Scarlet Quince Ramblings

I just got finished updating the map, which necessitated figuring out how I created it in the first place. This has been on my to-do list for a long time but I was spurred on to get it done by a request from one of my wholesale customers. She sold a chart to someone who lives in Baker Lake, Nunavut, who was very anxious to have his own X on the map. Although the map really reflects the locations I’ve sold to directly, I was happy to fake up something for someone living in such an out-of-the-way place.

Have you ever heard of Nunavut? If so, you must be Canadian (or better at geography than I am). It turns out that it was only separated from the Northwest Territories (which I have heard of) in 1999, so I have a little bit of an excuse.

My main excuse for being so ignorant of geography is that I was in grade school during the cold war and what we had was military-industrial geography. Our textbook took the same approach to each country we studied: first, how many square miles it was. Then, since they realized that didn’t convey much, they would superimpose an outline of the country on an outline of whatever part of the US it was closest in size to. This was supposed to make it fun. But knowing that Remotistan is about the same size as Nebraska also doesn’t convey anything (except maybe a veiled suggestion that Remotistan sure doesn’t amount to much; countries that got compared to Rhode Island were obviously ridiculous). They would tell us what language or languages were spoken there — if it wasn’t English, there was an implication that the residents had got it wrong. We covered the form of government they had: democracy (correct) or other (incorrect). Then they would get down to a list of the products considered useful to the US. This always seemed to be grains and metals and minerals, no finished goods. The implication seemed to be that yes, the country might make precision-engineered cars or fine linens or fancy chocolates, but whatever they made, we could do it better. Sometimes they had a picture of apple-cheeked children in funny clothes, but that was about IT. I suppose we were shown where the country fit on the world map, but if you haven’t absorbed the location of country A, learning that country B is just to the east of it doesn’t help. (You can’t explain what chicken-fried steak is to someone who doesn’t know what chicken-fried chicken is.) It was really quite ugly and in a way I’m glad I didn’t learn anything. I certainly hope that geography is no longer being taught that way. But bit by bit, I’m filling in the gaps, and I’m glad to know where Nunavut is!

We almost always have a warm spell starting around the middle of February and into early March, although it often gets cold again later.  This year I decided (partly spurred on by a coupon for 99 cent tomato plants at Red Barn) that I was going to get a jump on the season and get my tomatoes going.  Red Barn claims to carry varieties that do well in Austin.  We’ll see if they do or not.  They had a couple of varieties that say they are well-adapted to heat, one of which is supposed to keep bearing even in 100-degree heat.  (I got 2 of that kind.)  They were all nice healthy-looking plants, 7″ or 8″ high, and I intended to get them into the ground quickly.  I got a couple of herbs too, some spearmint because I used to have some but I think it died, and some thyme just because it smelled so good.  The young leaves have purple veins too, which is pretty.

But then, like an idiot, I left all the plants in the front yard, and the deer ate all but about an inch of each tomato plant.  (They ate a hunk of the thyme, too, but I guess it was a little strong for them, since they didn’t finish it off.)  Luckily each plant had at least one leaf left, so most of them are growing more leaves.  (This also gives me an excuse for not having planted them yet, since otherwise I don’t know what my excuse would be.)

I brought them in temporarily when it was supposed to get cold, which gave Jemima a chance to pretend she lives in a tomato bed.

No, not from my redwork alphabet … I wanted to do something special for the friend who kept the kittens most of the time that we were taming them and allowed me to show up at her house daily with little warning to visit them. I had this idea rattling around in my head — her name is 8 letters long, but only 6 letters are unique, and they can be arranged on a cube so that you can spell her name by turning the cube, so I decided to make her a name cube. (I know, weird. I should probably ease up on the word puzzles.)

I decided to do it in harganger. I have stitched hardanger before, following a pattern in a leafletI had, but I have never tried to design hardanger. It’s kind of mind-blowing because the basic units (Kloster blocks) are 5 stitches wide with each stitch covering 4 threads (which is 5 holes), and you arrange them corner to corner so you get squares. The pattern I worked before had each stitch laboriously drawn on graph paper showing exactly where each thread goes. I tried to do that but kept messing up. Finally I decided it would be better not to think too hard about it. I started by designing simple letters in a grid 6 x 5. Here’s my A.

The “pixels” in the letters are going to be the open places after cutting threads, so I moved them apart to allow for the stitching around them:

Then I sketched in my Kloster blocks around them. (Represented by the red lines — just pretend there are 5 instead of 2.)

