less than a year since my first stitch of blackwork, we have the most ambitious finished piece i have done yet -- in fact, it was known as the ambitious blackwork sampler until i decided at some point about a month ago that i wanted to give it to my friend kathy for her birthday. i was still working on the bottom row of border then; but for kathy, i also wanted a dragon at the top. it's still blackwork if you add a little color, as i've mentioned in the past. adding color isn't what makes projects appealing to me, usually, but this dragon did call out for red.
i love samplers for the mere fact that they are more or less done whenever you say they are done. this one almost looks like it's supposed to represent a single scene of some sort. i guess it does -- a scene of a couple of naked guys who have had a fight and are parting. a bug takes the side of the one guy and leaves with him. a dragon in heaven looks down at the foolish mortals. a small striped bird sits on the dragon's back. there are flowers on the earth below. yep, sounds like some sort of fable to me.
what else does kathy get? this little screenprinted bag from lotta jansdotter. it must have been a premium gift that came with my subscription to selvedge, because it was in my christmas bag with all the back issues. it is adorable, but i saw it more hanging on a doorknob at kathy's house than i saw it here. thus establishing an actual trend in birthday gifts for kathy; one thing i make her, and one thing that's already mine that i give her.
kathy's birthday is right after valentine's day and she knows she should stay off the blog for awhile so as not to ruin the surprise.
after a futzy beginning, i got better at working motifs rather than just borders in blackwork. i have been using backstitch rather than double-running stitch aka holbein stitch. if there's away to make these motifs reversible, i am sure i do not know it.
the ornaments you are seeing here actually number three, but are double-sided. they are all from historical charts (even the one that is very obviously a female reproductive system, which is an extra-good gift for this particular friend, and now keeping in line with a theme, as she received a uterus last year from me.)
i am sending these to her rather early. they are not overly christmasy, but she might want to find a way to use them now. there's little more disappointing than getting a holiday decor-type gift on the 25th and having to put it away for a year.
i have begun a new blackwork sampler, using backstitch instead of holbein stitch, and, frankly, not really planning what the thing is going to look like. this is what is neat about samplers; it's all process. there's little pressure. i'm using different threads and different historical charts, a mixture of motifs and undoubtedly borders, and we'll see what we have when we are finished.
i was chuffed to read that although blackwork started out rather simply, it increased in its ornate characteristics with the growing practices of calligraphy, and, yes, printing!
i am on the verge of scribbing out an attempt at an original chart. walking around town i am always inspired by wrought iron work (this grate is outside the curtis institute of music). it looks very much like a blackwork fill pattern!
it's october enough now. for all intents and purposes september has come and gone, and for the most part, in philadelphia, it was nothing but august junior. feh! but things are better now. lamb and barley stew is on the stove and we are soon to be entering the halloween-through-christmas days: my favorite days of the year, but also the time on the knitting blog when posting gets scanty, because i am keeping gifts under wraps.
not so much this year. i don't believe i'm knitting anything for anyone, now that i think of it!
but, back to september, and what the readership has missed. september began with an unexpected package on my doorstep. it turned out to be a big stack of blackwork books on loan from a friend. and she had written the note enclosed with the books in a really lovely copperplate! because that's the kind of people i hang with. copperplating freaks.
i had wanted to try some blackwork motifs rather than just borders. i wondered, could you do a motif in double-running stitch? not me, i found. maybe somebody can. i used backstitch.
then i made (partially) a victorian string art frame for my little bird. i have yet to quite finish it up. it does appear to be a little bird staring at a levitating pair of scissors, doesn't it? that's a bug, on the left. not scissors.
i am never "stuck" for ideas about what to knit, whether it be from a pattern from a book or something i'm just going to make up on my own. but i must say, lately, i have more ideas than usual. i thought it had something to do with the yarn moratorium, and maybe it does.
but i've also been writing like crazy -- absolutely crazy. i have filled a mead college-rule notebook with longhand this summer (an alarming amount of that having been written in various cosi/xando coffee-and-sandwich shops around center city -- their crumb cake is now officially a trigger mechanism for writing). i have also rewritten stories that have been lying around for some time (it is no unusual circumstance for me to make scrapple of a story for five years before seeing it placed) and i have exhausted, i feel certain, my store of "first readers" this summer -- even they have tired eyes (which is a shame since i just got the galley proof for the anthology story and really have no one to proof it. i can't. even if i read it upside down i probably couldn't proof it at this point.)
somebody -- and i wish i could remember who, since i've been really bad with my long-distance e-mail friends lately, just sending rather short messages complaining about my eyestrain -- suggested that little amber was the source of all this new creativity. well, the dates certainly line up. it's very possible!
this week, i suggested the same theory to little amber's creator, beth robinson.
Amber, that is so fascinating. I do believe that creativity breeds
creativity and it can spread like wildfire if given the right environment!
You gave it to me to begin with and I gave it back to you. Now that's a
wonderful exchange.
There is an artist in Miami that is completely fascinated with your doll.
