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 Great excitement in Reid Towers this week as I finally achieve a lifelong dream, and manage to get my computer to wirelessly send music to my hi fi. Thanks to the magic of Apple computers and their nifty little Airport Express devices I can recline on my sofa, use my iPhone as a remote control, and access my entire CD collection via my hard disc through the amplifier, and then fall asleep, mired in drool.
Not, I hasten to add, because I am too lazy to get up every hour or so to put on a new CD – perish the thought, hem-hem. No, but think of the space I could save if all of my 1,400 CDs were packed up in boxes, and everything was available on the hard drive. We’re living in the future, people! (The real breakthrough was realising that lossless copies of my CDs sounded as good as the originals – which, since I’ve got a hi fi that cost more than my car (new), was a pretty stunning revelation.)
 It’s possible I may be too attached to my music. In fact, there are times when I go into the lounge and see the great black shape of the hi fi hunched in its corner, lurking like Shelob or something out of a David Attenborough documentary, waiting to be fed, and I think, you know, maybe I ought to get out more…
Another week, another swatch. I’m rather pleased with this one, even if I’m not entirely convinced by the pattern. Pleased because it was my first attempt at translating a design into a gansey pattern; and it came out more or less as I’d hoped. I like the little cables in the boxes – I think that will work well in a longer band up the body. As I’d expected, the border (two purl stitches) doesn’t exactly come off, because when it’s horizontal it’s raised proud of the surface, and when it’s vertical it’s sunken. One possibility will be to do it in moss stitch, maybe make it 3 stitches wide.
I also wonder if there’s too much blank space on it, though, or if that will seem more natural when it’s knitted up as part of the body – after all, the body isn’t supposed to detract from the fancy patterning of the yoke.
Time to go and recline and listen to music. Which will it be? AC/DC’s classic album Back in Black, or a Mozart piano concerto – I think I’ll leave it up to fate and let the shuffle setting decide…
Some people, looking back, measure their lives by the growth of their children; others, their pets or their holidays. In my case, alas, migraines are my yardstick.
High on the list of Great Migraines I Have Known would be the time I saw an “energy ribbon” across my line of vision, like the nexus that saw off Captain Kirk in Star Trek Generations, and which mucked up my speech without me being aware of it, so that I was told later that I tried to pronounce “barbarians” as “blahbeeurugh”. Then there was the time I recreated the famous scene from the Acts of the Apostles, being helplessly sick into a gutter outside the Arndale Centre in Manchester at eleven in the morning, while passers-by made disparaging comments about my being obviously drunk so early in the morning*.
So when I was stricken on the train coming back from a meeting in London last week, you might think I’d have been ready for it, like the werewolf who recognises that a full moon is upon him when he finds he can’t use a can opener with those paws. But no. Somewhere around Preston I was suddenly overcome with sweating, nausea, headache and a kind of paralysis that prevented me even getting out of my seat for the next 2 hours, which will go down as some of the most miserable of my life, especially when you consider I had a Snickers flapjack tantalisingly out of reach in my bag. The fact that it a thick mist and drizzle had descended so I couldn’t see out only added to the experience.
Ah well, so it goes (just like my breakfast that day around 10.45am – what goes down must come up).
All of which goes some way to explain a quiet week on the swatching front, since the migraine took a couple of days to wear off, and one of the symptoms is tired eyes and slightly blurred vision. However, I do have another pattern to share with you, taken from the same panel in a Maori meeting house as the last one. Unlike the previous pattern, this doesn’t have an obvious parallel with a traditional gansey pattern, so we are starting to paddle ourselves out into deep waters. Hopefully I’ll have a knitted up version to show you next week.
The original is shaded two different colours of brown, which I can’t really replicate, even with moss or purl stitches. On the other hand, I’m hoping the addition of the thin cables in the boxes will make for a distinctive effect. We’ll see.
(*Yes, I know that scene of the Acts of the Apostles is set in the Holy Land, which isn’t really a description that applies to Manchester even on a Sunday – quite the reverse – but you know what I mean.)
 Autumn is well and truly upon us, with that pinch in the wind that sends you back indoors for a sweater and reminds you to check for moth-holes. (So far our flat in Edinburgh seems mercifully free of the little devils, unlike our home in the swamp in Somerset which bred moths the way Saruman bred orcs.) This is always the best time of year, for me – if summer is a ripe peach of a season, a season of juices dribbling down your chin, autumn is more of a granny smith: tart, sharp and squeezing tears out the corner of your eyes.
