For Show and Tell, Blackbird would like to see a chicken this week. This one, with those exotic and sometimes-unfathomable names that IKEA has, is "Flaxig Tupp". Tupp means cock or rooster, although I don’t know about flaxig — so Tupp he is. I bought this when Laura was very little, along with his friend the goose, because of the wonderful character and expression in them — now honed by a couple of years of being chewed on by small children.
Well, how about this for a flashback? It is another thing I found in the closet — my first cross-stitch! I remember falling in love with the picture in a catalog and sending away for it, though I’d never done cross-stitch before — I’d puttered around with embroidery, and earned my Girl Scout badge for sewing, but it was rather brave of me. I loved the rather Arts & Crafts-y look of it — I see the relationship quite clearly now, although at the time I had no idea, of course.
(I remember that some years later a companion piece came out, a man in similar pseudo-Renaissance dress, with “While Ye May” on his scroll. He looked a bit dorky, though, so I’ve let this girl gather her rosebuds on her own.)
The heatwave cooled a bit this past weekend, and it has been a positively balmy 82 F/28 C or so — cool enough to tackle the Fibber McGee closet in the front bedroom, our catchall-television room. Among a great many other things, I found this, and thought I’d share a last Project Spectrum purple —
This rug was made by my grandmother — she dated it "1947" along one edge. She was an excellent seamstress — one of my greatest regrets is that I did not ask her to teach me the arts of dressmaking — and although I don’t think she ever knitted, she did a lot of other crafts, including of course rug-hooking.
I love swirly acanthus-leaf-type decorations just about any time, but this delights me no end. I love the colors, the swirls, the beautifully-modulated flowers in the center, the subtle color variations from the stripes (?) in the fabric that makes the lighter purple, and of course most of all the fact that my grandmother made it. (Somewhere in the thousand or so Kodachrome slides I’ve got is a picture of this rug or one very much like it, at a long-ago holiday celebration, in front of the piano that I have now.)
I’m not quite sure what to do with the rug — I hate to wrap it up again and put it away, but it is quite fragile around the edges. Perhaps I could sew a new backing on it….
John Singer Sargent, "Lady Agnew of Lochnaw" (1892-93), National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. Another fascinating Sargent portrait (there is a fairly long discussion of this painting here).
Georgia O’Keeffe, "Black and Purple Petunias".
Mary Cassatt, "The Child’s Bath" (1893) Art Institute of Chicago. I’ve always loved this painting, the fabulous combination of colors and patterns, starting with the lovely lavender/green/white stripes on the mother’s dress (especially against the curved lavender rim of the washbasin).
Édouard Manet, "Berthe Morisot With a Bunch of Violets" (1872), private collection. I’m not a huge fan of Manet generally, thinking him more than a bit hit-and-miss, but I like this portrait, Morisot’s big, dark eyes and straightforward expression.
Carl Larsson, "Under the Chestnut Tree" (1912?). This is nice on a summer afternoon, a lazy tea in the shade!
I was hoping to have finished the Pi Shawl by now. I kept thinking, though, that it didn’t quite speak to me. I guess that in the laceweight wool of Elizabeth’s original, the "bumps" made by the K2tog, yo flatten out considerably with blocking, or that they just didn’t get on Elizabeth’s nerves as much as they did on mine. The Koigu is much stiffer than laceweight, has more body, so that the bumps are quite pronounced.. And even though I like the effect of the concentric circles, I missed the pi-ness (pi-ety?) of the ever-doubling radius, which to me seems a lot of the point of the thing. I also had so wanted to use my rosewood circular needles that even though the gauge was pleasant (they are 3.25mm), I was already on the sixth ball before I’d gotten to the "last" increase, and was starting to worry about running out of wool.
This is the first version on one of its few "travels" — to the park —
Here, by the way, is one of the posies that Laura and her enterprising friend made from dandelions and scraps of popped balloons, that day at the park. Laura’s friend is the daughter of a businesswoman, and I had to smile to myself when she went up to someone else’s mom and said, "Do you want to buy this? it’s a quarter." The other mom was so startled at this enterprise in a six-year-old that she handed her twenty-five cents without a word.
And the second version of the Pi Shawl, which I started the other day —
This is on US5 and US6 needles — my largest dpns and my handiest circs. Much bigger gauge, of course, and so it’s going fairly quickly, although I’m sure that it won’t be finished by the end of the month!
The color in the bottom photo is more accurate, as the camera tends to pull the reds out of purple in natural light, although the inside light, even if it leaves more of the purple, rather flattens things out here. It looks a bit drab in the new photo, whereas in reality it is quite vivid, for purple and grey. Almost intense, and luminous, yet in a very subtle way.
Blackbird requests, for Elizabeth, to see our sugar bowl this week for Show and Tell. A few years ago, Albertson’s had these willowware pieces on sale — you know, buy $500 in groceries and you get $2 off a plate. No, actually it was a pretty good deal, and so although I use plain white dishes for everyday, I got a few things to fill in, such as this sugar bowl and creamer, and a few large platters. I love the blue-and-white, and I like that they’re pretty but not too expensive for everyday — and yes, Laura is playing with them even as I write, pouring pretend cream into the sugar bowl.
Booking Through Thursday noticed last week what a disproportionate number of participants had Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings either in their list of "most tattered" books or featured in the photos. So . . .
Sorry, I was fantasizing so much about quilting that I forgot that it was Booking Through Thursday yesterday.
Well, there isn’t much knitting going on lately, what with the temperatures in the daytime well into the 90s F (high 30s C) and humid with it. In other years, we’ve consoled each other with "but it’s a dry heat," but can’t do that now. We have to do our errands in the mornings before it gets too hot, and then we sit around and drink iced tea (me) and cold juice (the girls) and listen to summery music in the afternoons, or go to the library where there is air conditioning.
Show and Tell this week is our coffee maker. Ah. Well…. When David and I got married, we had a tiny cappuccino maker that David had picked up as swag from some job he was working on, and I used that for a long time, running it through its paces for each individual cup as necessary, but it eventually gave out, and, barring the almost-uncontrollable cravings I had for coffee during my first pregnancy, I’ve rarely missed it. This, I confess, is my coffee maker now —
It makes a decent cup of coffee, not particularly high-brow, but sufficient unto the hour!
In other news, this, since there isn’t much knitting (or coffee, even), is what I will be working on soon —
Yes, it’s going to be a "Turning Twenty" quilt! I’ve been wanting to make quilts for the girls for some time now, inspired by the beautiful things that people like Nancy and Jane create. Laura and I went to the crafts shop this morning, while Julia was at summer school, and chose twenty fat quarters and a couple of yards for a border. She chose pretty much all of the fabrics herself — I merely pointed out a few that were pretty, and that a few others were a bit loud (a neon yellow and lime tie-dye, for instance), and laid them all out on a table so that she could judge the effect — and she got some duplicates of those she liked especially. She loves bright colors, but still says that her favorite color is purple, so I was amused to see that that is generally the effect here. Wish me luck!
Knitting, reading, other stuff.
A Bluestocking Knits 