A Bluestocking Knits

What with computer problems, camera software issues, phone camera difficulties*, &c. &c. &c. and the general ennui of summer in Southern California on top of post-2020 malaise, well, I have not been blogging.  This is not to say that I haven't been stitching, wh. is possibly the one thing that has kept me sane these past months, and I've clung tenaciously to it.  But I did take lots of photos, there is that! so here is a catch-up post, maybe the first of a short series ….

*I still can't get the top photo a little sharper.

An old family friend said to me, as they were packing up to move to Arizona about two years ago, "Hey, I've got this cross-stitch that I haven't been able to work on for a long time — when I find it, would you finish it for me?!"  I laughed and said yes.  She added, "It's a peacock by Teresa Wentzler."  At the time, this didn't mean anything to me, but then after I dug out my own unfinished sampler, and did some research online about it, I discovered that it, too, is by Teresa Wentzler, and I remembered J's peacock cross-stitch, as the name had stuck in my head.  I sent her the above photo and proposed a Wentzler finish-along (ha-ha!), and about half an hour later she texted back, saying, "I managed to find mine, let's do it!"  And so all of this summer, we have been texting back and forth, sending progress photos and encouraging each other.  I have much the easier project, as the cottage sampler, while some 20 sts bigger in both directions, has a lot more "white space" and no partial stitches, while J's — which is called "Peacock Tapestry" — is very dense in a lot of places, and lots of foliage (which is difficult because it is irregular and the colors are usually very closely shaded, and so can be easily confused).

I did, though, have a bit of a handicap, as I remembered that one of the reasons I kept putting this back in the drawer was that somehow in the intervening years between 1991 and 2013, I guess (my first "miniature" carpet), I switched from making crosses with the first stroke like this / and the second like this \, to the other way round, first this \ and then this /.  It doesn't sound that important, but if you mix the two in the same piece, it looks messy, even chaotic at times, and so it just Isn't Done.  Some time ago, I had picked out the offending bit of water horizon and fixed it, then put the piece away again, so that at least was no longer an issue, but everything I had done up to then was "right-handed crosses," and after two years of some rather intense cross-stitching "left-handed"*, I just could not make myself do it the other way.

*Which is silly, really, calling it that, as I am thoroughly right-handed, and I now make my cross-stitches the same way I write Xs, first \ and then /.  How is that "left-handed"?!  (I just polled the girls, both of whom are left-handed, and one writes her Xs "left-handed" and the other "right-handed"!  And Laura makes her cross-stitches "right"-handed.)

And so I ended up picking out almost everything that I had done so far, bar a short stretch of the outermost dark-blue border that I had only worked half-way, which I finished by (laboriously) running the thread under the first stroke in order to have them be lefties.  As you might expect, it was actually easier in the long run to pick it out and do it all over again.  Luckily for me, I hadn't actually got very far in 1991, relatively speaking, and so once I resolved to re-do it, it wasn't as much of an ordeal as I had feared.  ("There's a life lesson for you," I remarked to Laura.  "Don't be afraid to accept that something is a mistake, and to fix it.")

There are a lot of threads, and thread blends, to keep track of here!  I thought I was being fairly clever in my system of hole-punched index cards, and I was in that I only mixed up one batch of blends for the whole piece, but after a while all of the long ends of threads got handled a lot, and tangled, so I think that the next time I do a large project, I will think of something else — bobbins, probably.  (Some people use three-ring binders, with the flosses hanging from a similar kind of card, just the length that the binder is tall, but for some reason that just doesn't click with me.)

30th April: The old swans are picked out, but the frame around them is still the "righties".  I have no idea now why some of the white gingham-like bars have gold stitches here and there.  (I tweaked the lower-case z a bit from the original, which looked a bit skimpy to my eye.  The lower-case s will crop up again later.)

18th May. I decided, when I got to the upper-case alphabet, that I would leave those particular righties as they were.  The letters are far enough away from the other areas that it won't be obvious unless you look closely — so I rationalized to J — and it would be pleasing to have a little bit of the "original" 1991 stitching still intact.  It's now a Design Element.

It has been very comforting and encouraging, having a compatriot.  I felt a bit guilty, that my progress has been by leaps and bounds compared to hers, but she said that she appreciates having somebody who is having similar struggles and who understands that "progress" can be a hard-won square inch at times!  I have had the somewhat dubious "advantage" this summer, too, of unusually chronic insomnia, so that sometimes I will stitch a few hours in the evening, and then carry on for much of the night, so it's quite likely that I have at least twice the stitching time, maybe more, than she does.

Swans in progress.  I used the lazy-daisy embellishment as a bit of light relief now and then from all of the whites and greys.  (I also did a lot of "parking" of my threads, not cutting them but temporarily securing them to one side until the time came to shift the fabric up in the frame — this is a bit of a bother but saved cutting threads.  There are a lot of ends back there!)

Swans done!  I think this was one of the things that appealed to me most in 1991.  Swans on a sampler — fabulous!