The remaining spaces between the places that will be cut out have to be needleweaving, indicated by 8’s. If you haven’t done hardanger, trust me: they just do.

I decided I wanted a little more embellishment and was thinking of putting another row of kloster blocks all around, but decided that would look stupid and might not even work. Instead, I substituted a border of double wave stitch. This also made the letters bigger since so far the design is really pretty small.

I planned to do this on some of the Ariosa Fine that is left from my redwork alphabet, since it’s 22-count. (My hardanger booklets recommend 22-count fabric with #5 and #8 pearl cotton.) The thing I forgot, though, is that it has a rayon content, which means that the cut ends get kind of fuzzy. 100% cotton or linen would be much better. I played around a bit with colors for the stitching but there aren’t too many colors that come in both sizes of thread, so I settled on red for the Kloster blocks (#5) and needleweaving (#8), and gold (#5) for the outline. Once I had made that decision, I thought gold beads would be a nice addition. I ad libbed them but here is my basic approach to the bead placement (dots on the diagram).

Here is the finished letter A. I backed it with gold tissue lame. (I took a finished letter to the fabric store and tried different backings. I had thought about black, but liked this better.)

MRA kindly cut squares from mat board which is very hard and stiff and he got them all the same size, which I wouldn’t probably have managed. I glued the letters to the squares and also turned the corners in and glued them. I bought some special fabric glue while I was buying fabric — it was supposed to dry clear — alas, not so. (The red square isn’t centered on the mat board because despite much counting and measuring, the letters never came out really centered in the fabric squares I had marked.)

Here’s the finished cube. I was very pleased with it although I could do a better job if I were to make another one, which I have no plans to do. My friend would probably rather that I had taken her to lunch, but I had fun doing it.

The kittens have been growing practically before our eyes, and getting tamer and friendlier. Pearl learned to purr first, then Socks (who was initially surprised by the strange sound) caught on.

We set up a “tiger pole” for them and they learned to climb it (and more importantly, how to get down another way than falling off) and they have gotten lots of exercise racing up and down. They both learned to enjoy being petted, picked up, and snuggled, although Socks still is a bit skittish when he sees someone reaching for him. Once you have your hands on him, he starts purring immediately.

Pearl is really 100% tame. She loves to be the center of attention and if anyone tries to play just with Socks, or pat him, she has to butt in. He’s less outgoing, or less aggressive, and so we reluctantly decided they would do better if they went to different homes. They are adorable snuggling each other and playing together but he has visibly hurt feelings when Pearl is getting more attention than he is.

They came here about a week ago — it was just too awkward scheduling prospective “parents” to meet them at someone else’s house. Lucky has not been happy — he skulks outside the door of the room where we put them, and we had to put a mat in front of the door to keep him from sniffing and reaching under the door, and then put a weight against the mat so he couldn’t roll it away. When I catch him there, he trots away very quickly with sort of a “I certainly have no interest in whatever is going on in there” attitude. I have been lavishing lots of extra attention on him to keep him from feeling too jealous. Topsy and Jemima have not been interested in the kittens at all.

One of the main features of our guest room, as far as the kittens are concerned, is the disassembled bed. The mattress and box spring are leaning against the wall, long side vertical. They climbed up there almost immediately.

After checking on them several times, and finding them still on top of the mattress, I began to wonder if they could get down. I tried to entice them down and found that they really had no idea how to climb down. So I set up a ramp from the top of the mattress to the dresser. Pearl tried it immediately but it was too steep. I added a few books and that made it manageable — still a little slippery but OK. She wouldn’t try it again until she saw Socks navigate it, though.

That has been one of the most fun aspects of this whole project — seeing the way they learn from each other. Our cats do that too, occasionally, but these guys are at an age where they’re learning something new every day, or every hour. We brought in a “cat dancer” — little bits of cardboard tied to the end of a long flexible wire — and Socks loved it instantly. He chased it and gave crazy leaps after it, but Pearl was initially baffled by its unpredictable movements. She watched him play with it for about a day and then she had it figured out.

We have found good owners for them, I think — people who really want them, will keep them indoors, see that they get any medical attention they need (including spaying/neutering), and where they will each be the only pet. Socks went to his new home on Saturday and Pearl this morning. I so wish we could have kept them but it would not have been possible to give each of 5 cats the kind of attention they deserve, even if Lucky would have stood for it. We will miss them. We’ve been spending at least an hour a day with them for the past 5 weeks (and much more than that since they’ve been here). I have other uses for that time, but it’s hard to see them go.

