A Bluestocking Knits

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    Booking Through Thursday: Bestsellers from 1956

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    Booking Through Thursday is basing this week’s questions on a list of previous years’ bestsellers.

    In 1956, these were the top ten fiction bestsellers for the year:

  • Don’t Go Near the Water, William Brinkley
  • The Last Hurrah, Edwin O’Connor
  • Peyton Place, Grace Metalious
  • Auntie Mame, Patrick Dennis
  • Eloise, Kay Thompson
  • Andersonville, MacKinlay Kantor
  • A Certain Smile, Françoise Sagan
  • The Tribe That Lost Its Head, Nicholas Monsarrat
  • The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir
  • Boon Island, Kenneth Roberts
      1. Which ones have you read? Did you like them? Yikes! I think the only one I’ve actually read is Eloise, and that must have taken all of half an hour.  I doubled my "read them!" score when I looked at the nonfiction list for the same year — The Search for Bridey Murphy by Morey Bernstein and A Nun’s Story by Kathryn Hulme!
      2. If you haven’t read a single one, which ones have you heard of? Peyton Place, of course, and Auntie Mame.  I read Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse and wasn’t terribly impressed.  All of these titles are vaguely familiar, at least, thanks to years of shelving in the fiction section!
      3. Will you be putting any of these books in your reading list? I had to look up most of the synopses on Amazon to answer this question — I might try Boon Island, an historical shipwreck/survival novel.  The Monsarrat looks very salacious, doesn’t it! — I wonder if the cover has anything to do with the actual story….

      Monserrat_tribethatlostitshead

    1. A Bluestocking Interview with Kate Gilbert

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      Kate Gilbert is, of course, the designer of the Pearl Buck Swing Jacket, currently being fêted here in this knitalong.  She recently took some time from her busy schedule — motherhood, magazine deadlines, unpacking! — to chat with us.

      What was your first sweater design like?
      My very first sweater design was a complete and utter failure. I never put it all together but I still have it. The body is basically a giant poncho and the sleeves are these stubby little things. You can see it here: http://www.kategilbert.com/blog/archives/2006/03/public_knitting.html  I had no idea what I was doing and had only made a (very ugly) scarf before.

      Are you a perfectionist?
      Definitely. I have to learn to let go of a pattern at a certain point because there are deadlines and it’s just not realistic to do things a thousand times. I would get tired of them and never finish them. Thankfully I learn something with each pattern I write and hopefully each one is a slight improvement on the last. Also, I’ve had to learn to let go of my patterns after their published. I’m always happy to see what people do with them. I like when knitters run with them and make them better. Sometimes, they choose a yarn or color or button that I would never have chosen, but I hope that’s what will make it “perfect” for them.

      What is most important to you as a designer — fabric, shape, texture?
      Is D) all of the above a possible answer? I think shape is really my main obsession. My first inspiration for a project usually comes from a certain silhouette that I’m trying to achieve. In the case of the Pearl Buck Jacket, the shape I was going for would have required a fabric that is probably nearly impossible to achieve with knitting but I decided to give it a shot anyway. Then, the yarn that was chosen for the project changed the shape, fabric and texture that was possible. It’s all a compromise.

      Where do you look for inspiration?
      Sometimes it’s a technique that I would like to try or use again. Sometimes when I see people from a distance, I think they are wearing something great and stalk them down to get a closer look. It usually turns out that they aren’t wearing at all what I thought they were so I try to create what I had imagined they were wearing. I guess I’m most inspired by a challenge though. I try to figure out if it’s possible to knit a certain shape, or rather, if I can figure out how to do it, since I imagine anything is possible and there are certainly people out there much cleverer than myself – those knitting mathematician people could probably knit anything.