7th July.  I started running out of threads at this point, to my surprise just a few colors as the kit was very generous with threads but of course picking out almost everything I'd done was going to drastically affect my thread supplies in certain areas.  A number of DMC colors were affected by the changes that the company had to make in order to comply with then-new EU environmental regulations — a number of grey shades were affected in 1994, and a number of red shades in 2017.  The 613 is not actually on the list of colors affected by the changes, but either it actually is, or the lengths of 613 were the only ones in my kit affected by thirty years in a manila envelope — regardless, for whatever reason, my old 613 was noticeably darker than my new 613, as you can see here in the mosaic stitches at the edges of the "thatch".  J made the brilliant suggestion that, instead of either a), picking out all of the old 613 and re-doing it in new 613, or b) picking out the new 613 and re-doing it in 612, which is curiously a closer match to the old 613 than the new 613 is (!), that I pick out only the old 613 on the lower edge of the main roof and re-do it in the new 613 to match the bit at the top edge.  This would make the two side roofs look as though they are more in shadow than the main roof.  "It would give it some depth," she added, convincingly.

And so I did that —

I had heard, by the way, of magnetic "needle keeps" and since there was a small stack of earth magnets in my metal gluing jig, I decided to give that a try with a pair.  Very handy!  I have also used them to keep a coil of the current floss nearby.

Now I need to go and try to convince my phone to hand over the August photos …

I have some catching up to do, clearly.  But in the meantime —

There has been a bit of knitting going on, but it's just too hot at the moment, and frankly, I am so thoroughly fascinated with antique samplers and samplers-in-the-antique-style that that is what has been absorbing my imagination and attention for most of the summer.  I have finished the "English Cottage" at last — after thirty years! pictures to come — and so may now go back to my earlier "to do" list with a clear conscience.

This is Darlene O'Steen's "Floral Sampler," published in the February 1996 issue of "Just Cross Stitch" magazine — it is the second of my three O'Steen must-haves.  (There are other O'Steen charmers, to be sure!)  These colors are quite vivid in real life, it seems to me, more than in any photo of the finished sampler I've seen — a bit startlingly so, but I am trusting O'Steen's judgement.  (Though I will admit to already having tweaked the numbers line and switched out the long signature for a motto …)  The fabric is Zweigart's Belfast linen in "Winter Moon" — nearly white, with just a hint of cream.

I usually start a piece in the center, but I'm pretty sure that the pre-cut piece of linen that I bought is too big length-wise, and just maybe there might be enough left at the bottom that I can trim it off and use it for something else — and so for once I've started at the top of the chart.  I was amused all over again, on the Holbein-stitch band, at the near-magical transformation that occurs after the first pass, when you have just a jumble of apparently-random stitches, that with the second pass turn into a motif!  O'Steen's thoroughness is much in evidence here, as she not only incorporates the dividing band below the flowers into the Holbein motifs, but gives the specific sequence to follow throughout, so that this section is in fact entirely reversible! —

(Or would have been, if I had taken the trouble to hide that little blip from my thread changes!)

The dividing band below the first line of text is also reversible, thanks to O'Steen's numbering — it's not necessary on a sampler, of course, but I must say it is a bit of a kick to get to the end of the line and turn it over and see that it looks just the same on the back as on the front!

I come across this in a drawer every so often, the outer envelope getting more and more ragged as the years pass.  After my first cross-stitch piece, I was on a mailing list, and got catalogs regularly — in one was this, a kit called simply "English Cottage Sampler".  Being by then an Anglophile of some years' standing, I was charmed by it.

The kit still shows up on Ebay etc., so I guess a lot of other stitchers didn't even get as far as I did, which wasn't very.  I remember finding that I'd worked one section of the water horizon too high, and for some reason — or maybe life got in the way, those became busy years, I remember — I couldn't face picking it out.  (It's funny to think that it wouldn't faze me much at all, now.  I've picked out eyelet and queen stitches! picking out crosses is child's play.)

Since this got packed away some time in the early 1990s, and I think I did not do any cross-stitch again until … good heavens, two decades later, the name Teresa Wentzler didn't mean anything to me until recently.  The earliest chart that I can see on her website is from 1989, so perhaps she was still relatively new when I bought the "Cottage" — she is now known for intricate designs with lots of colorwork, especially with blended threads, and her designs, unlike say Darlene O'Steen's which are quite formal and squared, are full of swirls and curves.  But like O'Steen, Wentzler does not stick to cross-stitch alone, and includes sometimes a number of other "specialty" stitches — the "Cottage" for example includes Smyrna cross, Algerian eyelet, diagonal satin stitch, and lazy-daisy stitch.

It was nice to find this on Wentzler's website just now:

Background Information: This sampler was inspired by pastoral scenes from the English countryside … (my admittedly romanticized view!) It is also my first attempt at designing a piece using whole cross stitches (except for the specialty stitches, which were also a new departure for me at the time). Samplers offer unique challenges; designing them is a welcome change-of-pace for me. Letters (alphabets) are especially interesting to manipulate compositionally … they must not overpower, but rather, must compliment the rest of the design in order to achieve a pleasing balance.

Stitching Comments: Because it has no quarter stitches, this piece is significantly less difficult to stitch than most of my other designs. However, it is very large, and the hand-drawn chart is a challenge to read in places. Several people have told me that this piece is the very first of my designs they attempted, because of its relative simplicity … they seemed quite pleased (and justifiably proud!) of the results.

I wasn't entirely sure when I started writing this post that I wouldn't just put everything back in the envelope, but I think now that it will go onto my frame to be worked.  I have two O'Steen charts on my must-do list — the "Floral" a.k.a. "Lady Brittany," and "Virtue Outshines the Stars" — and I meant to start the "Floral" soon, but haven't managed to get hold of all of the overdyed threads yet, which seem even harder to get hold of the past year and a half.  That's not the only reason, of course — I should finish it for itself.

(You can still get the "Cottage" chart, as it happens ….)