Finally I have added the last few pictures I’ve received to the gallery. There weren’t as many waiting to go in as I thought, but some have been sitting in my inbox for quite a while. In retrospect, it’s a little hard to explain why this seemed like such an ordeal — it isn’t difficult and it doesn’t usually take very long. But December is cedar pollen time here, and it makes me tired, tired, tired to death. So much so that doing a half-hour task (that can be done sitting down) just seems impossible. I won’t go on about it because there’s little as boring as someone whining about their allergies; just wanted to let people who wondered what happened to their pictures know that I’m BACK!

Later: Well, I’m not finished after all. I THOUGHT there were more somewhere.

Much later: I added 6 more pictures to the gallery and was about to write that I am really caught up, when I realized that another one came in this morning! Now I’ve added it too, and I think I am really, really caught up. I use my email inbox like a to-do list which makes it a little hard to see at a glance what’s what. But I learned a long time ago if I put things that needed some sort of attention into a different folder (for example, I had one for suggestions) they would just languish there forever.

I had another browse through some Bierstadt paintings and I was wrong — there is a painting with Half Dome in it, although it’s not exactly a painting OF Half Dome:

It’s called, appropriately enough, The Domes of the Yosemite. I believe this is a view from the top of lower Yosemite Falls, with the upper falls on the left (although we didn’t go up there; the falls were dry). It’s somewhere between this view (Washington Column on the left, guess who on the right):

and Tunnel View (this is the first view of the valley you get driving in):

You have to imagine you’re down the valley and around the corner from El Cap (on the left).

Comparing the Bierstadt view to the topo map, I believe the point jutting over the left side of the valley is Washington Column, the round dome between it and the falls is North Dome, and the sliced-off round place directly in front of North Dome is Royal Arches. I think the largest dome on the right is Half Dome — it doesn’t quite look like it, but there have been massive rock falls from the face since Bierstadt was there, so I think the rock in front of what appears to be Half Dome just isn’t there any more. My best guess.

And by the way, I’m working on a chart of “The Domes of the Yosemite”.

This has nuthin’ to do with nuthin’ (as a friend of mine would say), but it’s such a great idea that I had to share. It came in what was essentially a spam email. Here it is: when making devilled eggs, put the yolks in a zip-loc bag instead of a dish to mash them up with the salad dressing and whatever else you put in your eggs.

This makes the eggs fast to mix, you can get ALL the lumps out, and you don’t have a dish to wash afterwards. Snip a corner of the bag to squeeze the filling into the eggs (and you also waste less filling).

I mooshed the filling down a little. I also accidentally discovered that putting the eggs on a paper towel dries the bottoms so they don’t skate around on a plate. I could probably have figured this out if I had ever really thought about it.

The eggs don’t skate when I use my cute egg plate (it’s an egg-shaped plate with depressions for a dozen half eggs). I didn’t use it this time because somehow there were only 4 eggs left in what I was thinking of as a new carton of eggs. The plate empties quickly, but you don’t want to start out with it half-empty.

This bag approach is similar to the Aunt Jemima cornbread mix which comes in a bag in a little pan. You add the milk and eggs to the mix in the bag, moosh it around, squeeze the batter into the pan, and bake. As I recall, it’s not especially good cornbread, but I thought it was so much fun to make when I was a kid.

In October we trapped a bunch of feral cats and took them to the Humane Society to be fixed. The vet told us that one of the cats had had kittens recently, and recently she started bringing her kittens to our garage to eat. There were only two kittens, which is a small litter. (I hope it isn’t the case that there were originally more and something happened to the others, but we once had a cat that gave birth to a single kitten, so perhaps spotty nutrition accounts for the small litter.) The kittens are absolutely adorable — aren’t kittens always? They are probably about 12 weeks old.

We’re calling them Little Socks and Little Pearl because they look just like their uncle Socks and aunt Pearl. (Yes, we are breaking ALL the stray cat rules — 1. Stray cats will not be fed. 2. Stray cats will not be fed anything but dry cat food. … 7. Stray cats will absolutely not be given a name. We are currently also feeding Coco (the mother of the kittens), Patches, Blinky, Sandy, and Brindle Cat — the mother of all the adult cats except Patches, and the only one that hasn’t been spayed or neutered.)

The kittens pretty much lived in our garage for a while, back in the shelves on an old bath mat. More recently the older cats have been showing them the ropes, the pond in the back yard for water, the leaf pile for other needs, etc. They are very playful, jumping each other, swatting older cats’ tails, playing “King of the Mountain” in the silver maple, and on and on.