      What do you enjoy most about your work? least?
      I love that feeling you get at the end of a project, you know, the one where you say, “I made that!” and you want to show it to everyone. Believe it or not, I also like the deadlines. I would probably never finish anything without them. I’m good at working under pressure and with restrictions. I practically never finish any of my non-work projects. If I can be honest, the thing I like the least is having to go back and reexamine a project when it’s done. By the time knitters are out there knitting up a pattern, usually at least 6 months have passed since I knit it and thought about it. I’ve usually finished a couple projects since then and am neck deep in something new. I find it really hard to go back and remember why and how I did something in order to answer questions that people email me. They often have a better idea of what’s going on in the pattern than I do.

      Is there a usual starting point for your designs? Do you plant it all out first or improvise on the needles?
      All of my projects start with a sketch or at least a vision of what I’d like to make. I’ve tried just sitting down and knitting something, but I’m not really that sort of person. I need to plan it down to the last stitch and then revise it on the needles. I’ve tried several times to make things that were randomly striped. I can’t do it. I always end up sitting in front of my computer planning my stripes so they appear random.

      What knitters have influenced you?
      Kaffe Fassett was my first big influence. I taught myself to knit when I was in high school using books that I had found in the library. Most were full of patterns that I wouldn’t have touched, especially as a 16 year old! It was only when my art teacher lent me his wife’s copy of “Family Album” that I realized there were all sorts of possibilities for using color and patterns in knitting and that yarn didn’t have to come from Walmart. More recently, Elizabeth Zimmermann never fails to inspire me.

      If you were to have a motto in life, what would it be?
      Try everything once – except organ meats.

      Kate blogs at Needles on Fire, and more of her patterns are available at kategilbert.com.  Thanks again, Kate!

    2. The Green Gallery, Continued

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      Francistowne_ariccia_1781_britishmuseum

      Francis Towne, "Ariccia" (1781), British Museum, London.  I’m afraid that this scan looks more than a little grey, but it was the only one I could find of this lovely little watercolor — the trees are actually a beautiful Italian dusky-green, against a pale creamy-blue sky.  Ariccia (sometimes spelled "Arricia" — Towne wrote "Larice" at the bottom) is an ancient town near Rome, redesigned in the mid-1600s by Bernini, whose dome of the church of Santa Maria dell’Annunciazione appears in the background here.

      Degas_carriageattheraces_1869_mfaboston

      Edgar Degas, "A Carriage at the Races" (1869), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  So elegant, so Degas!  I love the smoothness of the grass, the sheen of the horses, the combination of imbalance — the mass of the horses at the right against the near-emptiness at the left — and balance — the driver, the dog, the mother, the second lady, all focussed on the baby under the pale yellow parasol at the center.

      Cezanne_montsaintevictoireseenfrombellev

      Paul Cézanne, "Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bellevue" (ca. 1882-85), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

      Holbein_christinaofdenmark_1538_national

      Hans Holbein the Younger, "Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan" (1538), National Portrait Gallery, London.  A fabulous effort by one of my favorite portraitists.  The yellow floor and the green wall (with its mysterious shadow on one side), the wonderful flow and texture of her gown, her level, strong-willed yet rather seductive gaze — brilliant.  I love the story that when the suggestion was made that the young widow marry Henry VIII — who was then casting about for his fourth wife — she replied that if she had two heads, she might, but as it was she had only one.  Holbein has certainly given the impression of a girl who can hold her own on the Renaissance political stage!

      Bastet_26thd

      "Bronze Statuette of Bastet" (26th Dynasty, 664 BC-525 BC) Senusret Collection, California Institute of World Archaeology, Santa Barbara.  One of my most beloved possessions is a reproduction of a similar Egyptian cat from the British Museum.  This is an equally lovely one, although slightly different, mostly about the ears, which are pricked forward in the British Museum’s cat.  The serenity of this little cat appeals to me greatly, and the way that the artist has captured the essence of cat-ness.