He's a good guy, a customer of mine, and he's mentioned your doll on a few
occasions via email. I think he may be salivating with creative juice from
it as well - he was so touched that such deeply personal items could be
brought together in an art form like that. He said it made him think
differently about the work he was doing. Wildfire!
this is an example, to me, of what it is to be living an ideal.
ADDENDUM: this very day, syndicated sex columnist dan savage emphatically endorses "brechtian punk cabaret" act the dresden dolls, who use beth robinson's dolls in the video for their song "perfect fit". synchronicity!
the children of henry VIII are moving to the forefront of the game. the ones that are still alive, that is. for the most part, they are teenagers -- other than the fully-adult mary, who is wed to portrait painter hans holbein.
as previously noted, mary queen of scots' father, james V, died in a tragic playing-with-scissors accident that we had hardly even noticed until his urn was sitting on the bedroom floor.
marie de guise had some mental problems...
and then she, too, played fatally with scissors. you'd think mary, now an orphan, would have been a little more disconsolate. but no, he came running in to show the grim reaper his report card, completely forgoing the opportunity to plead for his mother's life.
mary was then a bachelor teen with a lot of free time on his hands.
elizabeth and mary are still hot and heavy. mary has a tendency, as well, to make time with elizabeth's half sisters, whenever they are in sight. elizabeth hasn't seen any of this happening yet, but i imagine it's coming. 
speaking of elizabeth's half-sisters, maxine, the eldest of the three, came home from school one day with a "friend" -- ralph enriquez.
ralph enriquez? we said. he's one of the pre-made sims that comes with the game, apparently. but it was obvious that he and maxine really liked each other, and so did the rest of the household -- including henry, who was there visiting his redheaded daughters.
not only is something brewing with maxine and ralph, but the twins, peak frean and mushy pea, seem to be splitting a suitor between them: his name is amar. there is also a spare suitor by the name of jihoon le tourneau but he only comes around every so often.
we like this rather exotic twist that these girls have taken in their courting. this ralph enriquez -- he showed up for a date with maxine in a STRETCH HUMMER. maybe he is one of those prince jeffrey of brunei types. after all, maxine, peak frean and mushy pea are not yet princesses. bessie, their mom, is just a commoner.
the king's numerous teen daughters continue to sway in their affections for these foreign boys -- who, because they "come with the game", i am not sure can grow up into adults, so it may not be worth my time to pursue serious relationships with them. who the hell, then, is going to marry all these girls? i have to get out a history book and make some more guys.
bessie -- mother of maxine and the twins -- was having some emotional problems. she knew that history mandated that she give henry a SON -- and even within the "destiny" of the game, bessie was dying to have another baby. and yet, at the same time, she FEARED it. this put her in an awful position, as you see.
bessie was getting close to her "birthday" -- the day when she age transitions into an old person -- and she had been hoping to become impregnated by the king again, but i found that it was not an option -- literally-- when they were in bed together.
however, bessie was too smart and together to go the joan lunden route. she was not going to hire any surrogates or take any funky sims fertility drugs. one day, outside by the mailbox, bessie met a mysterious and benevolent social worker.
i gathered from their conversation that the social worker knew a recent widower with a tiny infant, and he really, really needed someone to care for the baby. so a call was made to the adoption agency and things were finalized very fast. the baby came at the same time as the mail did that day. her name is francoise. she's in no way related to the king, so we may find her useful for clive of cleves, one of these days, if he makes it... although he might not make it. the princes in my world seem to have as much trouble as the princes in henry's real world did.
henry is getting older too and can't have too many more babies, i guess... once he's finished with katherine howard, he has no one left but katherine parr -- who, again, in that eerie sims-imitating-life fashion, is a very kind, nursemaid sort of woman. after all, she has been living with and taking care of bessie's daughters for as long as they have been around. katherine's relationships, particularly with bessie and the king's twins, are free-will, proactive, and have continued as the twins have grown up.
we're starting to give some serious thought to what will happen upon henry's death. it's nowhere near (not that we know of) but since the game lacks options like "rule" and "come to power" and "abscond with the crown", we don't know how we will actually KNOW who has taken over the role of monarch. we have to set some rules up. although we haven't been all that great at following the original rules we set for this version of the game; however, it's still fun (and you don't break a sweat playing it.)
after the untimely deaths of five, count 'em, FIVE of his (completely made-up, by me), sons (nine, ferdie, arthur, greensleeves, and harold), the king uprooted the rest of his (legitimate) family and moved to a new house.
when sims move to a new house, the ghosts of those who died in their previous house do not follow them. they disappear. the ghosts of those five princes -- not to mention anne boleyn, jane seymour, and a maid who died in the yard of we don't even know what -- had become too much to handle. you could barely move in that house!
so the king moved, with elizabeth and edward in tow, into a smaller house, only two houses away from the pre-queen holding pen, where the king's illegitimate daughters maxine, peak frean, and mushy pea, also live with their mother, bessie blount. the king's eldest daughter mary -- married to portrait painter hans holbein -- lives a little further away in the neighborhood.
