A Bluestocking Knits

Counted Stitch, Samplers

Floral

Published by

Bluestocking

on

24th August 2022

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!
Counted Stitch, Samplers

An English Cottage …

Published by

Bluestocking

on

9th April 2022

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 ….)
Counted Stitch, Quilting

Stitching, Stitching

Published by

Bluestocking

on

4th March 2022

I am on the home stretch with the "Patience" sampler, with just a few more repeats of the green border, about half of the red flowers, and filling in the rest of the tiny landscape. I'm still getting a big kick out of it, the over-the-top-ness of those letters!

(You can see where I changed my mind, not having believed the designer when she said to use two threads for the double running stitch around the letters — I did Q, R, and S with one thread, then realized that she was probably right, and carried on with two threads, going back over R and S later to plump them out, as it were. Haven't done Q yet, as I can't decide if it looks anemic or if I should leave it!)

Continuing my series of mini-quilts-turned-placemats, here is one to the "Brick Road" pattern from Temecula Quilt Company, the original of which ended up in my sampler quilt. (I am not exactly learning to love orange, but perhaps at least to accept it … in very small doses …)

And the Broken Dishes from Prairie Children and Their Quilts by Kathleen Tracy. This one is a kind of friendship piece, the whites being almost all TQC's but the others being some of my own stash (including scraps left from Laura's quilt and my big half-square triangles), some of Betty's from the estate sale, and some from a garage sale at the end of my street a few weeks ago — we shared a wry laugh about fabric acquisition.

I'm enjoying the smallness of these projects, easily manageable in a few days, even the hand-quilting. Very satisfying.

And — I couldn't believe my luck — at a swap meet a few weeks ago I found this sampler dated 1830, and bought it for a song, a pittance. I was not surprised when I sent a photo to Amy Finkel and she replied, briefly but kindly, that it is not worth conserving, but very happy when she agreed that it is indeed from 1830. I plan to rechart it …
Counted Stitch

The Pomegranate Sampler

Published by

Bluestocking

on

3rd March 2022

The "Pomegranate Sampler" by Darlene O'Steen, from the May/June 1986 issue of "Just Cross Stitch" magazine. I think this is one of her earliest designs, which is all the more impressive, that she started off at this level of excellence. I enjoyed every moment of working this sampler — even the frustrations of having to pick out mistakes (of which I made a number) were only fleetingly annoying, because it was a pleasure to have it in my hands.

I did make a few changes in the blue alphabet — frankly, it surprised me not a little that she made some slightly tortuous modifications to two of the As when simply re-spacing the words would allow the full letter to fit, but there it is — my quirk is that I deeply appreciate a beautifully-spaced alphabet and therefore will go to some trouble to get it!

I had bought a lovely selection of overdyed threads, but as I said before, I ended up using only two of them, Old Blue Jeans for the eyelet-stitch alphabet and Used Brick, which is the darker pink of the "strawberries" and other bits throughout — these are both by Crescent Colors. (Partly this is due to the fact that there just aren't enough overdye shades to make reasonable equivalents to the range of DMC or Anchor threads … I will certainly remember in future that most of the conversion charts online are in some cases wildly "approximate"!) The other colors I used here are for the most part the DMC ones that O'Steen suggested as an alternative for the original Au Ver à Soie silks.

The fabric is Weeks Dye Works' 32-count linen in "Cocoa".

I still don't really like working eyelet stitch, but they look lovely in that blue, don't they!

I couldn't really tell from the just-not-quite-clear-enough photograph on the cover of the magazine, but it seemed to me that the satin stitch was running all in the same direction, i.e. that the top and bottom were meant to be short vertical stitches and the sides to be long vertical stitches. This seemed a bit reckless to me, having long floats of thread lying on top of the fabric, and it seemed far more thrilling to me to miter the corners of the border, so that is what I did. (And as I said, O'Steen's tip in The Proper Stitch of working it with one thread in the needle going round twice, instead of the potentially-twisting two making a single pass, worked more perfectly than I could have hoped!)

Queen stitch is clearly a favorite of O'Steen's, as she uses it a lot — I find it hard to get the threads to lie nice and flat, but it was worth picking out a half-dozen or so and doing them over!