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      Thoughts on the Mittens for Next Winter

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      Ezmittens1

      Elizabeth discusses a variety of mittens in this chapter of the Knitter’s Almanac — thumbs at the side (thus at first interchangeable for right or left hands), thumbs that fold naturally against the palm, Norwegian-patterns on front and back, and the ones that I knitted this week, mitered ones that shape themselves into a point at the top.

      I used two balls of Cleckheaton Machinewash 8 Ply Crepe, in a bright teal green with colored flecks, which I fondly imagine would be lovely against snow, although I don’t know if living here in Southern California will give me much chance to find out!  The miters, alternating an increase and a decrease, shape the mitten very prettily.  At the spot where you want the mitten to curve around the ends of your fingers, you simply eliminate the increases at the sides and continue with the decreases, which pulls the sides of the mitten into a point at the top — which discovery cheers Elizabeth enormously!

      I added one more decrease round at the tip, because it was easier to graft that way, and it made the grafting all of a piece with the line of mitering up the front and back — thus,

      Ezmittens2

      Elizabeth also digresses a little onto the subject of color, with which mittens are an ideal means of experimentation.  Do people see the same colors differently, and does this account for the different preferences for the same colors that people have, she wonders.  And associations with certain colors can matter enormously — "For years," she says, "I loathed purple because it was the color of a droopy and voluminous hand-me-down coat I had to wear"!  Mittens, since they take so little wool, can be a way to try different colors, or combinations, of course, with little emotional or financial investment!

      You snip a stitch where you want the thumb to go, and unravel a bit (I was amazed at how easy this was, after cutting the Aran last January — I was quite blasé, and snipped without a second thought),

      Ezmittens3

      then pick up 15 or so stitches and work the thumb in the round.

      Ezmittens4

      I put the thumbs a bit low, I realized afterwards, and would recommend that you judge by the spot where your thumb connects to your palm, not at the bottom of your thumb joint (this part is a little vague in the book).  That spot will be at the outside edge of the mitten, keeping in mind that the miter will cause the unravelled row to run downwards at a 45° angle towards the center of the mitten.  (You will need to mark the spot at the edge, and then follow that row down to the middle of the miter, because you need to snip in the middle and then use the unravelled ends to reinforce the edges of the hole, as in the photos above.)

      I added a bit of length to the thumb to compensate for the smaller gauge of the Cleckheaton, but that was all.

      I found that the easiest way of sewing in the ends was in fact to wear the mitten, which gave the odd but amusing sensation of sewing on my own hand!

      Ezmittens5

      These are not perfectly anatomically correct mittens, and this is something of a detraction, for it means that the thumb when worn pulls the miter away from its line —

      Ezmittens6

      but on the whole, I think that the sheer ease of this pattern is much in its favor.

      Ezmittens7

      "Stash them away as they are finished, and when the time comes, next winter, you can deal them out with a liberal hand"!

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      Booking Through Thursday: Recent Finishes

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      Booking Through Thursday writes, "We haven’t done anything like this for a while, so here goes…"

      1. What are the last five books that you finished reading? Parts one and two of The Heaven Tree Trilogy by Edith Pargeter — audio versions of Pride and Prejudice and Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile — can’t think of a fifth, I’m afraid, having far too many things in the half-finished stack.
      2. How long did it take you to read them? I read The Heaven Tree and The Green Branch together in less than a week, amazingly enough — didn’t get anything else done — I listened to the audiobooks while knitting of an evening, and so took I think about four to six weeks here and there.
      3. Did you enjoy reading these books? Why or why not? I enjoyed all of these very much — Death on the Nile I wrote about a few weeks ago, and the Pride and Prejudice read by Irene Sutcliffe is equally brilliant in its way.  (Both of these are from Chivers, which is apparently now part of BBC Audiobooks, whose server seems to be on its tea break at the moment, so I can’t link.)  Sutcliffe’s characterizations are not as dramatically varied as Suchet’s, but then this is, I think, more appropriate to Austen anyway!  (I will write more about The Heaven Tree when I’ve finished the third book.)