the first thing the king needed of course was to marry again. after a rather back-and-forth courtship with anne of cleves, there was a wedding.
edward, history tells us, had the same sickly constitution as his mother, jane seymour. so did our edward. he died of the same "sickness" as jane -- that is, the sickness of swimming in pools with no ladders.
i did not know you could do it! i thought for sure child services would show up and intervene! but in the name of england i had to try. and what do you know, it worked. the problem was that the scary blue ghost of little edward not only walks the halls of the new little house -- and the yard -- he FLOODS them with puddles of water as a reminder of his untimely and treacherous manner of death!
but, we must move forward. forward with the bloodline. once again, somehow, henry had NO sons. lost all SIX somehow. imagine the excitement then at the birth of "clive of cleves".
but anne of cleves isn't a beautiful woman and she's not getting any younger. and henry is rather fond of that jailbait katherine howard. and he expresses his admiration for her in the usual fashion.
anne, still queen, and pissed at henry about this bold dalliance, grows complacent about her hair and makeup. she also gets a bad case of food poisoning from some nasty pop-tarts and grilled cheese.
meanwhile: the princess elizabeth is head over heels in love with mary queen of scots! she dyes her hair to match his and they go steady. in fact, the new palace is so relaxed that mary queen of scots stays overnight with elizabeth frequently! (but also very innocently.)
henry soon gives the ratty-ass anne of cleves the heave-ho. and in one of those eerie sims free-will moments, whenever katherine howard enters a room, henry gives her a wolf whistle. but that little blue, drippy edward-ghost is too much for the house to handle and the king orders the castle razed, and rebuilds it, with the best, and most forward-thinking interior decorators that his century has to offer. and boy are they good!
and katherine howard gives birth to a daughter, the princess howard anne. katherine and henry are not married -- i forgot to do it. there is still time. expect of course that katherine will start knocking boots with someone other than the king -- but who? there are so few available. it'll have to be some male domestic, some sim that came with the game. hmmm.
there's lots more to tell -- about the death of marie de guise, about the suitors from faraway shores -- very moneyed suitors (one of them showed up in a stretch hummer, actually), of illegitimate daughters maxine, peak frean, and mushy pea. but, right now, it's time to go to the gym.
the wooden shadow box came, from all places, target. now she's hanging right above my computer, right where my eyes go when i write.
she feels so absolutely right to me! my ex husband said she was my familiar. so y'all watch yourselves.
a little refresher: a few months ago, i mailed some organic bits to a woman in vermont. some hair, some puppy teeth, and a kidney stone.
then, more recently, i did a little bit of blackwork on linen -- and sent that back to her as well, after using some chintz pattern pieces she had sent me, to frame the borders i was stitching.
are you ready? are you ABSOLUTELY ready?
okay, then, if you say you're ready.
beth and i have been calling her "amber junior" or little amber . she is, for me, a reminder of an inner expression -- something i need to use for writing, and for knitting, too. (Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind, warned ralph waldo emerson in the mid-nineteenth century.)
i hesitate to call this a collaboration because obviously the very talented beth robinson did the hard stuff -- sure, i did the blackwork, passed the kidney stone, harvested the dog's teeth, and grew my hair (in june, my hairdresser DID find the missing piece: "why is this section back here so much shorter than the rest of it!?"). but beth really made her what she is.
i got "in progress" photos along the way.
the first pictures were of just the head. as beth and i had discussed, we would use the kidney stone to represent the mole on my left cheek. (ben has this exact same mole in the exact same place.) and, of course, ripley's baby teeth -- gathered one at a time throughout her first few months with us -- were inserted into the mouth.
then we conferred back and forth a bit on how to do the clothes. dress pieces had already been made; they were sent to me, in chintz, and i used some linen i had here at home to re-create them, and add the blackwork.
soon, she was on her way.
this was a luxury for me -- normally i do not spend any money on things just for myself, unless they are tools for knitting or letterpress, or an occasional book or cd. but that said, beth's dolls are much more affordable than they ought to be, and are getting more and more press all the time. i do not think that little amber will be the last strange doll i get... although it seems that to date, my request was, even for strangedolls.net, pretty strange!
more pics will be forthcoming, of little amber in her new environment. we are just loving the heck out of her.
for father's day, i assembed -- with ben's help -- a photo album. it's based on schematics from a book about japanese bookbinding i got for christmas.
i covered bookboard with japanese mulberry paper for the back cover, and with my first blackwork sampler on the front. i glued and cut, and ben folded, accordion-style pages out of heavy cotton paper. i included a few photos and a package of photo corners -- very modern -- they just come off on a strip and you can peel them one at a time.
it was hard to get a great photo so i went with the moody one. the shiny thing beneath the book is a bubble-wrap envelope that i put the little book in -- which smells like frozen shower gels from LUSH, since that what was in it up until i pulled it out of the freezer. (the freezer is now a new place i can look for recyclable gift wrapping. please pretend to be surprised and charmed when all your xmas presents from me are arranged under the tree, wrapped in a "frozen vegetables from trader joe's" theme.)
