We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

Write what you know, I guess. I like piecing quilts more that Valancy does, though.

Title: In the Lighted Palace Near
Rating: G
Fandom: Blue Castle - L. M. Montgomery
Characters: Valancy Stirling, Barney Snaith (or someone very like him), Valancy Stirling's awful relatives
Warnings/Enticements: Pre-Canon, Daydreaming, Canonical Family Dynamics, Chivalry, Fairy Tale Elements, Sewing
Summary: A tired knight rides up a winding road to a faint prospect of sanctuary.
Valancy pieces a quilt.
Wordcount: 1323 words

On AO3

I also wrote a sexy Carmilla drabble for Wanksgiving.

So for reasons that may be evident from my last post this summer was not a great time for reading or for anything else. Except crafts. Last week I did so much crochet I bruised my fingertip. (Tumblr quilt posts here and here)

Recent:
A Short History of the World According to Sheep by Sally Coulthard started good but got more irritating over time, and I ended up skimming the last few chapters.

Very much liked Patchwork: A World Tour; I still really want a general history (specifically one starting before 1700), but this was very diverse and very pretty.

I read the first of Jewelle Gomez's Gilda Stories, which was very well done, but the author's note was more evidence that debates over moral storytelling are not limited to modern tumblr.

In August I finished another Biggles book, and now the next time I feel like Boy's Own Adventures I can get on to the resolution of Von Stalhein's arc and widen my fanfiction options.

And then I deliberately picked up Circle of Magic: Sandry's Book for comfort reading, which it provided. Also more craft books and more RWRB fanfic.

Current:
Just finished Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger in audiobook for more comfort reading. I remember liking but also being annoyed by a paranormal romance about how great small towns are, and it probably says something very clear about me that Horrible Things Happening in Nice Small Towns are, conversely, very comfortable.

Terry Pratchett's Interesting Times, because I wanted to reread a Discworld book and I knew I'd only read this one once ... but unfortunately there was a reason for that. Which of course is going to be true of anyone who wrote that many books over that much time.

Sarah Caudwell's The Shortest Way to Hades, which is great. One of the nice things about this series is that I can think things like, "Ah, what an interesting choice to refer to Euripides' Helen in this particular narrative. What might that imply for the main mystery plot?" (I'm less than halfway in and don't know if I'm guessing right yet.)

My current purse book is The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman, which will probably go slowly but which I am enjoying very much when I remember it's there.

And a facsimile copy of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

Future:
The library for some reason hasn't got any of K. J. Charles' recent releases.

I have another Christie audiobook lined up. In print the Caudwell will probably take me a while yet. But it's occurred to me that autumn is coming up, and this year I want to actually read The Haunting of Hill House.

I got my booster shot yesterday, which has knocked me out like all the others. My immune system would like to know wtf I'm playing at.

Current pandemic obsession is embroidery, and at the moment specifically needlelace (modern explanation, Victorian explanation), which is something like embroidery without the cloth. It's also much more manageable than bobbin lace; if I tried to set up a lace pillow covered in pins and things hanging from strings around Pepper terrible things would happen.

I have been throwing myself into that with all the enthusiasm of someone who is avoiding preparing for the new semester and also has a bunch of Agatha Christie audiobooks on Libby, but in the interests of avoiding eyestrain, and also because I just had a shower and am now utterly out of energy, have a meme.

( AO3 Averages Meme )

So I was listening to a podcast about an 18th century cookbook, and the host read out some recipes from it and added "These recipes seem lacking on specifics today..." and the two professional chefs I was listening with immediately said, "No, they don't. Those are perfectly normal recipes."

And I said, "For you, because you already know how to cook."

I've read several books on quilting and patchwork in the last year. Florence Hartley's Ladies’ Hand Book of Fancy and Ornamental Work (1859) assumes not only that the reader already knows how to make patchwork, but that patchwork was how she learned to sew in the first place. It includes a few patterns, mostly just by showing you the finished design, and introduces the reader to the concept of album quilts, and has relatively specific instructions for English paper piecing. It gives descriptions of a few individual quilts. But mostly the author just rhapsodizes on the history of patchwork, because of course her audience already knows all about how to do it. On quilting there's even less.

The first full length book solely about quilts was Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them by Marie D. Webster (1915). She's got more space, but when it comes to instructions she mostly just tells you to sew the pieces together. She's more interested in appliqué than patchwork, and she has lots of detail on quilting, but she still assumes that of course you know how to sew and can make your own pattern.

Ruby Short McKim's 101 Patchwork Patterns (1931), now, actually tells you what size to cut, how to sew together, what seam allowance to leave, and usually what order to sew the pieces together. She tells you about bias, she tells you how to deal with triangles and diamonds, she tells you to baste appliqué before final sewing. She gives you actual pattern pieces and tells you how to cut them out.

The first book I read on quilting was The Perfect Patchwork Primer by Beth Gutcheon (1973). It goes through the entire process of designing and making a quilt. It tells you how to calculate fabric quantities. It has a diagram of how to do running stitch. It doesn't assume you already know how to sew, but it does assume you can figure out how to apply general rules to specific patterns.

All Points Patchwork by Diane Gilleland (2015) tells you how to tie a knot in your thread. (She does say this is because lots of people ask her this question.) It doesn't assume you have ever sewn before. It's an excellent book, lots of design inspiration, specific details on how to work with different shapes, etc.: and it has and repeats detailed instructions for everything down to the most basic tasks.

Gilleland's book is not actually representative of most books on quilting these days; it's a general introduction to a specific technique, and doesn't have any individual pattern instructions. Most quilting books don't have the basics, they certainly don't tell you how to operate your sewing machine, but they have extremely specific patterns: use this quantity of these five kinds of fabrics, cut them into these pieces in this way, join these together to make this segment, then those segments to make this one, and so on: an unbelievable level of detail for each individual pattern, that no one who has made more than two quilts would actually need, especially not if they had access to the internet.