    5. A Rock

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      St_2 

      "Show and Tell" this week wants to see a rock.  I got this one some years ago from my favorite boss, who went on a vacation one summer and collected a small bag’s worth of interesting rocks and pebbles for us in the Technical Services department.  I chose this one because of its interesting shape, that fit so well into the curve of my hand.  It is some kind of marble, and so I fondly imagine it from its once-cylindricalness to be the long-lost arm of some Grecian statue, perhaps even the Venus de Milo, broken off in the mists of antiquity, worn smooth by the sea, to be found by a librarian on a sandy beach in Mexico.

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      Thoughts on the Pearl Buck Swing Jacket

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      Swingjacket_637

      The Pearl Buck Swing Jacket is a wonderful design — simple and classic.  It comes together easily, and requires only a bit of care when blocking and piecing together to look very elegant.

      The Jaeger Extrafine Merino is beautifully soft on my skin.  The elderberry color is lovely, too, full of depth and drama — it looks rather more purple in some lights, but usually tends more towards the burgundy with purply-blue undertones.

      Swingjacket560_1

      (Julia, who is usually so camera-shy that she is pouting in all of her school pictures this year, decided that this time she did want her photo taken, and so she refused to move out of range, and in fact climbed into my lap for quite some time.)

      Swingjacket615

      The pleat at the back is the most unusual thing about this jacket, but the half-diamond edging at the front and the back yoke worked from side to side are also subtle but interesting details.

      Swingjacket522

      I made a minor adjustment to the length of the sleeves as follows: in the first decrease section (at the lower arm), instead of 11 plain rows between the decrease rows, I worked 13, giving a total of 14 rows for the shaping, worked 5 times altogether.  At the "continue even" section just before the beginning of the cap shaping, I worked 12 rows straight, and the piece measured 11 1/4 in. instead of 10 1/4 in. as given.  This kept the stitch count on the needle the same as in the instructions, but added about an inch to the length.  I could just as easily have worked an extra inch straight at that last section before the start of the cap shaping, but this would have made the bell-shape end lower down, and I wanted to extend it closer to the elbow.  (The bell-ness does not show much after blocking.)  If I’d thought about it ahead of time, I might have added an extra inch to the length of the body, so that the sleeve/body proportions would have been the same as in the original — as it is now, after I lengthened it, the sleeve is just a smidge shorter than the body, and would look a bit better if it was about two inches.  This is a minor quibble, though!

      Swingjacket_633_1

      It is also very comfortable, partly from the lovely merino, but also the shaping and fit.  Ten out of ten!

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      Swing Jacket Monday

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      Beth writes, "Another crazy busy week – I’m only just finishing up the second sleeve.  Then on to the real business, I’m going to tackle the back."

      As for me, I finished knitting on Thursday night, and started sewing up on Friday!

      Prep_2

      I actually have not had much experience in putting together a fitted garment — in fact, I’m wondering if this is my first one — have done drop-shoulders before, and the raglan-like sleeves of the top-down style, but nothing like these beautifully rounded ones.  I was a bit apprehensive, and so I got out my old Vogue Knitting reference for reassurance.

      I found it much easier to sew in the sleeve cap before sewing up the sleeve and side seams, rather than sewing the sleeve and side seams first as the pattern says.  I speak from experience, having done the first sleeve cap first (the way that VK recommends), and the second cap after the straight seams just now — it was considerably less awkward doing that curved seam with the sleeve flat, so that I could hold the two pieces together more comfortably and smoothly.

      While I doubt that sewing up will ever be my favorite part of knitting a garment, I must admit that I am more interested in it than I ever was.  I took a great deal of pleasure in watching the way that the mattress stitches went from loose …

      Mattress3

      Mattress4

      Mattress5

      to snug with a single smooth pull on the working yarn.  (It’s almost like the way an invisible zipper pulls the two sides together.)  I did have a lot of trouble with matching the lengths, and frequently ended up with about half an inch more on one side at the end of a seam — on average, I think I did each seam three times — and so I started putting in markers to match up as I went along, usually four on each long seam, so that any extra length would be distributed more evenly.