in sims news...
after an extended "illness", queen jane seymour went down for good.
i tried to make her get "sick". everybody else's sims do it. i sent her out in the yard. i underfed her. i worked her hard. not a sniffle. i wanted to be historically accurate -- even if in a very general way. but alas, it wasn't taking, and edward was just growing and growing, and i had to get rid of jane, so she developed an unusual "malady" that makes one want to swim in a pool that has no ladder for getting out of it.
also, somewhere along the way, james V died. a little later than he ought to have, considering how old mary queen of scots was at the time. and frankly, we missed it. he must have been running with scissors. he may have been particularly low on reserves since he and marie de guise had been going at each other with these evil magical aspiration vaccuums.
anne of cleves left henry at the altar; i got bored and moved everyone into much larger homes, then again into much smaller homes. i gave the pre-queens a taste for television that i now really regret giving them; and edward seems to be a rather hale and hearty little boy, already far older than he ever should have gotten before expiring. part of what is keeping me from playing now is trying to resolve within myself what appears to be the inevitability of edward not dying at all, or just being removed from the game by social workers. (anything that would normally cause a child to expire is simply intervened upon in the eleventh hour by social workers.)
sometimes, when i get to a difficult point in the game, i let
ben
take over until it is solved.
ben
is the eradicator. he makes problems go away.
henry's oldest living children are growing up.
as a restless teenager, mary tudor would get bored at the castle and go to visit king james V and marie de guise, and their live-in border hans holbein. there she grew curious about the ways of love, watching the amorous king and queen.
mary agreed to sit for a portrait for master holbein, and their friendship grew. soon hans was visiting mary at the castle. they could dance and have fun, but since she was a teen and he an adult, their romance could not truly blossom.
still, mary enjoyed taunting hans with her sexuality, and the minute she became an adult, she received her first kiss.
they married as soon as they could, and they moved into their own little house. will mary ever wear the crown? perhaps, perhaps not. king hans holbein? prince consort? who knows.
poor arthur, harold and greensleeves. in a kingdom where just about everyone was either their half-sibling or someone their father has to marry, they had very few dating options.
arthur was getting friendly with "scot", the maid... but things really didn't go anywhere. and then there was the fire. so unfortunate. this was a fire, as opposed to a "fire" that "happened" and in which all the princes "died" (quote marks mean you should picture me clicking and mousing and dispatching them all to their deaths in a conveniently ordered -- by me -- kitchen fire.) this fire really just happened, and even though i tried to save arthur (my favorite), they all just died. for real.
arthur -- last remaining son of henry and catherine of aragon. dead. harold and greensleeves, for whom i had great hopes of evil despotism, sons of henry and anne boleyn -- dead. boring, and dead.
henry does still have three illegitimate (and fictional) daughters with bessie blount, and they are still alive -- maxine, and the twins peak frean and mushy pea. but for them, henry only has the legitimate, historically accurate children he would have had to begin with -- mary (by catherine of aragon), elizabeth (by anne boleyn), and edward (by the recently dead jane seymour). i think the power of history is forcing my hand.
princess elizabeth, since i wanted her to be as formidable as her historical counterpart, has a lot of skills. logic, creativity, charisma -- she is a well endowed girl. alas, her possibilities for romance are also limited, because her only peers are her half-sister maxine, and of course, mary queen of scots.
i guess there is something i should explain about mary queen of scots. at the time marie de guise gave birth, this was a very boring house to play, and when the baby was born a boy, i did not know how to force-quit ben's computer properly, and he was a few rooms away, busy doing something. so i yelled "do you want to come force-quit this machine, or do we want mary queen of scots to start life as a boy and become a tranny?"
so you see which option we chose. mary queen of scots is a force to be reckoned with though -- having maxed out on logic in childhood.
but, remember -- mary queen of scots IS still a male teenager, and is NOT related to elizabeth -- and currently, until i make a new houseful of auxilliary characters, is her ONLY chance at a bloodline.
there is much yummy, nearly rapturous information to be had about elizabeth's clothes, and i will be damned if i'm not going to get my hands on it. and i had not known until recently about mary queen of scots' needlework, which contained secret messages. that mary has her fans. isn't it fantastic?
there's something that needs explaining about the illegitimate maxine fitzroy as well. lovely as she is, she went through a stage of temporary dwarfism heretofore unseen in this game, at least by me.
here is my best guess at what happened. when you play the sims, time is only passing in the house you occupy while you are playing. therefore, babies born on the same day (if you played both houses that day ) will not age at the same rate if you spend more time in one house than in the other.
also, if a sim is a visitor in the house you are playing -- even if when in their "own" house you can boss them around -- they are out of your control. not only that, but, say, a girl goes to a party at a neighbor's, and you stop playing that house while she is sitting there eating cake. go back to the house that girl "lives" in -- and she will be there, because it is a different time and day in that house.
got that?
