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Week 25: 22 – 28 June

9how25aJust a few rows to show this week, as I’ve been otherwise engaged bringing my car up from Somerset to Edinburgh, an 8-hour journey which turned into an epic worthy of legend and song. Here’s the short version.

I took Friday off work, and flew down Thursday evening. I’d got on the plane quite early, and bagged an aisle seat near the rear (it was a row of three, with another chap by the window; the centre seat was empty). Imagine my feelings when I saw the fattest man in the world waddling sideways down the aisle (the only way he’d fit) towards us, ours being the only empty seat left. Well, he squeezed himself into the middle seat in the manner of someone crushing a sofa cushion back into its cover, and the pressure effectively forced me out of my own seat so I found myself rising like dough in the oven. All through the flight I was a sort of flying buttress for him, poor chap.

9how25bThis was uncomfortable enough, as I was sticking out into the aisle like a man peering round a fence, but one there was a particularly beefy stewardess who kept barging into me with her thick, meaty hams every time she passed, several times a minute. Indeed, when she first backed into me as she manoeuvred the snacks trolley down the aisle I became so intimately involved with parts of her anatomy I thought I’d end up with a paternity suit. In the end I got so fed up I leaned in with the shoulder in the manner of a footballer body-checking an opponent next time I saw her coming, and that seemed to sort her out. Got her right in the escape slide, as it were.

9how25cOther highlights included one of the most spectacular lightning storms I’ve seen, bolts of electricity sparking to the ground like a gigantic van de graaf generator, followed by a power cut of several hours which started within five minutes of reaching home. And is there anything more discouraging than getting stuck in a traffic jam, not on the motorway itself, but on the slip road to join the motorway, even before you’ve started your journey?

Ah, well, not to worry, I’m here now, doing my own small bit to increase traffic congestion in Edinburgh, a city which increasingly resembles Gondor in the third Lord of the Rings movie the more I get to know it. Weathered stone buildings, a castle atop the hill, cobbled streets, knights in shining armour, and a distressingly large orc amy besieging the place and flinging severed heads over the walls (the latter probably a feature of the Highland Games)…

Week 24: 15 – 21 June

9how24aAny week must be special that contains the summer solstice, the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, and Edinburgh’s celebrated “Moonwalk” festival (in which thousands of women roam the city streets after dark wearing nowt above the waist but pink bras in aid of a breast cancer charity, and I draw the curtains and contemplate, er, well, anything to be honest, so long as it’s not pink) – and so it has proved, as I’ve finally finished the gansey’s body and the ribbing around the neck.

As promised, the ribbing is just over an inch, about 14 rows, plus the cast-off row. As usual, I cast off in the same knit 2/purl 2 pattern as the ribbing itself to ensure that the neck remains concertina’ed: if you cast off all in knit or all in purl it distends and stretches the neckline, which looks wrong.

Then it was on to the sleeve, which meant – gulp – picking up some 200 stitches round the shoulder, plus the gusset. As previously, if you increase the gusset on the row before you divide the body front and back, when you come to pick up the gusset for the sleeve you can decrease on the pick-up row: this gives the gusset a nicely rounded edge and also means that the sleeve’s pick-up row doesn’t distort the gusset.

9how24bI pick up the stitches onto four needles, as it makes it easier to manage in the round, but quickly revert to three thereafter. And – in the spirit of transparency I’m keeping nothing from you – I had only intended to pick up 186 stitches round the shoulder, or 93 on each side, but alas the cricket 20-20 world cup final was on (Sri Lanka versus Pakistan, both teams triumphing over terrible tragedies to keep on playing – Pakistan can’t play international cricket in their own country for fear of terrorism, and the Sri Lanka team were attacked by gunmen recently, several players injured and a number of policemen killed), so I kind of got caught up in the moment and before I knew it I’d picked up 100 stitches by the halfway point instead of 93; and the rest, as they say, is history. Anyway, Pakistan won.

