With the end in sight I’ve been cranking up the old cd player (still trying to come to terms with the elusive symphonies of Arnold Bax, whom I fear I will never love as a brother) and putting in the hard yarn. Am over halfway through the sleeve now, and it gets easier all the time with every decrease. And plain knitting after a pattern always zips right along.
Under normal circumstances I’d be finished in another week, but we’ve got a friend coming to stay this week and I’m taking a few days off for general slobbing about and coffee drinking purposes, not to mention going to see Wagner’s Flying Dutchman as part of the Festival. So I’ll only get a couple of days’ knitting in this week.
As usual at about this time I’m thinking about my next gansey. I already know it’ll be in cream, as I find the navy colour a bit dull to work with sometimes so I’m alternating light and dark projects. I ordered some British Breeds yarn over a week ago and am starting to wonder where it’s got to. (I’m not quite satisfied with the Frangipani yarn I’ve been using. It’s hard to say exactly what the issue is, but it seems scrawnier than I’m used to, thin and scraggy and a bit uneven. It knits up all right, but I miss the softness and “bounce” of some of the guernsey 5-ply yarn I used to knit with, so I’m trying elsewhere this time. That is, if it arrives…)
I’ve had a major rethink about the pattern of the next project too. I was going to knit a straight Hebridean gansey, one of those really fancy ones like Tudfil’s in the gallery. Basically, these beautiful jumpers have patterned columns or ribs from the welt to the yoke, a trellis-patterned band across the middle, and then square-ish panels making up the yoke (typically 3 per column) separated by cables, moss stitch, you name it. They’re the only ganseys I’ve seen with”yarnovers”, the decorative lace-like holes. They’re quite something.
At first I thought of doing something I’ve never tried before, but sneakily, and incorporating my own designs into the panels. I thought of replicating something for each of the countries that have significance for me (so a kiwi for New Zealand where I was born, a rose for England, a dragon for Wales and a Saltire for Scotland). But then I started to think: why not design an entire gansey around the native patterns of one country – say, a book of Kells/Lindisfarne gospels design, or (and this is where light bulbs started going off) Maori patterns from NZ? The overall construction would follow the Hebridean arrangement, but the patterns would be adapted from Maori designs.
Of course, there’s always a downside, and to achieve this I’d have to – gulp! – knit quite a few swatches, not to mention play around with a lot of graph paper. But I think I’m onto something here. Watch this space…
Oh, and the answer to last week’s question was that, as far as I’m aware, Tolkien adopted the idea of a “ruling ring”, i.e., the one ring that would give the wearer power to rule the world, from Wagner, who invented it in his 4-part operatic cycle, Der Ring Des Nibelungen (which, at 15 hours, is still longer than Peter Jackson’s film trilogy!).
It’s nice to reach the second sleeve. The end is in sight – feels like forever – so you’re motivated just to put in the hard yards and get it done. This time I’ve been helped by a couple of factors.
Secondly, and it’s probably not a coincidence, I’ve rediscovered my love of Wagner, in particular his epic Ring cycle of 4 operas, a mere 15 hours of music. The astonishing thing about the Ring, not only did Wagner write both the text and music himself (and what music), but he used old legends to illustrate his thoughts on the nature of human society and human nature. So the Ring is, in one sense, a portrayal of the world, from creation to dissolution. (To give one example of the originality of Wagner’s thinking: he devised his own creation myth, to get the cycle underway; but in it he portrayed the gods as morally corrupt, “mired in sleaze” as the saying is, requiring human beings to renew the world and offer a hope of redemption. Usually it’s the other way round.)
So lots to keep me entertained while I put my feet up and knit, as the rain hammers on the roof and the howling wind rattles the windows, in what passes for summer up here. All of which explains the dramatic progress of the last few days, and the euphoria that follows the realisation that I will never, never have to knit a row of this soul-destroying pattern ever again. (Yes, all right Suzanne, I admit it, you were right! Woody Allen has a character in one of his stories who falls out of a box at the opera and lands on his head; rather than admit it was a mistake, he goes back every night and repeats it to make it look like it was deliberate… In some ways that’s not a bad metaphor for me and this pullover.)
Apologies for the break in transmission over the past couple of weeks – normal service is now resumed, albeit using the word “normal” in its loosest sense.
Our window at the National Archives looks out on a plaza in front of a shopping mall, and every now and again a busker is incautious enough to set up close to the wall. If the music goes on long enough to become annoying we have perfected the technique of reaching out, grabbing them by the shoulders, and suddenly pulling them inside like the creature from Alien dragging another victim into a cooling duct. (Once we’ve got them inside we can go through their pockets, then set them to work cataloguing archives until we consider they’ve paid their debt to society. Or just until we feel like it. This of course is how the National Archives recruits most of its staff – it works just like the old-fashioned press gang.)
Anyway, back to the pullover. I think I made the sleeve a little too wide for my taste at 10 inches at the armhole. I normally aim for 8 to 8.5 inches, which works fine with my standard decrease rate down the sleeve of 1 in 6. This time the sleeve looks a bit puffy, the kind of thing Lord Byron would have worn if he’d been into fishing for herring instead of writing poetry. Of course, it’s all relative, and this sleeve is fairly typical of those shown in many of the old photos, so it’s not a problem. But best worn by someone with muscular upper arms, not the likes of me whose arms most closely resemble those animals made out of air-filled balloons.