Being a man of my word, at least when it suits me (or when I can actually deliver on my promises), I am delighted to say that I’ve finished the front and joined the shoulders, as forecast last week. It was touch and go, actually, as I got rather sidetracked, but more on that later.
Back in the day, I used to get to the shoulder straps and then split the front in three sections – left shoulder, neck and right shoulder; I would then work back and forth on straight needles to complete one front shoulder strap, then do the same to complete the other front shoulder strap (leaving the first shoulder strap on its needle) and only then would join each one with its counterpart on the back.
These days I’ve modified my technique, so that I join each shoulder as soon as each front strap is completed. Let me explain. I divide the front in three as before, and I work back and forth (as before) to complete one shoulder strap; but now I join it to its counterpart on the back straight away, casting off in the usual way. Then I go back and complete the other shoulder strap and join it to the back counterpart and cast off.
It’s a subtle distinction, but it means I’m not trying to knit the second shoulder strap while the first one is left hanging on its needle (and given that back and forth knitting means you’re constantly turning the gansey face up and face down, and with the back dangling loose, the overall effect is like trying to tango with a corpse). It also means you easily can cast off with the yarn you’ve been knitting the shoulder strap with. Anyway, just the collar and the sleeves to go now.
As I said above, I’ve been sidetracked this week. An old chum reminded me that some time back I promised to let him see some short stories I’d written (hi Jan!). I dug out the stories and sent them off to him, but read a couple first, for the fun of it. Rather to my surprise, I found they weren’t as bad as I remembered. Some of them were almost acceptable. And that sent me back to one of the novels I wrote a few years ago. It was a deliberate attempt to write the sort of story I’d have loved when I was younger and still had hair, a Christmas fantasy story which I recall describing as a cross between Alan Garner, Stephen King and Ted Hughes, a story with wolves and snow, magic and legends, battles and monsters – but set in the present day, not a faux-medieval Tolkienesque Middle-earth.
Maddeningly, it’s not (quite) good and it’s not (quite) awful. If it was great I could rest easily; if it was dreadful I could just throw it away and we would Never Speak Of It Again, like Aunt Mildred’s elopement with the second under-gardener. So I’ve started going through it, editing it, stripping away the useless verbiage and pruning ruthlessly (as I had to while we were between under-gardeners). The draft stood at 
135,000 words: I’ve resolved to get it down to perhaps 75,000. (They say you have to “kill your darlings”, i.e., get rid of any fancy writing that gets in the way of the plot; if you open your windows and listen carefully, you’ll hear my darlings’ death cries cries fading on the wind…)
Finally, if you bake bread, the books recommend that you develop a “signature bread”, one that you bake most of the time, and which you know intimately and can guarantee will work. This is mine, a basic French white bread which I make into batard loaves and mini baguettes (baguettettes? baguettinis?). It’s very easy to make and results in a moist, sticky dough, which, if handled carefully, will produce a very light, open crumb and and some big, airy pockets (the cavernous hole in the picture is a good example). Cooled, but still warm from the oven, this bread is even better than chocolate. (That’s right. You heard me.)
And so Edinburgh has hosted a state visit by Pope Benedict XVI, which by all accounts went very well – even if the church and the Government between them had to invent a new festival around which to celebrate his visit (as far as I can tell, this was the first time St Ninian’s Day – 16 September – had been favoured with a parade; or celebrated; or even publicly remembered).
Other memorable events on that day include the declaration of Owain Glyndwr as Prince of Wales in 1400, the sailing of the Mayflower in 1620 and the release of “She Loves You” by the Beatles in 1963. But I guess none of them have that much resonance for the Catholic church, unless the young Cardinal Ratzinger was a Beatles fan – which seems unlikely – so I guess St Ninian’s day was the logical choice.
Margaret went down for a look, and was favoured by a glimpse of the Pope skimming past at a surprisingly brisk pace. (As a friend of mine who watched from the windows of the National Archives remarked, “He’s not going to sell many ice creams going at that speed”.) I cheated and ended up watching some of it on tv (I know, I know).
