when I get there, but I've never found that to be an issue with my cotton floss, as once it's worked on the fabric, it smooths itself out. I do usually wet-block my pieces in cotton floss, though I suppose I won't risk it with the silk here.)
A Bluestocking Knits 