maxine fitzroy went to the birthday party of mary queen of scots. maxine went to this party as a child. while maxine was still at the party, i closed the house and started playing the house where maxine actually lived.
while playing the house where maxine lived, maxine herself age-transitioned from child to teenager. quite attractively i might add.
but when i re-entered the home of mary queen of scots, and the frozen-in-time birthday party -- maxine was still there. and dwarfism, however temporary, was the very upsetting result.
this whole weird ugly squatness of maxine revisits a fear i had as a little girl -- a fear and dislike of an illustration in a facsimile reproduction of lewis carroll's alice's adventures underground. it was not disneyfied. and carroll's drawings were a little primative and upsetting to me. in that book, when alice grew small, her head was the same size as it had been when she was herself -- and her expression really bothered me.
this is 18 count linen, and so much nicer than the aida cloth. also, i used a crewel needle rather than a tapestry needle and felt much more in control of my stitches. this is for use with the bits.
here's a front, and here's a back! not bad!
always remember: the ugly may be beautiful, the pretty never. that one is attributed to both paul gaugin and mary baker eddy -- but is worth remembering, particularly in response to this project.
i finished my first blackwork sampler!
of course, you can't have elizabethan blackwork without an elizabeth.
conceived by anne boleyn only after the birth of two fictional princes (harold and greensleeves), we do now have a brown-haired elizabeth. (funny that her brothers are both redheads.) i am pinning a lot of hopes on her, even though it's me who has given her exponentially more siblings to fight for the crown, so i have also given her mad skillz. she drank lots of "smart milk" and got quite a bit of charisma and logic.
elizabeth has of course, two living half-sibs by henry and catherine of aragon (the fictional arthur, and the real mary), and the aforementioned two full brothers by anne boleyn. at last mention she also had an illegitimate sister by bessie blount, who at that time was again pregnant by the king, and has since delivered: twin girls, who live in the pre-queen pen and therefore have a lot of ladies to care for them.
i was mad that they were twins and that they were girls. i needed a boy. i needed a henry fitzroy. i was so mad, i gave the twins dumb names. they are "peak frean" and "mushy pea".
after seeing numerous identical single-birth siblings generated by the same pairs of parents, i was surprised to see clearly fraternal twins -- who also have very different personality traits! we are going to work hard towards a good twin and an evil twin. i don't know WHAT to do when it comes to the conception of henry fitzroy -- because henry and bessie had a big blowout fight and there's no way to get them in bed together right now.
as far as queens go, i got henry and anne boleyn into a cycle of fighting and nagging, but, so dull and unimaginitive is the game, there was no way for him to order her beheading, so he requested instead that she go fix a trash disposal that she was not mechanically equipped to handle, hoping for an electrocution.
instead, the ghosts of the immolated princes -- nine and ferdie -- were wandering the kitchen, and ferdie -- with whom anne had had such a nice relationship in life -- literally scared her to death. anne had low resources at that point -- she had not enjoyed motherhood. and being scared to death by a ghost seems to have made HER in turn a VERY scary ghost indeed.
eh. can't fight fate. so, anne boleyn is dead. and henry IS already married to jane seymour (whose wooing caused the big problems between the king and bessie blount -- you will recall that bessie was involved both with the king and with jane!) and all jane has to do is produce an edward -- a sickly little edward -- and all my obligations towards "real" legitimate offspring are fullfilled, right?
she didn't do it. i had to force-quit and make her labor again. she caught on that time.
now i have to get rid of her. just as hard to come by as "beheading", it seems, is "sickness". sims are SUPPOSED to be able to catch communicable diseases; these won't. with all the clever players creating clever shareable downloads, why isn't anyone making "smallpox"?
there have, though, been some interesting trends taking place in the kingdom.
trend one: running with scissors
this was a new download from thesims2.com -- they LOVE to run with these giant scissors, which look as though they were purchased as a "decorative" item from pottery barn! alas, running with scissors is VERY dangerous. be careful and give your sims room if you try this, or you will end up...
trend two: pleading with death
death comes, and you can plead with him. this had to happen a number of times, because the anne boleyn ghost is so nasty, she scared jane seymour to death twice in five minutes. and once when henry ran with scissors, he stabbed himself in the chest because he ran into a wall, and we had to plead for him. it's a fifty-fifty chance, but it's still a chance.
children cannot play with the scissors. such a socially responsible game. (when hetero couples stand under the wedding arch, the action they take is to "marry". when same sex couples do it, the option is called "join". take it as you will.)
my blackwork sampler is finished. finished!
i finished the last band during one of our encore viewings of reform school girls, and then zipped around the outer border in no time. pleased? yes.
of course, i'm all about perspective, so i got some when a buddy returned my scott peterson trial book -- MEDIA MAIL -- and sent this along, wadded up inside. like it was nothing.
if i could do this, it would be triple-matted and behind UV protective glass. but no, she wads it into a book and sends it MEDIA MAIL.
i love the assisi work. love it.