Finally, as an afterthought to the thread on detective stories, and speaking of cricket, I’ve just finished the novel “Netherland” by Joseph O’Neill. It’s a wistful piece of literary fiction, almost a book without a plot, but I found it curiously compelling, if a tad self-consciously over-written at times. It’s set in the aftermath to 9/11 in New York, when a wealthy Dutchman finds himself living alone after his wife takes their son back to England. He drifts into playing cricket every Saturday with other, poorer immigrants – taxi drivers, waiters and so on – and so the novel has interesting things to say about what it means to live in a foreign country, to adapt and yet to keep your cultural identity, and of course about America. One of the narrator’s cricketing friends is murdered at the start of the book, yet O’Neill isn’t interested in a conventional detective story: the murder is never properly solved; instead, you gradually learn enough about the man’s life to know all you need to figure out why he died. So I guess sometimes a plot can get in the way of a good story?

Right, now it’s time to go and listen to some Pink Floy- no, on second thoughts, let’s just call them The Floyd…

Week 23: 8 – 14 June

9how23aMore incremental progress this week, as the Edinburgh climate has finally taken its toll and landed me with my first cold of the summer; helped no doubt by the fact that this week also marked a bit of a lull after a fairly hectic and stressful few weeks at work, which probably meant that my immune system was off guard and looking the other way when the enemy microbes sprang their ambush, rising out of the heather in their little microbial kilts and waving their tiny diseased claymores.

So, to be honest, even picking up the stitches round the neck felt like quite an achievement. (This is sad but true – I usually look forward to picking up stitches with a certain amount of fear and loathing, but it’s never as bad as I expect; ha, not this time!)  One of the effects of the bug I’ve picked up has been a certain blurring of my vision, like having a blocked nose in your eye, which made it hard to focus; and so, for whatever reason, I found it nearly impossible to find the sweet spot for picking up each stitch, but jabbed away like an incompetent nurse trying to find the vein with a syringe (the voice of experience here, folks).

9how23bFinally, with the gansey severely bruised and no doubt badly traumatised, though not as badly as me, the ghastly chore was done. I’ll probably make this a short collar, just an inch or so, to round off the neck.

Last week’s mention of the somewhat unconvincing ending to Dissolution has had me wondering, what is the clunkiest conclusion of a detective story I’ve read? I think the palm has to go to PD James’s “Unnatural Causes” in which, and I kid you not, the killer is rescued from a rooftop during a flood by the detective in a helicopter; she falls to her death, but our hero is left clutching a small bag that she kept round her neck, which contains – don’t laugh – a tape onto which she dictated a full confession. And yet James remains highly regarded as a writer, which to my mind is the real mystery…

Week 22: 1 – 7 June

9how22a
Real sense of achievement this week, with the shoulders joined. The last few rows always seem to go very quickly – you’ve already divided front and back, so you’re only knitting half the number of stitches you used to when knitting in the round. Then, by subdividing the left and right shoulders and doing each of them in turn (and leaving just under a third
of the stitches on a holder for the neck) you’re through in no time.

The shoulders are, once more, the good old traditional “ridge and furrow” pattern – three ridges and furrows (each consisting of 2 purl rows and 2 knit rows) per shoulder per side. This is the pattern I know best, and always makes for a nice effect. And it’s probably the easiest, which may have something to do with why I like using it so much!

9how22bTo join a shoulder, put the 75 shoulder stitches from the front on a straight needle, and do the same for the back. (Both front and back should be identical – the same number of stitches, and the last row on each side should be the last knit row from the last ridge and furrow, so you’re putting two knit rows next to each other.) Position the two
needles side by side, with the stitches on each more or less equally paired off.