      Matching1

      Matching2

      I also used a safety-pin version of Vogue‘s and Knitty’s marker method of picking up stitches along the curved neckline, dividing the length fairly evenly by 10 (for the 97 stitches — a.k.a. almost-100 — to be picked up).

      Pickingupcollar

      For those who, like me, are still fairly new to mattress stitch, I found myself dropping into this hypodermic position — oddly enough, it was quite natural, even though I have never actually inserted a hypodermic needle.  It felt much easier on my wrist than holding the needle in the usual manner, since I could aim and scoop up a stitch simply by moving my thumb, instead of my whole wrist.  It wasn’t always possible to do it like this, because of the way that some of the pieces fitted together, but it was helpful, and so I pass it along.

      Sewing

      I sewed in the twenty-seven ends — would have been twenty-nine, but I knitted in two of them along with the collar — last night while watching "Jericho" and "Rosemary & Thyme", two, er, rather disparate mystery series, the one grim and hard-boiled and the other a more typical English "cozy" mystery, light-hearted and not terribly demanding. 

      Pictures, as they say, to follow!

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      Knitting the “Knitter’s Almanac”: Mittens for Next Winter

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      Ack! it’s the 17th of May already, and I’ve not even cracked open the Almanac for this month’s project!

      I’ve thought about it, any number of times, but last month’s blanket is not even a quarter of the way to being finished — Hedera, and the Swing Jacket, of course, and secret birthday projects coming up — and life in general.  You know how it is.  So, here’s the plan — the Mystery Blanket will plug along happily behind the scenes (I can crank out a square while watching a longish movie, but there are twenty-four of the bally things to do, you don’t need to see each one), as will the secret birthday projects, and I’ll do the Mittens for Next Winter now.  Luckily, this is a fairly modest project!

      But — deep breath, relax — "it is better," Elizabeth says, "not to make mittens in a hurry."  When you want them, "when snow flies and small frozen hands beg for warmth (sob)," the knitting gets rushed and perfunctory — so "let’s make them in May; let’s take our time over them; let’s venture into new approaches and designs; let’s enjoy them"!

      I had been tempted before, when considering this Almanac project, by the lovely Norwegian mittens, with the big eight-pointed star on the back of the hand — but I think I will be realistic, and plump for the single-colored ones "gingered up" with mitered shaping.  On this scale, perhaps, color work would not take much extra time, but there is a deadline, after all, if only a modest and self-imposed one!  I have in fact never knit mittens before, so either would do quite nicely.

      8plycrepe_1558

      I’m thinking about the Cleckheaton 8-Ply Crepe which I bought last summer at Mui Tong Wools ….

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      Swing Jacket Monday

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      We have a new face in the knitalong this week, Bec of Glamorouse, who writes, "I’m feeling a bit of a fraud that I’m yet to cast on, but somebody has to be last, right?  My last hurdle is that I’m still waiting on my Bendigo Wool Mills colour card to get yarn (Suse’s recommendation and I trust her completely on this one!) but I have the needles, I have the pattern, and I’m returning to my normal job today after three months of an extra-demanding project so hopefully I now also have the TIME to knit!"

      As for me, well, I didn’t think I had the time this week either, since my choir had not one but two performances of Mozart’s Mass in c minor, involving numerous trips both "home" and "away" for rehearsals, and the concerts this weekend.  This was more than a bit of bother, but on the other hand I had Mozart in my head all week, and that can’t be bad. 

      Now, I can’t make any particularly educated statements about the Mozart effect one way or the other — but I wouldn’t be surprised if this time it was just the adrenalin —

      Blocking2

      as I finished both of the sleeves this week, and everything is blocking.

      Pass the Chibi!

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