when last i updated, catherine of aragon had given king henry three sons (nine, ferdie and arthur) and a daughter (mary), but, when caught doing it with bessie blount (who gave birth to maxine fitzroy, illegitimate and entirely made-up daughter of henry), catherine of aragon left the king. fine.
henry, being who he is, has bessie blount pregnant again, but she doesn't live with him, since he has married anne boleyn.
i tried to create a situation in which anne started getting it on with one of the teenage princes, therefore enraging henry into killing her. i had this really COOL idea that elizabeth would actually be the child of anne boleyn and a son of henry and catherine of aragon -- good and convoluted! -- but since moving anne boleyn into the house she rates as "family" and a chaste family kiss is all she and the princes were capable of mustering. here she is though, gossiping with prince ferdie, with whom she had the best relationship.
due to a real lack of finesse when it came to figuring out when to take toaster pastries out of the oven, the palace had a series of kitchen fires. you see anne getting toasty here, but mercifully she was extinguished. however. prince henry IX and prince ferdie, both spotty teens, were dispatched in one of these fires. (prince nine has already been seen walking the halls at night, ghostly and red.)
scorecard: at this juncture, prince arthur -- third son of catherine of aragon and henry VIII -- stands to inherit the throne. behind him, his sister mary.
but not for long. in a historically false move much like catherine of aragon's, anne boleyn gives rapid, machinelike birth to TWO sons -- prince harold, and prince greensleeves.
here we see prince harold being held by his half-brother prince arthur. they have an unusually close relationship -- sims have "free will" and arthur is always first to come running to hold harold, or even to potty train or bathe him. they just seem to love each other.
but i think you'd agree that prince harold is obviously demonspawn. look at that face. he doesn't look like the type who wants to be second-in-line for anything, much less the throne of england.
prince greensleeves is still a tiny infant right now, so it remains to be seen what will happen with him.
enough about this household -- you may be wondering, where do all these queens-in-waiting come from? are they "built" yet, or do we make them as we need them?
all the queens DO exist already -- in a holding pen on the other side of the neighborhood.
there are benefits to doing it this way, rather than just conjuring up new sims as the need approaches. when in the queen pad, henry can come "visit", but since it is not his house, he is not actually aging while this happens. "playing" the queen house, after having one of the women phone to get him to come over, buys me time in which he can make their acquaintance, begin to form relationships with them, but does not use up days in the king's actual lifespan. it's very helpful.
i love this calvin-klein-ad shot of jane seymour, demonstrating how really boring the queen house is. i didn't spend a lot of time outfitting it. in fact, for some time, when they were hungry, they had to order pizza, because i hadn't given them a kitchen. (true story.)
here's anne of cleves, demonstrating how the queen house has a real prisoner: the women of cell block H feel.
here's katherine howard eating out of the trash at the curb. again, free will. when i realized that they would do this kind of thing, i got them a kitchen right quick.
bessie blount, who is no queen, but has borne a daughter and is pregnant again with henry VIII's child, was in a little house of her own, but it gets annoying to maintain so many homes. i have since moved her in with the queens, who are all incredibly helpful in teaching little maxine fitzroy to walk, talk, and use the potty.
instrumental in getting bessie moved in was her very close relationship with jane seymour.
but, as often happens with these things, it sometimes seems like it's going in one direction...
and then, suddenly, it's not.
so there you have it. henry is flinging his seed hither and yon; i need mary queen of scots to come of age relatively concurrent with elizabeth, and, while i might have them both conceived right now, i'll have to cheat to be sure (force-quitting the game).
the possible conception of mary queen of scots was quite interesting. marie de guise and james V have been the most ornery married couple i have ever seen in this game -- in fact i have NEVER had such a hard time trying to get two sims in bed together.
but here's what's fascinating: as i sat there clicking and cursing and ordering them to copulate, the "conception" theme song started playing -- and neither marie nor james had gotten undressed, or under the covers, or so much as touched each other!
so -- things that the history books don't tell you -- mary queen of scots was a virgin birth.
here's what my blackwork sampler looks like these days.
and i'm very excited to finish and move on, fine-tuning and reworking the bands i liked the best, using all this nice new linen and exciting threads (including silk), sent to me by a friend (the trade was some high quality paper "scrap" from the KT as well as the loan of my new scott peterson trial book).
here is the blackwork.
more than halfway through the sampler, i get a little panicked thinking what will i do when it's done? because i want more. but, in fact, i plan to rework a few of these bands on an extra piece of aida cloth, because i want to see what they look like with a different number of strands than i originally started with. might also do some in red.
i prefer the band designs to "stuff that looks like stuff" (trees, flowers, fruits) and am thinking that, since there's a lands end catalog on the kitchen table and
ben
and i each have a linen shirt marked to purchase, that i may just try to go to town on our clothing a bit. just a bit.
so -- in my "new tudors" sims game, there are rules.
certain things have to stay as historically correct as possible, including: order of wives, method of their dismissal, and the fact that they MUST bear the historically acknowledged "legitimate" existing children of henry VIII. (this is true as well of bessie blount, the mother of henry's most acknowledged illegitimate.)