We were lured out of doors by the sunshine over the weekend, down the cobbled streets as far as the Stockbridge Sunday market (well, they’d stuck a flier under our car’s windscreen wiper, so it would have seemed rude not to go). The market, alas, was a bit of a disappointment – just a few stalls selling cheese, bread, scented candles – but it was fun to kick through the fallen leaves in the park, and watch the birds on the lake dodging the model boats. Not being an ornithologist, I can’t tell you what kind they were: but basically they were white, and there seemed to be two kinds – larger and smaller – if that helps at all; they were dotted all over and rose up from the surface of the water like meringues. (Meringue duck? Is that a breed or have I just invented a new Chinese delicacy?)
As autumn is a doing kind of season, you will see I have completed my first swatch for the new project (which I hereby present to you with the same degree of confidence with which I returned home one day to show my parents my first wobbly bookend from woodwork class). You will note if you look carefully that the pattern is repeated – the bottom half shows the pattern as it appeared in last week’s chart; the top half features some minor amendments to the pattern which I made as I went along.
The upside is that it works quite well as a pattern (it reminds me of some of the East Anglian patterns, especially those from Yarmouth). I think it would look good on a gansey yoke, either as a panel or right across. The downside is that I don’t think it’s quite what I’m looking for in the lower body. The diamonds are too small to really be effective, and the chevron patterns in between the diamonds detract from the impact of the diamonds. Also, the diamonds need to be more diamondy. Still, live and learn, eh? I’m going to play around with it and try another variant – maybe make the diamonds twice the size, more angular, and downplay the chevrons a shade. I’ll chart that out and post it next week.
In the meantime, time for an apple. (Remember, as the song says, love will make you cry but a good supply of granny smiths works out cheaper in the long run.)
 I promised last week that I’d post my first cut of a Maori pattern this time, so here it is.
In a way this is a bit of a cheat, since I’ve started with a design that closely matches the kind of pattern you’d find on a traditional British gansey – diamonds and straight lines. But this was deliberate. As I’ve said before, I’ve never tried to create my own designs, so it made sense to start with something relatively familiar, and then gradually work up to the swirly patterns and tikis or kiwis you’d expect.
The pattern comes from a photograph of the interior of a Waitangi meeting house, where panels of abstract patterns alternate with carved wooden totem figures. Of course I couldn’t hope to replicate the power of that combination in wool! But my interest was piqued when I saw the diamonds, and it occurred to me that they would make an effective bridge to get me into the project. The main difference between these diamonds and the ones from, say, Flamborough, are the way that each one is divided into four sub-diamonds, with alternating shading between the horizontal and vertical pairs of sub-diamonds. Also, as you’d expect from art of this type, the space around the diamonds isn’t left plain but is filled in with smaller diamond patterns, making it all very rich and detailed.
Finally, the other point to stress is that this pattern is supposed to serve as a sort of “filler” for the lower body; the really intricate stuff should appear on the yoke, and what’s on the lower body shouldn’t detract too much from that.
Curiously enough, now I’ve got an actual charted pattern to play with, the thought of swatching doesn’t seem too bad. (My God – did I really say that? I must be sicker than I thought.) Tune in next week for a curly-edged swatchlet. (I’ve decided to save all the swatches I make in future, until I have enough to sew them together into an American quilt. Or at least a pillow case. Or maybe a handkerchief?) The panel is about 42 stitches wide in all, so if it works I’ll probably have 5 panels on the front, and another 5 on the back, giving me some 430 stitches in the round.
And here’s a thought to chill the soul, now we’re officially into the season of Autumn. I went up to Inverness last week, to see the state-of-the-art new Highlands Archives Centre, due to open at the end of the month (and very impressive it is, too). The county archivist mentioned in passing she’d noticed there was snow on the Cairngorms that morning…
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Great excitement in Reid Towers this week as I finally achieve a lifelong dream, and manage to get my computer to wirelessly send music to my hi fi. Thanks to the magic of Apple computers and their nifty little Airport Express devices I can recline on my sofa, use my iPhone as a remote control, and access my entire CD collection via my hard disc through the amplifier, and then fall asleep, mired in drool.
It’s possible I may be too attached to my music. In fact, there are times when I go into the lounge and see the great black shape of the hi fi hunched in its corner, lurking like Shelob or something out of a David Attenborough documentary, waiting to be fed, and I think, you know, maybe I ought to get out more…
Some people, looking back, measure their lives by the growth of their children; others, their pets or their holidays. In my case, alas, migraines are my yardstick.
Autumn is well and truly upon us, with that pinch in the wind that sends you back indoors for a sweater and reminds you to check for moth-holes. (So far our flat in Edinburgh seems mercifully free of the little devils, unlike our home in the swamp in Somerset which bred moths the way Saruman bred orcs.) This is always the best time of year, for me – if summer is a ripe peach of a season, a season of juices dribbling down your chin, autumn is more of a granny smith: tart, sharp and squeezing tears out the corner of your eyes.
I promised last week that I’d post my first cut of a Maori pattern this time, so here it is.