I'm not objecting to this trend. It means that anyone can pick up a hobby as an adult, whether or not they have any experience with it or even know anyone else who does it. But I do have a strong personal preference for the middle of this progression; for books that tell you how to do things rather than what to do.

(I recommend all of the specifically named books in this post, though in some cases mostly for historical interest.)

I have absolutely no executive function whatsoever today. No, wait, maybe I do? I did the laundry. Working memory is what I don't have. I think.

Instead, have a conversation:

My brain: We should take up quilting.
Me: What?
My brain: Patchwork! We should do it!
Me: Why?
My brain: Patterns! Colours! Look!
Me: ...You hate sewing.
My brain: But patchwork!
Me: ...We will sew a mask, by hand, because we don't have the energy to figure out Oma's sewing machine, and you will remember that you hate sewing and we can go on with life and maybe finish some of these knitting projects.

...I'm actually kind of enjoying it, goddammit.

It seems weird to say that what I look for in a podcast is that the hosts are married, but that is in fact the main common factor in the ones I have gotten seriously obsessive about. The hosts are either happily married or happily divorced, and I like to hear people liking each other.

I have also read May Morris's Decorative Needlework, which is great, though that may just be me being fascinated by the Arts and Crafts movement in general.

There are other things happening but the next semester of online classes just started, so.

1. The Antique Pattern Library is a thing that exists! OMG!

2. My twitter rule still applies ... except in the case of theJagmeetSingh, which may be the only twitter that makes me feel better about humanity.

3. Most accurate AO3 tag yet: #idiots to lovers.

4. Titles and summaries are the most annoying parts of fic writing, so it's very weird to get that but literally nothing else about the fic - no prose, no plot, not even theme or mood. But:

It's Not That I'm Sentimental
Natasha Romanov is not a matchmaker. Maybe if she says that often enough eventually someone will believe it.

5. The latest in the continuing series of essays I won't write: Beautified With Our Feathers: An Optimistic View of the Future of Fanfiction.

I keep feeling like I could be done this fic (which we will call fic A, because there is never just one WIP) by the end of the month if I just decided to work at it (and maybe set up a goal tracker), but Life is in the process of happening and it's going to keep happening, so I can't just decide to spend a month on that. And in the meantime (mostly to distract from the aforementioned Life) I have started half a dozen WIPs, some of which are also at the "one week of concentrated effort and they'll be done" stage, but it's always much more tempting to just start another damn WIP instead of finishing them. And concentration may be a slight problem, now that I think about it.

And there's at least three other WIPs from before fic A that I could also be focusing on.

And I still think they're mostly really good ideas! So it's not that I don't want to work on them. Except that I am in one of those states where I am convinced that my present writing is much worse than it used to be. Despite the suspicion that in a month or so I will think my writing now was so much better than that future writing will be.

There is also the problem that right now I feel like anything I post needs some kind of Reason To Exist. God knows what reason would actually count as sufficient for the brainweasels, though.

The really annoying thing is that if I posted chapter-by-chapter I have like three fics I could post the first chapter of (and on Fic A it's more like the first 3+ chapters) with minimal editing. Except that I do not write linearly and any of these first chapters could change at any moment. And anyway I do not want to do that without a schedule, and cannot keep to a schedule. And while fic A's structure is pretty clear by now I don't actually know how long the others are (or whether they even need chapters).

But that means I have thousands and thousands of words of unposted fic burning a hole in my metaphorical pocket. Of my brain. Whatever that means.

ETA: And I just sewed buttons on a knitting project instead of writing, so that tells you how much is coming out of the word mines today.

So yeah, I've had a pattern published in this month's Knitty: here.

The coverlet ... is about 50" wide and 67" long and displays a high level of competence in both design and weaving technique. It was woven by Kiersti Halvorsdatter Rø (1794 or 1795-1874). According to [Torbjørg] Gauslaa, people in the area remembered stories about Kiersti, a talented woman, good with her hands, who never married and was a prolific weaver. When she was twenty years old she fell from a barn loft and injured her hip, and for the rest of her life she needed help to get around. She had a difficult life, but her weaving shows that she found interest and satisfaction in her craft.

Six of the bands in the coverlet have woven-in text. The letters and numbers are elegantly designed. Two text bands near the top contain what Gauslaa refers to as a skjemterim (jesting rhyme). It isn’t clear who the message was for, but it shows that Kiersti had a sense of humor. “GJØR MIG EN MAGE OG SKIK M MIG DEN TIL BAGE DIN SKARV” (Make me a match and send it back to me you rascal) and “DETTE STYKKE ER JORT I MIT 55 AAR DEN FØRSTE NOVEMBER 1849 KIERSTI HALVORSDATTER RØ I VINGELEN” (This piece is done in my 55th year the first of November 1849 Kiersti Halvorsdatter Rø in Vingelen).

-- Norwegian Pick-up Bandweaving, Heather Torgenrud. The coverlet is in the Norsk Folkemuseum.

Finished

Respect the Spindle by Abby Franquemont: More worldwide and modern view than I had previously, lots of help with practicals.

Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 by Khaled El-Rouayheb: Very good as a general overview of mindsets. Also I like that he kept specifying exactly what he and his sources were talking about. Other notes here

From a High Tower by Mercedes Lackey: It's a Mercedes Lackey book. Although I feel like I keep getting poked in the ethical sensibilities by my comfort-reading right now, which is annoying.

In Progress

Cotillion by Georgette Heyer and Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho: Have actually been reading these this week.

Library

As well as Before Homosexuality, read an article on determining prehistoric TFRs from skeletal remains and ethnography.