I really like the way that some stitchers worked their family's initials in their samplers, and so the other biggish change I made was to re-do the signature panel in order to include them — these letters are worked over one thread, which was tiny! —
Counted Stitch, Embroidery

Ukraine Solidarity

Published by

Bluestocking

on

3rd March 2022

As a peaceful protest and as a sign of solidarity with the Ukrainian people, Antony of At the Point Studio has generously made this chart free to share as a stitch-along project. For details on the symbolism of the motifs and colors, inspired by traditional Ukrainian embroidery designs, and a PDF of the chart, please visit his post here.
Embroidery, Samplers

Patience, Indeed …

Published by

Bluestocking

on

27th February 2022

This is the "Patience" sampler by Homespun Samplar, which I saw one day not long ago on a Pinterest list called something like "100 Best Samplers of All Time" — a rather sweeping claim, to be sure! — and I fell for it instantly. The blackwork, certainly, and something about the over-the-top-ness of the letters just spoke to me! The original shade of linen is still available (a Zweigart standard, happily for me), so I managed to get a piece, marked the center, put it in my frame, and dove in. It wasn't until I was well along the next line of the alphabet that I realized what I had done …
Crochet, Family, Miniatures, Miniatures – Street of Shops, Samplers

Long Time, No See

Published by

Bluestocking

on

26th February 2022

Oh dear, it has been a very long time indeed since I posted anything. In my defense, my computer — which was at least ten years old — has been fading fast this past year, and around Christmas-time the top row of the keyboard just stopped working. I debated with myself whether to try writing posts without using those letters, and in my younger days I might have enjoyed the challenge, but, well … no, I just couldn't face it! (No "e"! That alone is 12% of the words in English!) I then got a lovely new laptop that seemed every day to have some different bug — I still can't print anything double-sided — and didn't have any photo-editing program. On the bright side, I was extraordinarily happy in the meantime stitching the "Pomegranate" sampler, despite some at-the-time-horrendous mistakes on my part, and so I was quite content to stitch and make sympathetic noises while David fussed over the new computer.

It wasn't until the third row of the blue alphabet, for instance, that I realized it was supposed to be eyelet stitch, not cross-stitch, so I had to pick it out and do it again. More poignantly, I had been so very pleased with the overdyed threads, and as it turned out, almost one by one, I thought, "no, that color just isn't working" or "well, there's a bit too much variation in the overdye there," and ended up using only two of the eleven that I had chosen. I took the above photo just after I decided that the color of the "green" pomegranates was too bright — and too blue — and so I picked out one of them and tried a different color —

— which I liked much better.

One of the intriguing things about this particular sampler was the satin-stitch border — quite unusual. I had a slightly different color of linen than the original, and it seemed to me that the original color was getting a bit lost, and so at the same time that I auditioned some similar shades I also tried O'Steen's tip — from her book, not unfortunately from the chart for this sampler — to work it with a single thread run through twice, instead of a double thread, because the two-at-a-time threads have a tendency to twist and overlap each other as you work. You can see this in the section at the bottom (which is worked in the original color) —

Each of these four satin-stitch areas has two threads per hole, but the bottom one is worked with both of the threads in the needle at the same time, while the other three are worked with a single thread, working essentially two stitches in each hole. This takes twice as long to do, obviously, but the result was clearly so much tidier that there was no question about which to do!

It surprises me that I haven't taken pictures of the finished sampler yet, but I will do that soon and make a separate post. In the meantime …

I said to Julia one afternoon not long ago, "Let me teach you some basic crochet, so that you will always be able to make yourself a supply of dishcloths," and to my pleasant surprise, she agreed. ("Someday I might want to do some Irish crochet," she said thoughtfully.) I couldn't find the hook I usually use for dishcloths, so she had to use a size smaller — I went smaller rather than larger just because the cloths tend to stretch out a bit when they get wet, and we tend to like them a bit snug. The first one, at the bottom, is single crochet, and the others are double and half-double. It's kind of funny, because I remember the girls' bits of knitting — fifteen years ago! — that were all wobbly and full of holes, and Julia I think didn't even get an inch knitted before she decided that she wasn't interested at all, and now she worked a row or two with me showing her what to do, then she went off by herself and focused intently on it, after a few wobbles at the start keeping the stitches perfectly uniform. That is what a year or two of making bobbin lace can do for one's concentration and standards!

(That, by the way, is pretty much exactly how I learned to knit, getting the basics from my mom, then going off by myself to work at it until I figured out how to get it all going smoothly!)

My New Year's resolution this year — yes, the only one — is to finish my three 1:12 shops. I don't know why I was so uninterested in them the past few years — well, not uninterested, it was just that other things were more interesting, I guess — but there it is. But to that end, I bought a few new-to-me things to inspire myself, including these little charmers for the tea shop, which are from Old Bell Pottery — I love that the teapot even has that little steam hole in the lid! —
Crochet, Quilting, Samplers, Shawls and Scarves

Pomegranates and Pinwheels

Published by

Bluestocking

on

11th December 2021

Linen and threads to start the "Pomegranate Sampler" by Darlene O'Steen — I'm looking forward to this very much! The linen is Weeks Dye Works' in "Cocoa" with a collection of threads from Weeks, Classic Colorworks, and Simply Shaker, converted from the DMC list on the chart. I'm also relieved to see that although I had to choose both the fabric and the threads without seeing them in person, the results are fairly successful!

