Welcome to episode eleven of "Stitching Between Pages"! I hope you enjoy watching, and thank you for checking it out.
Please get in touch!
Ravelry Group: Stitching Between Pages Podcast
Ravelry: halfpass92
Twitter: @medievalisting
Instagram: medievalisting
FOs:
1. "Red Robin Shawl," by Helen Stewart of Curious Handmade. Knit in The Wool Barn Luxury Sock in the "Bunting" colorway. Knit on US6/4.00mm HiyaHiya Sharps, 32" fixed circular.
2. "Reyna" shawl, by Noora Laivola. Knit in Miss Babs Yummy 2-Ply in the "Coffee Break" colorway. Knit on US4/3.50mm Knitter's Pride Karbonz, 40" circular.
WIPs:
1. Vanilla socks. Knit in West Yorkshire Spinners Signature 4-Ply in the "Blue Tit" colorway. Knit on US1/2.25mm HiyaHiya Sharps DPNs.
2. "Strand Hill Cardigan," by Keya Kuhn. Knit in KnitPicks Stroll, "Dogwood Heather" colorway. Knit on US8/5.00mm ChiaoGoo Premium Stainless Steel, 32" circular.
3. "Campside" shawl, by Alicia Plummer. Knit in Loop Studio in the "Charcoal" colorway. Knit on US7/4.5mm Knitters Pride Karbonz.
4. Granny square crochet blanket.
Spinning:
1. I've begun spinning up a YarnRescue Polwarth braid in the gorgeous "Eggplant" colorway. It's a 4.2oz braid, 100% Polwarth. I'm spinning it on my Schacht Hi-Lo spindle.
2. I finished my first ever handspun skein! It's the Cephalopod Yarns Bugga! Fiber in the "Ursula" colorway. It ended up being about 2.6oz, and I am pretty sure that I have about 220 yards.
Books:
1. Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely
1. Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely
2. The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker
Other Miscellaneous Mentions:
1. Thank you again to the Two Tangled Skeins podcast for including me on their awesome list of knitting podcasts! I'm in fabulous company on that list and it is such an honor.
2. The Rose City Rollers socks, designed by Mara Catherine Bryner, are super cute.
3. I remembered where I won the cherry zipper pull! It was from a drawing at Crafty Bastards, which is a really cool annual (September-time) craft fair in Washington, DC. It used to be held up in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, but recently moved to the Union Market in NoMa. If you're in the area, I definitely recommend going! Kismet Fiber Works was there last year, and there are always so many cool makers and people and stuff.
4. Check out the #sockblanketmadness tag on Instagram, started by WoolDiaries. I did not end up adding my 9 squares to my blanket, unfortunately; I just did not have enough hours in the day! But it was so inspiring to see others' blankets and squares and yarns in the tag.
5. If anyone was intrigued, Kars is located in northeast Turkey, on the border with Armenia. It has changed hands quite a few times throughout its history. The Turkish word for snow (the title of the novel by Orhan Pamuk) is "kar." GoodReads has a list of books by Turkish authors, though Orhan Pamuk's name is the only one that I know.
6. Some famous (and lovely!) DC independent bookstores include Kramerbooks, Politics & Prose, and Busboys & Poets.
7. The Bishop's Garden at Washington National Cathedral is a truly lovely spot. The entryway to the garden is a 12th-century Norman arch, and my favorite part of the garden is the herb garden, the "hortulus" ("little garden" in Latin). The inspiration for the hortulus was 9th-century monastic gardens, and the sources for plants and layout include the poem "Hortulus" by Abbot Walahfrid Strabo of Reichenau and the garden layouts in the St. Gall Plan. I was also not entirely wrong: there was indeed a Greek geographer (as well as philosopher and historian) named Strabo, who lived from 63 or 64 BCE to 24 CE in Turkey.
8. The Postal Museum is a fun place to spend a couple of hours. They have on display a block of four Inverted Jenny stamps, which were printed in 1918. The stamps have a face value of 24 cents, but are now valued at $977,500 apiece; there are only 100 in existence.
9. The oldest item in the Postal Museum's collection is a 1390 Silk Road letter. The Silk Road was a network of land and sea trade routes throughout Asia, the Middle East, and into Europe, connecting people and cultures across a vast amount of space and permitting the exchange of goods and ideas. UNESCO has a neat online portal for the Silk Road. (It was only when I was googling "Silk Road" to find a good link to include for anyone looking for more information that I remembered that "the Silk Road" is also the name of an online black market for the sale of illegal drugs; I am definitely not talking about that Silk Road!)
10. Medieval textiles are fascinating! Expensive silks, brocades, and other fabrics were symbols of status and luxury. There is a cool online exhibit of examples of extant medieval clothing worn by famous people - the chemise of Louis IX (St Louis), for example. Medievalists.net has a good brief description of various fabric terms used during the middle ages. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a great article on early modern silk production (c. 1600-1800) that touches on the silk industry that arose in Tours, France, in the late middle ages. This article, also from the Met, talks about the changing depictions of the Virgin Mary in the medieval period, but the paintings that they include in the article show some beautiful textiles.
