A Bluestocking Knits

  • , ,

    Dishcloths, Dishcloths

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    Our dishcloths are looking a bit, well, antique, so I’ve spent the last two days with my crochet hook smoking from the speed of whipping out four new ones. (The “Dahlia pan holder”, with the swirls, was actually on my Year-of-Finishing-Things list, having been sitting around for a considerable time with the ends needed to be worked in, so — check! done! I’ve written about the pattern elsewhere.) I lost my Dishcloth Gallery with TypePad’s desertion demise, but will have to figure out some kind of replacement or substitute, since I don’t think that WordPress has something like it. The purple variegated one at lower right and the purple and weirdly-pooling reds-and-pinks one (using up scraps of the cotton) are really just swatches, of even moss stitch and Suzette stitch respectively, but the other two are new-to-me patterns, Made by Gootie’s “C2C Moss Stitch” dishcloth at lower left, and Nordic Hook’s “Clara“. The latter I resized a bit, as with Lily Sugar ‘n Cream it would have come out about 9 inches wide, and I prefer smaller dishcloths. It’s still quite a handsome cloth, although again, the colors pooled strangely! The corner-to-corner one gave me a bit of trouble with the decrease half, but I think that was entirely my own fault, as watching the accompanying video after I think my fourth attempt, it narrowed down quite obediently!

    I just finished reading Sam Kean’s Dinner with King Tut, wh. I came across on the public library’s new-books shelf. It’s about experiential archaeology — there is in fact a short debate in the introduction about the term, but I prefer “experiential” to “experimental” which sounds to me like people are experimenting being archaeologists, not investigating the experiences of people in the past! Kean is exercising his novel-writing chops in this book, weaving fictional stories around his research into particular details of life in the past — mediaeval catapults, Polynesian canoes, Egyptian mummification. I’ve always enjoyed the “living history” series on television, from “1900 House” to the side journeys in “Time Team” about how a certain kind of snake bracelet was made, or Bronze-Age bread, and such, and so I found this book an easy and enjoyable read!

  • , , , ,

    10th Update

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    “Update on the 10th,” more explicitly, in a nod to the folks on the Petipointers list, with its monthly progress report. This is my Fereghan carpet, now most definitely past the halfway point, which is the line of small flowers to which the needle is pointing.

    The first “Gilded Cage” mitt finished except for weaving in the ends! I’ve got the second one up to the point where I pick up stitches to work the thumb.

    The first block in my “Lucy Diamonds” quilt-to-be. The funky daisies fabric is the almost-last pieces left over from one of the last projects I did with my Daisy Girl Scout troop quite some years ago now — Julia was in kindergarten! — and it makes me smile whenever I see it. I’ve sewn this up since the photo, along with four or five more blocks — I’m using the freezer-paper method for the first time, which seems to be working quite well, I’m happy to say, as getting all of these diamonds to line up neatly can be a bit of a challenge!

    And some reading that I’m particularly enjoying — Ex Libris is an old favorite, and makes perfect bedtime reading. I read in a recent Slightly Foxed newsletter of their new reprint of Robert Westall’s memoir, and since he has long been a favorite writer of mine, I jumped at the chance, and ordered John Moore’s Portrait of Elmbury as well. I just finished the Westall, and enjoyed it very much, so full marks to both Westall and Slightly Foxed — have just started the Elmbury one …

  • Six Degrees of Separation: Wuthering Heights

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    It has been a long time since I took part in the “Six Degrees of Separation” meme, but I came across an old collage of mine buried somewhere in my computer, and thought, “hey, that was fun, is it still going on?” And it is, so here is mine —

    This month’s book is Wuthering Heights.  Never read it, can’t be bothered.  Thus also, Moby-Dick.  Big fish — well, sea creature at least, whales aren’t fish — leads to The Big Six, in which a huge pike plays an important role.  The epithet “The Big Six” is a nod to Scotland Yard’s The Big Five, but since I don’t know off the top of my head of any book or novel featuring those real-life detectives specifically, I can only proffer that Ngaio Marsh’s detective hero Roderick Alleyn is in the CID.  Patrick Malahide played Alleyn in the BBC series, and he also played Rev. Casaubon in the 1994 BBC adaptation of “Middlemarch” — an adaptation which, by the way, I liked better than the book.  I was thinking of going in the direction of film adaptations I like better than the books, but those are pretty rare, and so I went with Victorian paintings used on the covers of modern paperback editions of Victorian novels (Middlemarch‘s is William Powell Frith’s “The Lovers” of 1855), thus leading (via Goodreads’ handy list, though that is specifically Pre-Raphaelite paintings) to an Italian translation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, here with John William Waterhouse’s “Boreas” of 1903 (lovely but not Victorian! you say, and you are correct on both counts).  Also on Goodreads’ list is another Victorian novel re-issued with a cover featuring a Waterhouse painting, this time Jane Eyre, with “Windflowers”. And of course a bonus is that this leads very neatly, I thought, with the Brontë connection, back to the beginning!