After much agonizing about what would be best for them, we captured them and are working on getting them used to people so that they can have homes. (The Humane Society’s adoption program won’t take them unless they are friendly.) I would LOVE to have them here but Lucky, who is very easily stressed, would go crazy if he thought MORE cats might be coming to live here. Instead, a friend agreed to foster them, and they’re currently living in her guest bathroom. (A bathroom is a good place to start new kittens because they can’t get someplace where they aren’t retrievable, they can’t do any damage, and it’s a small space. When we brought Lucky home and let him loose, as he discovered what a big world he was suddenly in, he got more and more panicky. He was much happier in the bathroom until he got used to things.)

At first the kittens were not very happy with the strange hard white surfaces.

But they have quickly gotten more comfortable.
(I wish I could get a picture without the glaring red irises but you can see that Little Pearl has blue eyes — she’s a beautiful kitten.)

My friend and her husband visit them often in the bathroom, and we’re visiting also most days. Little Pearl is already allowing herself to be petted. They have lots of toys and apparently are having a pretty good time for themselves, and I’m glad they’re not outdoors — they were born very late in the year and it’s cold out. So I trust this story will have a happy ending. We’ll probably try to find them homes ourselves without going through the Humane Society — not that I have anything against the Humane Society, but Lucky was there only 5 days and he caught the feline equivalent of kennel cough and almost died, although he was younger and smaller than these two. If we can tame these guys, get them their shots, and send them directly to a good home or two, that would be best.

Update: here’s the latest picture — they are in the bathroom sink.

Several of our patterns are available in two sizes (two stitch counts, which makes the finished piece different dimensions). Many people ask, “How are they different? They look the same.”

In general, we make our patterns as small as possible (believe it or not!) while still preserving the important detail of the original work. Sometimes, though, it’s possible to make a somewhat smaller pattern which is not quite as detailed, but still very good, and a lot fewer stitches. Think about it: a 200 x 200 stitch count pattern is 40,000 stitches. 180 x 180 doesn’t sound much smaller, but it’s only 32,400 stitches. A 9% decrease in the sides (width plus height) results in a 19% decrease in the number of stitches!

So how are they different? Here are a few examples.

Take the Fair Face of Woman comes in two sizes, 197w x 250h, and 315w x 400h. On the pattern pages they look the same. If you click the pictures to see the fixed scale views, you can see that one is larger and one is smaller, but you still may not be able to see any difference.

Compare the eyes.  In this case, all the same features are there, the shading in the eyelid, the lighter blue below the pupil — it’s just that they are larger in the larger version.

An area where a bit of detail is lost is in the beaded bag. Most of the beads are there in both bags — but the one that the fairy’s finger points to is mostly missing in the smaller bag. (It helps to get back from the screen a few feet to see this.) The beads in the larger bag also have a little structure (darker spots in the center of the beads) which is missing from the smaller bag.

As you can see, these are not very momentous differences.

We are also working toward having all of the Lady and Unicorn tapestries in two sizes. Here the differences are quite subtle (given that the original tapestries are so large, many of the details such as the flowers are rather impressionistic even in our larger pattern). Compare two dogs from Lady with Unicorn: A Mon Seul Desir (this is the dog near the upper right corner).

The biggest difference in the two dogs is that the smaller dog’s ear nearly disappears. The smaller dog is a little blockier, too, as there’s less room for shading stitches to fill in the curves. The flowers are almost the same. Consider, though, that there’s a 15% difference between the two charts in width plus height, and the smaller one has 30% fewer stitches!

So: if you prefer a smaller finished piece, or just want to do fewer stitches, you shouldn’t hesitate to do the smaller version of any of our charts. If you really love the picture and want all possible detail, or prefer a larger result, do the larger one. Either way, you’ll get good detail.

I forced myself to finish the letter I before starting another letter just to see how long it took to do this relatively small letter. It took 13 days, but that’s elapsed time, not stitching time. There was a jigsaw puzzle in there, and not much else happens when I’m working a jigsaw puzzle. (This was a Christmas tradition in my family, which I have allowed to bleed over into New Year’s. I think this is the first year I’ve had one at Thanksgiving. It’s a slippery slope. Next it will be Columbus Day, then Labor Day, Flag Day, Arbor Day…)

Anyway, I like “I” much more than I thought I would looking at the chart. (I should look at the cover picture more often.) The decorations sort of remind me of something, although I can’t think what.