A crocheted snowflake for an exchange-by-mail with our lace group. This one is called "Matterhorn" one of the amazing variety from SnowflakePatterns. I had planned to use starch to block this, but it is so ethereal that I was concerned it wouldn't hold its shape for long, so I re-blocked it with full-strength white glue. This one is in Coats size 30 crochet cotton using a US9 steel hook, and, impressively, is not as difficult as it looks!

The second of my two Temecula Quilt Company kits, an unnamed pinwheel. I'm quietly pleased to find that I'm getting better both at piecing and at hand-quilting.

The "Léontine Coutances" sampler by Mamilou, a free reproduction chart of a ca.1900-1910 French sampler. I decided to work this to look a bit more like the original than like the chart, so I left out most of the now-missing stitches and kept some of Léontine's mistakes, though I confess I added a few of my own! I like the effect of using three strands of floss instead of the more-usual-these-days two — it does have that plump "vintage" look, as I'd hoped — and was not too much for this rather loosely-woven Charles Craft linen.

And my "Camptown Races," thanks to no less than three concerts of Julia's for which I sat knitting while waiting for the curtain to go up, is actually starting to look like it's going to be a scarf! Huzzah!
Family, Quilting, Samplers, Shawls and Scarves

Saturday

Published by

Bluestocking

on

27th November 2021

Not long ago, David needed to go down to San Diego to collect some tool or other that he was buying from a friend, and said, "Let's have a little road trip," and so he and I went to Temecula and visited the Temecula Quilt Company shop which has been mentioned rather frequently here of late, and which is going to online-only in the next few months. I had thought, "Gee, what can I do with all of these mini quilts once I sew them up" as I'm not really the quilt-on-the-wall type, and eventually I thought, "Duh! Placemats!" And so I came away from the shop with one each of their last two mini quilt kits, a booklet of doll quilt patterns (which are often about the same size as placemats …), and some pre-cuts of TQC fabrics. After lunch in San Diego, we stopped off to visit some friends who recently moved to the wilds of the Santa Ana Mountains — had a good visit and a delicious dinner, with the bonus of a gorgeous sunset — so all in all, an excellent day.

I sewed up the first mini quilt kit in an afternoon, deciding to arrange the squares randomly instead of in four-patch. The kit is of the same high quality as the others, with a generous selection of fabrics and clear, concise instructions. I backed this with some navy Kona Cotton and hand-quilted it, pleased to see that I'm getting a bit better at the latter, though that may also have something to do with the batting being thinner that what I used previously, and thus easier to manipulate the needle through!

I'm glad I started with this one, as it was thus clear to me early on that for placemats, I think I will want most of them slightly longer than the 16" here. I've sewn up the pinwheel kit, and will start quilting it soon.

I do have — of course — another distraction —

which is Mamilou's charting of an antique sampler which I found almost accidentally while I was researching French samplers. I decided, since I had some linen that has quite a loose weave, to experiment with three strands of floss instead of two, to get that rather "thick" look that so many antique samplers have, usually (I guess) from the original stitcher using wool and not modern cotton floss. It's actually quite a success, I think! and because of the loose weave isn't at all too much. I was originally thinking that I would veer towards a "re-creation" and follow Léontine's mistakes as well as the now-missing stitches, but the chart has a few "corrections" and I've made a few mistakes of my own (!), so it is Léontine as well as a soupçon of both Mamilou and me!

And I do, I assure you, still knit, although it may not seem like it! I like this wool and think this will make a fabulous scarf, but I cannot knit it during Zoom meetings, as I lose track of which row I'm on and find after an hour that I worked a plain row when I should have worked a pattern row, or vice versa, and have to rip out all I've done since then. This is the longest it's been yet! —
Blankets, Throws, and Afghans, Crochet

Thoughts on the Basic (Baby) Blanket

Published by

Bluestocking

on

26th November 2021
This, at last, is the "Basic Blanket" from Simple Crochet for Cherished Babies by Jane Davis, which I have to say, was an utter pain most of the time I spent on it, but is very pretty now that it's finished and draped artfully over the arm of a sofa. I had searched for blanket or afghan patterns that called for 10 balls of Jaeger Baby Merino and would be fairly quick to make, and this seemed to fit the bill perfectly, but ten balls were not enough by at least one, and I spent quite a lot of time having to figure out not only the instructions themselves but how to arrange it so that I could get as much of the pattern worked with almost every inch of the ten balls I had.