  • ,

    A Truly Great President

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    To mark the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration on this date in 1861, here are a few quotations from the man himself, and one about him:

    “Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.” [Lincoln’s Peoria speech, 16 October 1854]

    “To give victory to the right, not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots only, are necessary.” [From a speech given 18 May 1858]

    “I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.” [From a remark made to Joseph Gillespie, reported in a letter from Gillespie to the Hagerstown, Maryland Herald and Torch Light, 15 March 1876]

    “Nothing discloses real character like the use of power…. [If] you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test. It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power, he never abused it, except upon the side of mercy.” [From an 1895 lecture by Robert G. Ingersoll about Lincoln]

  • Better, But …

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    This revised gusset is much smoother and better-fitting, so I’m happier. But now that I’ve got a good fit on the thumb, I realize that the slipped-stitch hand is a bit snug. I don’t think I’ve ever before used such a relatively-large swathe of slipped-stitch fabric, but I suppose it makes sense that it would pull in a bit more than regular stockinette. The cuff is certainly big enough, so I think it isn’t the number of stitches — especially since I did try the next-larger size first of all, and found the cuff too big. So I think I will rip this back to the braid at the top of the cuff again, and work the hand with needles one size larger, to get a skosh more room ….

  • Sewing Machine — Fixed!

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    I got my sewing machine back from its week-long sojourn in the repair shop yesterday afternoon, and, on their advice, spent some time sewing this morning to make sure that I’m happy with the repair. It no longer shrieks like a banshee, and — bonus! — the action feels smoother than it has in a long time. Yes, I’m happy!

    These are the quilt blocks I put together. I saw a scrap quilt in the Old Swedish Quilts book a few years ago that appealed to me enormously as something both handsome and useful, as well as thrifty, using up scraps left over from other sewing projects. It is simply a string-pieced block, using a square of old fabric — here, cut from a set of worn-out table napkins — with strips of various widths sewn onto it. No piecing required! so it really takes longer to choose the strips than it does to sew up and press the block. With today’s batch, I have about forty blocks, so some ways to go still before I can put together a quilt top ….

    It pleased me very much to add in one of the hand-pieced and probably-antique scraps in my box of Betty’s things —

  • Grandmother’s Footsteps

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    This is the first of a pair of “Gilded Cage” mitts, being knitted as a gift. I either wasn’t paying attention or couldn’t see on this beautiful but rather dark wool, that I had knitted at least three stitches in different places in the ribbing when I should have purled, and I didn’t really like the way the Estonian braid joined together, so I ripped it out and did it all over again. I liked the way my join looked using the crochet-hook method better, and so I carried on, merrily working the gusset increases as written in the pattern.

    But after I had finished the gusset and put the stitches on a piece of scrap yarn to work the thumb later, I slipped the mitt on to my hand just to double check how things were going, and found that the gusset bulged strangely down at the base. This pattern has the gusset increases every other round until there are enough for the thumb, then it is worked straight until it gets to the dividing point, which, sure enough, makes it much wider at the lower edge. I’m not sure why, and it doesn’t look this bulgy in the pattern’s photograph, but of course logic says that increasing every other round for a little over a third of the way and then working straight would give you something resembling a Florence flask.*

    And so I’ve ripped it back to the braid and started the gusset again, working the increase rounds more evenly distributed up the length of the gusset. Wish me luck!

    * I didn’t know that it’s called a Florence flask! Well, you learn something new every day, don’t you!

  • , ,

    A Year of Finishing Things?

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    My “Annie’s Cushion” from Treehouse Textiles —

    Am quite pleased with this, especially now that it’s done (!).

    In the midst of spring-cleaning — because, yes, in Southern California it is already spring — I have come across a number of unfinished projects, and am coming to the realization that perhaps this should be a Year of Finishing Things. I have a black cardigan with lacy trim still on the knitting needles (stalled when I decided to sew a new black choir dress altogether), a pair of socks also on the needles (wh. I have now taken on two trips intending to finish and didn’t touch once, either time) and the 1909 Ladies’ Mitts (I don’t even remember now why I set these down …) — also two counted-stitch samplers that got taken off the frame for something else and never put back, a quilt that I laid out and thought, “well, I hate that” but really deserves finishing, and two pincushions that I could use right now, in fact.

    But, yeah, I have just started something new, though my excuse is that it’s a gift with a deadline …!

  • ,

    State of the Petitpoint

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    I have not been as attentive to this for a while as I might have been — mostly because of The Game,* I confess — but I have now got it within sneezing distance of the mid-point, which runs through those little floral motifs at the top of the stitched area in the photo. It isn’t really a difficult chart, but it does require fairly close attention!

    *Which absorbed quite a lot of my time this past autumn, and I freely admit that I will no longer roll my eyes at how the hours that David and the girls might spend on a computer game. Mind you, I can still tell them that they should be reading a book instead.

  • Some Quilting …

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    I suspect that I hadn’t posted these before (cough–TypePad–cough!), so here they are now, two new-to-you mini-quilts-as-placemats.

    A modified “Windowpane” from Kathleen Tracy’s book Small and Scrappy (I added in another column of the windowpane blocks to make it a rectangle) —

    And the finished “A Bit of History”, which is really too big for an ordinary placemat but I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out —

    And a few more fabrics for “Lucy Diamond” — a selection of fat quarter-ish pieces from a fabric thrift store (!) that David discovered for me (!!) —

Knitting, reading, other stuff.

Let’s connect

Recent posts