At Her Leisure

I finished the children's Christmas ornaments so I am officially finished with Christmas sewing. I can spend November and December making anything I want!

These are quite possibly the glitziest felt applique ornaments ever.


This weekend I'll get to start putting Hallowe'en costumes together, but in the meantime, I think I'll just read.

I know these posts are boring, but I do like to post every week. Since this is what I'm doing, this is what you get to read.

Here was the state of the picture last week:


Here it is this week:


I finished the cross-stitches and half cross-stitches yesterday and did a fair bit of the backstitching and French knots and the like that the instructions call "details" and I call "outlining." There's a lot left on the outlining, but I'm pleased with how it looks so far. It's amazing how much better it looks with the edges outlined.

Beside cross-stitching, I've been working on Hallowe'en costumes for the children. Since I'm just at the cutting stage, there's nothing to show. I also started a Christmas ornament for one of the girls while I was at a needlework circle on Saturday. It was a lot more portable than the floor stand I'm using for the cross-stitching. I've knit a few rows of my miser's purse too.

I'm still working on my cross-stitching piece.

This was last week:


Here is this week's progress:


I finished off the last bit at the top, shifted the frame, and did the part of the robes that are on this side of the pattern.

On Saturday I spent a couple of hours working on my miser's purse, and the children and I picked out Hallowe'en costume fabrics on Friday. I've started cutting their costumes out, but since I won't have a sewing machine available for three weeks, I'm not in a huge rush.

I nearly finished the cap I was making. I had cut two sets of ruffles, but in looking at it with one set, I think I'm going to skip the other set. I still need to thread in the drawstrings, but I don't seem to have any tapestry needles with me so it will have to wait until all my stuff is available.

Then I might have spent almost all day Saturday cross-stitching. Here's where it stood Friday:


Here's where it stands now:


I did a little Friday night and last night, but most of it was Saturday.

I finished knitting the second side of my current pinball.



I'll have to wait until my wool batting is out of storage before I make it up, but the vast majority of the work is finished.

I have the thread to make one more, but I'm not feeling any urge to so I started on a new cross-stitch piece. I can take breaks from it working on my cap, but since I don't usually feel like cross-stitching, I ought to take advantage of the urge while it lasts.

I finished my Williamsburg cross-stitching project yesterday. I'm really glad to have it out of my stash, but I'm not sure how much I like the finished product.



I'm just not sure whether I want it hanging on my wall. After we're in the new house, I'll have to look around and see if there's a place it would do well. Otherwise, I'll be giving it away.

I've been looking at the portrait I'm trying to copy and trying to figure out what shape the kerchief/fichu is. Is it square? If not square, what is it?


You can zoom in quite a bit on the Met website here: http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436222

It looks like it's something very sheer with a lot of drape to it. My thought would be silk gauze (modern gauze,) but even that might be too heavy. It seems to have three stripes around the border, which I assume are silk ribbon, roughly 1/4" (6mm) wide and spaced only about 1/8" (3mm) apart. They could have been woven into it, but I'm never going to find that so I would think that applying china silk ribbons would be my best option.

It's long enough to come around from the back across the breast and tie in a bow at the back, but there doesn't seem to be all that much bunched up at the neck. There are definitely two layers at the neck. My experience with 45-45-90 triangular fichus is that there is always a lot of fabric bunched at the neck that needs to be pinned into submission. That's the same shape you get with a square folded on the diagonal so if it were square, it seems like there should be more material at the back of the neck than I see in the painting. On the other hand, the points hanging down from the neck look like right angles, and I can't see how to get two right angles opposite each other without being a square or being some wonky shape with a seam down the middle. I don't see a seam in the painting.

Any suggestions? Any thoughts? Anything I'm missing? Please help!

We went to Williamsburg for vacation this year, but we didn't take a long enough trip to make the driving worthwhile. Last year we were gone almost three weeks with Williamsburg and Louisville, but this year it was only a week and a half. It just wasn't long enough, and it didn't help that the drive up ended up taking four extra hours due to various traffic jams. We did come back through Louisville, but we were only there long enough to go to church and lunch. We were a month too early for the Jane Austen Festival.

We spent three days at the Colonial Williamsburg historic district, but it turns out that they have rearranged their schedules so that all the shops are open on the weekends. We didn't go on any weekend days so we were hunting for open shops quite a bit. It was still nice, but it was just less satisfying than previous trips.

On the other hand, there were certainly lots of good points. The weavers had a table loom set up for children to try out, and my girls loved it and kept asking to go back. We got to lunch and hang out with reine_de_coudre one afternoon, which was very nice, and we went to the Williamsburg Heritage Dancers' regular Tuesday night session for the first time. And I wore my new linen items.





I finished my stockings in time to wear them, and you can get a glimpse of them in the picture above. Unfortunately, I forgot to get a good picture of them while I had them on so I'll have to do that sooner or later.

The other outfit I wore was my c. 1780 wool gown.





The third day was 21st century wear.

I've heard so much about linen being the coolest to wear that I wanted to test it out. One day I had a wool gown with cotton-lined bodice and sleeves, a cotton shift, and wool stockings. The next day I had a linen jacket, linen petticoat, linen shift, and wool stockings. Both days I had the same cotton and wool stays, and the weather was about the same. My conclusion was that the linen wasn't actually cooler to wear, but that it did keep me from feeling that the sweat was running down me.

You would think that by now I'd have it down that "knit plain" means stockinette. Why did I start garter-stitching the collar of the slipover bodice yesterday? Grumble, rip out, start again. At least I didn't have to pick the stitches up again and could rip back to the first row knit. I had enough time to get past where I was when I realized I had messed up.

 I've done a bit of knitting the last few days.  My stockings are finished with time to spare. Interestingly, I had about two yards of yarn left at the end of the second stocking after running out on the first stocking. I don't know if the extra stitches I picked up after the heel on the first stocking pushed me over the edge on needing more yarn or the yardage was just slightly lower in the first two balls than the second two. In the end, I do have just one odd-colored toe. 

I started working on the 17th century garters I've talked about before. I gauged them and knit about an inch before I decided they weren't working. I posted about the attempt on LJ (http://atherleisure.livejournal.com/114983.html) because I didn't want to add the picture to Flickr.  Something more the texture of the silk embroidery floss I've used for pinballs would probably work better, but the floss itself wouldn't be suitable.

I also started working on the 1919 Slipover Bodice that Wearing History sells. I'm guessing that it comes from the 1919 edition of The Columbia Book of Yarns, but I can't find that one online so it's just a guess.  Since I don't know where it comes from, I don't want to add it to the Ravelry database.  (She put it in as a personal pattern when she did her project page.)  I am hoping this will use up the rest of the leftover yarn from the 1892 petticoat as well as a couple of sport-weight leftovers from other projects. I don't mind having a fabric stash, but I don't really want a yarn stash so I'm always extra happy to use up the leftovers.

Incidentally, there is an error in the slipover bodice pattern - it says to cast on 76 stitches for the back, but the pattern doesn't work out that way.  It needs to be 77 stitches. Then you have 61 left after narrowing for the armscyes and cast off 23 for the neck. I'm only just to the neck so I don't know if there will be any more issues. As often happens for me, I had to go down a needle size.  I find it interesting that the armscye is quite shallow on the back (and therefore presumably much deeper on the front) like the 1907 sweater and 1912 vest I've made so the shift to sweater seams directly under the arm like modern sweaters must post-date about 1919 but has occurred by about 1937 because my c. 1937 sweater does have the seams under the arms.  I may be the only one who finds that interesting, though.