so far, the king's ability to make any woman feel like she is the only woman in the room has only lead to a baby in every crib.
the "everything goes" comes in in that, where the wives are concerned, they can bear as many OTHER children as is necessary to get them the "historically correct" ones. in other words -- when catherine of aragon gave birth to a boy, i did not force-quit the game and go back and make her labor again until the baby came up a girl. i just kept making her have more babies. in fact, at least twice, she gave birth, put the infant on the floor, marched up to bed, and was pregnant again before ever feeding or changing the new baby.
because of this, catherine of aragon actually bore henry VIII three healthy and viable male heirs before producing the infant "bloody mary".
somewhere the ghost of henry VIII is kicking himself. but only because he can't kick me.
from the sidelines, cracking the whip on catherine and henry's breeding, benjamin and i were disappointed to find that the three boys were, at all stages of their growth from children to teens, essentially identical. we had to change their hairstyles and acoutrements so that we could tell them apart.
they were henry IX ("prince nine"), prince ferdie, and prince arthur.
they were also unusually ugly little dullards. with terrible skills. sloppy. impossible to "encourage" (as per the game). really difficult!
bloody mary turned out as ugly as any of the boys, and almost identical to them as well. strange! takes the fun out of procreating with the same pair again and again.
i was of course interested to see what bessie blount could whip up. it was eerie (this is what makes the game so damn fun) how DIFFERENT she and henry were, romantically, than henry and catherine had been. with catherine, he had gone through the motions. with bessie, there was this weird warmth.
the king went to visit bessie, and unfortunately, the queen came with. dammit! but, after a whispered conference with hans holbein in the shower, the king and bessie conspired to get hans to PAINT a PORTRAIT of the queen downstairs, so she would not be too aware of the king impregnating bessie upstairs!
having produced three princes, it felt a bit insincere to have to orchestrate a situation where henry would want to get RID of catherine of aragon; she had done a great job. but, she caught him canoodling with bessie blount -- hans holbein failed us -- and it set things on a downward slope. the king had to get rid of catherine, and he did. she walked out in her pajamas and disappeared into the fog at the end of the road.
we'll call this "annullment".
that worked out fine, except for the fact that the baby is a girl, which means we have to go through the whole process again. so now, in addition to the fictional princes nine, ferdie and arthur, we have a fictional illegitimate daughter named maxine. and henry is JUST getting things rolling with anne boleyn!
by the way, not particularly enamored of the "extra" princes, i tried to immolate them. we now know that, in a housefire, adult and teenage sims will grab any baby or toddler on the premises and take them to a far away spot on the lawn outside. also, children cannot, it seems, be consumed by fire. hmm.
on the sims front -- well, you are a little behind on the story. as you see, elizabeth became a beautiful teenager. but queen jane seymour was feeling a little under the weather.
indeed, the queen was feeling poorly. with a gasp, she expired. (note the school bus arriving outside the front windows of the palace. i love the little details like that.)
and see now, the return of jane's ghost! whoooooooo! she is here to tell us of the nature of her demise. again and again she enacts her final moments on earth. food poisoning!
i whizzed through anne of cleves and kathryn howard (had to drown her), and got katherine parr in the house and married to the king. that's wife number six, and it all felt rather anticlimactic at that point.
so, although the images above are from the proto-game, i have decided simply to begin again, building a new king and six new would-be queens, as well as additional figures such as hans holbein the younger, bessie blount, james V and marie de guise, and so on.
but i have also decided to beef up henry's line a bit, with additional fictional offspring, and offspring of offspring, possibly even half-alien. (you can do that in the game). the tudor bloodline will live on.
by the way: does anyone remember when i took this quiz about two years ago? i took it again today and got the same answer i did last time:
Which of Henry VIII's wives are you?
as for my blackwork sampler, that is progressing as well. i LOVE doing this. i am not happy with the aida cloth -- it's too shiny and too white. (so many things are.) i want to use linen, i intend to use linen. blackwork is a much nicer "out" project than knitting seems to be. easier to cart off to a favorite café, to sit with
ben
and work on the project plan for the knitting tarot. blackwork does not take up a larger and larger space in your bag as it progresses. that's a plus.
the image is greyscaled to decrease the shiny, bluey-white of the aida cloth, but of course, the thing is still unpressed, and full of creases. this is much more of an "in progress" image than i tend to show with my knitting, mostly because i know what things look like when they are partially knit and they are not always that interesting or photogenic. but this is all still so new and i'm still in that wonderment stage.
i like, though, how the incomplete motif worked left to right looks like an i ching hexagram, then fills in so nicely coming back right to left.
rather an uncomfortable closeup, but this way you don't see so much of the imprint that the hoop has left on the aida cloth. i am halfway through the second band of my blackwork band sampler.
in the simulated tudor empire, anne boleyn has met with a sinister end. (again, i didn't have a guillotine at my disposal, so i basically had to starve her in a hedge maze. whatever.)