Meanwhile, on to secular matters. Work on the gansey continues apace; as you will see, after finishing the back last week, the front is halfway complete now. My aim to complete it and join the shoulders by next weekend. (We’ll see.) I’ve just finished by 7th ball of yarn, too, so I know I’ve used 700g of gansey wool so far.
So, there’s the back finished, and the accompanying shoulder straps. On the whole, the pattern is coming out more strongly than I’d imagined – especially in strong light – and the pattern bands are deep enough to really allow the eye to catch the diagonal lines. So no need to rip this one up after all!
By the way, the more observant among you will have noticed that this is a half-patterned gansey, i.e., a plain body and a patterned yoke. Traditionally the yoke and the gussets would start together, halfway up the body. Now, I still want to follow this principle, but given that my ganseys tend to be a bit longer than the old ones were, there’s a complication: half of 27 inches is 13.5 inches, and that might result in a deeper armhole than I want.
Since I want this gansey to be as traditional as I can make it, I’ve decided to go ahead and start the gusset and yoke at the halfway point; but in order to ensure that the armhole isn’t too deep, I’m making the gusset longer instead of the armhole (which will be just 8 inches plus the shoulder strap). And in order to ensure that the gusset doesn’t become too wide, I’ve increased once every 5th row (instead of every 4th row, as is my usual practice). The result is a longer, narrower gusset than my ganseys usually show. I just need to remember that the gusset will extend further down the sleeve than normal, too, so I’ll have to be careful about my rate of decrease when I get to that point.
Meanwhile I’ve been continuing my experiments with sourdough bread. I tried a wholemeal loaf that came out well, but was perhaps a little dry; so my next attempt was a granary loaf with extra water. Well, somewhere down the line I miscalculated, because the dough was so wet that it didn’t so much rise as flow stickily, and my attempts to knead it resembled nothing so much as someone scooping up vomit off the counter with their bare hands. From a distance it must have looked as though I was wresting a particularly tenacious jellyfish, and losing. Still, one of the advantages of wet dough is that it can rise nicely in the oven, and result in a ciabatta-like texture, which was the case here, so I’m counting this one as a success. My new invention – pain de dégueulis.
Finally, yesterday, 12 September, was the centenary of the first performance of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, his great explosive celebratory hymn to life and love and the mysteries and splendours of God’s creation. I have no idea whether God really exists or not – even Richard Dawkins admits there is a possibility, however remote – but listening to this great symphony, as so often with Mahler, I’m prepared to give Him (or Her, or It) the benefit of the doubt…
A very warm welcome back to the ganseys blog, after the summer recess. I hope you had a good summer – I spent most of it in a sort of contented hibernation, lapsing into a vegetative coma on the sofa, so that periodically Margaret would be obliged to drop in and hold a mirror up to my lips to see if I was still breathing.
Meanwhile, during what we drolly refer to as summer in Edinburgh, I’ve been polishing my bread-baking skills, or “poolishing” (yes, I’m making bread jokes now), and have developed a sourdough or wild yeast culture which is now living in the fridge and growing like one of those creatures that used to give me nightmares in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. With it I’ve learned how to make baguettes, pain de campagne, pain a l’ancienne, and (on bad days) dark matter under laboratory conditions.
I thought I’d take advantage of not doing very much to crack on with a gansey that’s been in my mind for a while – in fact, regular readers will recall that I’ve flirted with this pattern off and on for some years. I’m referring to the famous Henry Freeman of Whitby pattern, which crops up everywhere and is referenced for example in Staithes and even Edinburgh. The reason I’ve hummed and hawed in the past is that it doesn’t show very clearly in my stitch gauge – in the wrong light it can look like a scrambled jumble of random stitches (though in a strong light coming from above it’s very effective). But since I hope in the long run to include examples of most types of pattern on this website, then the collection would be incomplete without it. And, if nothing else, it would show anyone else thinking of knitting it how it comes out.
Finally, if you ever thought you had a dangerous job, take a look at the photos below – while partaking of morning tea one day, our eyes were caught by this painter decorating the outside of a window across the street – four stories up. I mean, I know archives is a terribly risky profession – actuaries call it “the widowmaker” – but this…