Strangely, although my gauge came out noticeably larger than given in the book, with the same weight yarn and my usual 1-size-smaller hook, the finished measurement of the panel was smaller than given. How can that be?

There really should be a more-clear photo of what this blanket is supposed to look like when laid flat. I suppose that this —

— which is the photo from the book, is clear enough once you've already made the thing, but before I got to that point, I heartily wished to see it more fully. (What does the seam look like? for example …)

I found out early on from reviews on Amazon that a lot of people have had difficulties with a number of patterns in this book, so perhaps I'm a bit more salty than I would have been if I thought it was just me. I suppose I can figure out that if the instructions say "weave in end after row 11" that I'm supposed to break off the yarn at that point, or that if it says "sew the panels together" that I'm supposed to make a second panel, but it doesn't say so at all. But I was mystified by the instruction "Work row 8 along the top and bottom edges of the blanket" — it's multi-directional, so which edges are the top and bottom?!

This edging, by the way, is simply begging for a chart, but I am not at that stage yet, myself. (Laura herself came in not long after I'd hidden the blanket-in-progress but not my attempt at a chart. "What's this?" she asked, "some weird code??")

After trying to puzzle out the directions, then trying to figure out from the photo what was meant in the directions, I came up with these alternate instructions for certain rows, with my choices and some clarifications in boldface. Note that in the main body of the panel, the initial ch3 does not count as a stitch — you are making loops in which to anchor the edging. (This, if I remember correctly, is not what the general instructions say at the beginning of the book.) The initial ch3 in the border, however, does count as a stitch. I also did 1 less ch than specified at the beginning of each row, as mine tend to be a bit looser than average, I guess, so that one less ch made my edges a bit straighter than they would have been —
- Row 3: Ch3, 1 DC, [ch1, sk 2, DC, ch1, sk 2, 3 DC in next st] 32 times (on the last rep, 2 DC at very end) [129 sts].
- Row 4: Ch3, DC, [(DC, ch1, DC) all in next st, 2 DC in next st, sk 3, 2 DC in next st] 32 times, (DC, ch1, DC) in top of ch3. Note that the "sk 3" will be above a DC in the row below.
- Row 5: Ch3, 2 DC in 1st st, [DC in sp of sk3 section, 6 DC in ch1 sp] 32 times, 3 DC in top of ch3. Note that the 6-DC cluster will be above the 3-DC cluster in the row below.
- Row 6: Ch3, sk1, 1 HDC, 1 DC, sk1, [2 DC, 2 HDC, 2 DC, sk1] 32 times, 2 DC, 1 HDC in top of ch3. Note that each bracketed section will be centered over the 6-DC cluster of the row below.
- Row 7: STDC, DC in 1st st, DC, sk1, (2 DC, sk1) 64 times, 3 DC (the last in top of ch3).
As I said, I did not have nearly enough wool to do the four rows of DC mesh at the top of each edging section (which is worked four times!), so in frustration, I just worked the mesh on each side until the wool ran out, estimated how many rows total I could get, which ended up being about a quarter of what was called for, and then ripped out the ones that had gone past that. In the end, I decided that, really, an open section of mesh down the middle makes a rather drafty afghan, and so I would work the edging only through Row 7 on one side of each of the two panels, stitch those two together, and then work as much of the mesh as I had yarn on the two "outside" borders.

It also seemed to me — and perhaps I'm mistaken, not having that much experience with crochet — that having a mattress-stitched seam running through a quite-pretty lacy panel might look just a bit clunky, and so, remembering some particularly clever methods I'd come across for joining crochet squares and used myself with tolerable success, I decided to do one of those instead of a mattress-stitched seam. (I used the fourth one from the top, the one with the sort of "telegraph pole" look to it). I thought this suited the pattern quite well, actually, and would recommend it to anyone making this blanket, certainly if not using the full complement of mesh rows down the middle. (I ended up, by the way, after joining the two panels after their respective 7th rows, getting a grand total of two rows of mesh on the two outside edges, four altogether, far less than the sixteen the pattern called for with ten balls of Baby Merino, even subtracting maybe two of those which got used up in my join. Oof.)

But — as I said — it turned out very pretty, and I'm also quite happy with the color, which was Jaeger Baby Merino 233 Lilac overdyed with 1 package of grape Kool-Aid per ball. Interesting that it came out mottled even though I did not try to get it so. It looks very different in different lights, as you can see!

(Yes, that is my HST quilt, finished and on the bed!)