there is considerable strain on the relationship of the half-sister princesses, mary (daughter of catherine of aragon) and elizabeth (daughter of anne boleyn).
what is so fun about the SIMS is that sometimes these things present themselves without your help. mary started giving elizabeth a hard time as soon as she was a school-aged kid.
the princess mary, in her spotty teenagehood, is very difficult to deal with. here she is seen not getting along well with a neighbor. undoubtedly she is telling him, as she does everybody, how elizabeth is the bastard daughter of a heretical whore.
but what historians fail to understand about mary is that she had very poor mechanical skills, and was electrocuted to death while trying to repair a home computer.
okay. this just happened, and we had to force-quit the game so it didn't stick. you can do that in the SIMS. we had to force-quit when elizabeth was born a boy, go back into the unsaved version of the game, and rebirth her until she came up female. it's a good thing king henry didn't see us doing that or he would surely have had a few choice words. (although since these images, jane seymour has in fact given birth to prince edward. i am trying to keep them both sickly, as jane must die, and in time, so must edward.)
this is a very finite SIMS adventure, you know. once henry dies (while still married to katherine parr if things to go plan) and then edward dies (little hopeless runt that he was) there's nothing left to DO. mary will be queen until she dies, then elizabeth will be queen, but in the context of the game, this requires nothing of them. it will have to end there; the three legitimate children of henry VIII all died without issue. (the books all say that, and i love it; "died without issue", as though they looked up, saw the reaper, and said "eh. i can't really make an issue of this.")
the band sampler is going to take a lot longer to complete than the game is, but english history does not depend upon the finished band sampler.
been loving the blackwork. (careful with that piece of paper behind it though. it was handmade in korea.)
i finished the first band of my sampler this week, and am anxious to move onto the next one. i will use a different number of strands, as i wish to experiment with different thicknesses. there is a lot more detail in the upcoming band than in this finished one. close up, my work looks squiggly, like a "dr. katz" cartoon. still, the feeling of pride and enjoyment prevails. i like it!
i am a fan of the tudors and so it is no big surprise that i like the elizabethan blackwork. (plus, it's black. usually.) it's called "elizabethan" although the work can be seen in portraits of elizabeth I's foremothers just as readily. it's harder than you think to get a nice public domain image of any of the tudors. seems that whichever gallery holds the holbein portrait, holds the copyright of the image, or at least they seem to believe so. but i can direct us easily to some images of actual tudors in actual blackwork, in addition to -- yo, anna putsch -- why are you wearing my hat?
anyway. prior to elizabeth, here's her corpulent father slathered in blackwork. elizabeth, being the lion's cub, was pretty good at putting on the dog when it came to blackwork herself, in time.
a widely held belief is that catherine of aragon, henry VIII's first wife, brought blackwork to england from her native spain. catherine of aragon was the mother of despotic catholic whackadoodle bloody mary. it was henry's second wife, anne boleyn (please note just how similar the blackwork around her neckline is to the sampler band i have just completed), who gave birth to the virgin queen (check out the rat) -- and anne boleyn is the queen about whom my uncle eric would sing that scary "with her head tucked underneath her arm" song while my cousins and i sat in the back of his VW bus.
perhaps this makes for dryish reading.
here's an image of catherine of aragon that i am allowed to use, because i created it in the SIMS 2. this is catherine of aragon, still on maternity leave from her job as a cashier at a fast food drive-thru, bathing baby bloody mary in the kitchen sink.
we had a sims game going previously that was just an amber-sim and a ben-sim progressing through an entirely made-up life, but it was depressing to realize that the high points of the game were so utterly predictable:
a. see what gender a baby is, then name it
b. buy furniture and decorative items
c. anticipate how people will die, or just kill them
and we kept doing them over and over again. i decided instead to make a henry VIII sim, make the six wives, and see how hard it was to get him hooked up with them in the correct order, have the right gender of progeny with them, and then dispose of them in the most historically accurate manner -- while of course needing to plan things so that henry dies of natural causes while edward is still a young teen. this has more of a challenge for me. there are no beheadings in the SIMS 2, and there are no gabled headdresses, but i'm making my way as best i can.
here you see catherine of aragon -- still in her nightie -- enjoying grilled cheese with anne of cleves and anne boleyn.
i think i'll keep this blog updated on my game as well as on my blackwork. as you see, both are progressing nicely.
a whole new category for the blog that has less and less to do with knitting all the time.
recently i became entranced with elizabethan blackwork, and got a sampler kit for my birthday today! from ben of course!
this, and a jar of betty crocker frosting, have kept me busy most of today so far. oh, okay, we went to pilates as well.
my ex-husband tim also made me some zuppa inglese and got me some new music. my sister sent me a t-shirt of my favorite spamusement cartoon.
ben and i are going out to dinner tonight, if i can tear myself away from the blackwork. i have a feeling i'm going to want to update the progress on the sampler before nightfall!
a little court tv, a little frosting, a little blackwork. see, this is why i don't feel thirty-five. whatever "thirty-five" means.