9how22cThen, using a third needle, knit the first 2 stitches together, one from each of your holding needles, ending up with a single new stitch on your third needle for the two old stitches you’ve just knit off. (You can start from either the neck or the far edge of the shoulder, it doesn’t matter.) Do exactly the same for the next 2 stitches, so you now have 2 stitches on your third needle. Then cast off the first of these 2 stitches by passing it over the second, so that you once again only have one stitch on your third needle. Repeat this process, working along the shoulder, knitting the stitches on your holding needles together and casting them off as you go, until they’re all gone. At the very end, thread the yarn through the last stitch and pull it tight, cut the yarn to leave a loose end to be darned in later, and that’s one shoulder finished.

I still find it amazing that this process creates a seventh ridge along the centre line of the shoulder, to the casual observer identical to the 6 other ridges, effectively making the join disappear. Magic.

Yes, it gets a bit fiddly towards the end, when you’ve only got a few stitches on each needle and they keep slipping out of reach down to the other end like naughty children avoiding a vaccination shot. But compared with the ghastly prospect of, say, picking up stitches or having to knit a swatch, it’s a piece of cake. Sponge cake, for preference, maybe with lemon icing. And a nice cup of Earl Grey to wash it down. Speaking of which…

Week 21: 25 – 31 May

9how21a
After weeks of what has probably felt like the knitting equivalent of watching paint dry, well, it’s dried. All of a sudden it’s time to divide for the left and right shoulders, which to be honest came as a bit of a surprise after all this time, a bit like driving along the motorway late at night, miles and miles of relaxing monotony, when suddenly you realise it’s your exit and you have to wake up and pay attention.

It’s a simple calculation to figure out the decreases from neck to shoulder (which usually means I’ve done it wrong) but here goes. My starting point is, I know how deep I want the neckline to be. In this case, it’s a couple of inches or so, quite low for a gansey which traditionally didn’t have any shaping around the neck, but since a tight neck makes me feel like I’m being strangled I say the hell with tradition, and aim for an elegant sweeping curve.

Now, because I’ve ticked off the rows front and back on a piece of paper, I know exactly how many rows there are still to go before the front is the same length as the back – 32. And, as the decrease rate is a giddy 1 stitch decrease for every 2 rows, that means I can fit in 16 decreases between now and the end of the shoulder.

9how21bI already know that each shoulder on the back is 75 stitches. So, in order to ensure that I finish up with just 75 stitches, decreasing 1 stitch every 2 rows to a total of 16 decreases, that means I have to start the shoulder with 91 stitches (75+16). I therefore slip 91 stitches onto a straight needle and continue knitting back and forth, decreasing on every purl row at the neck. The diagonal line to the shoulder you can see (hopefully) in the pictures (of necessity, taken with the iPhone again).

A couple of points. First of all, although the straight line diagonal from neck to shoulder looks a bit geometric at this stage, when the neck is finished with a collar it should look softer and more rounded. This is partly because knit 2/purl 2 pattern of the collar naturally draws the shape inwards, but also because by leaving some stitches on a holder around the adam’s apple, the shape is naturally rounded, it’s not a full V-neck.

9how21cThe second point to mention is that the decreases round the neck should be finished before the “ridge and furrow” shoulder panels are begun. These shoulder panels should be the full 75 stitches, just like at the back (the photos were taken immediately before starting the shoulder, with all the decreases on that side completed).

Apart from knitting, this week I read the historical detective bestseller, “Dissolution”, set in the reign of Henry VIII and focusing on the dissolution of the monasteries. It was a good read – a sort of Name of the Rose lite – but it fell down, as so many do, over the resolution of the mystery. Do real murderers, when they’re confronted by a detective, really start blurting out a full confession (“Yes! It was me! I killed the colonel with a lead pipe in the library!”) before conveniently plunging to their deaths? I suspect not. Or else being a detective would probably be a whole lot easier.

Special thanks this week to Nigel, for taking time out of his busy schedule to meet me for a coffee on the hottest day of the year – not exactly gansey-wearing weather, was it?