Gansey Nation

In the life of every gansey I knit, there comes a point when it suddenly shoots along, like a time-lapse film of bamboo growing or a gangly teenager you only see once a year. Well, if you compare the pictures from last week with this week, you’ll see that we’ve just reached that stage.

The Red Arrows on Armed Forces Day

I’d like to pretend this is a result of my monastic existence during Margaret’s absence, while she was sunning herself in the south of France and having to wrestle with the future imperative of irregular verbs like “être”. But sadly it was just because the weather has been so miserable here in Edinburgh, wet and cold, that it was simply better to pretend that the outside world was a figment of my imagination – rather like the efficient universe proposed by Bishop Berkeley in the 18th century, in which the bits you didn’t need at any given time (such as the middle of a rainforest when no one is looking) would simply cease to exist until required again. (To my utter delight we watched a programme on TV last night on which a physicist seriously suggested the universe might really work like this.)

Tuesday was the solstice, of course, the – ahem – longest day. I watched through the rain out the lounge window as Calton Hill slowly disappeared under low cloud and mist, until by six o’clock it was so dark I had to turn the lights on.

Anyway, as you’ll see from the pictures the gansey is going like a breeze. The overall length will be some 28 inches, shoulder to ribbing, so I’m about 3-4 inches away from starting the gussets – maybe next week, if I can keep this rate up. It’s now too heavy to support its own weight and has to be filmed lying down (not unlike me after an Indian meal).

I also reached a milestone on the novel last week, 60,000 words. Not bad for 6 weeks. It’s interesting how different people write: some plan a novel out beforehand in great detail (the SF writer Neal Stephenson writes longhand in fountain pen, and when asked what he did about rewriting sentences replied that he made sure he got his sentences right first time, the swine). Stephen King reckons he doesn’t know how the story will go when he starts, and can’t plan his novels out in advance. I’ve discovered that I find out what a book is about as I write – but when I’ve reached a certain point, such as now, I have to go back and rewrite the whole thing, pulling it all together and planting clues and foreshadowing. It’s not very efficient (apologies to Bishop Berkeley) but it works for me. So that’s what I’ve started to do today.

Friday when Margaret got back was the start of Armed Forces Day Weekend, so we got several flypasts from the Red Arrows up and down the Forth. This meant we kept running to the front and back of the flat like tag sprinters to catch a glimpse of jet trail, thus keeping our fitness levels up but doing nothing for the digestion.

Finally, last week I promised some examples of Margaret’s amazing polymer clay work. So here they are. (And I thought knitting was hard…)

So here we are, La Gansey Nouvelle. (Or, of course, Anciente, depending on your point of view, and your understanding of French; mine, as the Francophiles among you will have spotted, has already been exceeded…)

Let me say first of all what my criteria were in selecting this pattern.

As I explained the other week, this is a gansey for my uncle John, who has associations with both the east coast of Scotland and the Devon coast in the south west of England. So my starting point was to select patterns that were common to both areas, Scotland and the south west. Of course, there are dozens to choose from, but some of the most popular were chevrons and diamonds (both open and moss stitch) and, of course, cables.

This project comes off the back of two quite intricate ganseys, with the cardigan perhaps being perhaps the most fiddly project I’ve ever attempted (all those individual knit and purl stitches felt like encoding part of the King James Bible in braille, probably one of those tiresome genealogies from the book of Kings). Each panel on the cardigan was different, and required close study of a separate pattern chart, so that it took a vast amount of concentration not to make a mistake (more concentration than I could manage in the end, ahem).

So I wanted to go back to knitting something that was just fun to do, and relaxing, and which didn’t require constant cross-referencing. It was always going to be a full-body-pattern gansey, but I wanted it to be a good, old-fashioned, single pattern from top to bottom, with lots of cables. (I’ve always thought the patterns where cables run all the way from shoulder to ribbing are some of the most effective.)

While I was experimenting with combinations of chevrons and diamonds, using the essential aids of a calculator, graph paper, a pencil, a wet towel and some Class A drugs (or, failing that, strong coffee) I happened upon a pattern that crops up in all the books, one that features just these patterns: Jim Curtis of Polperro in Cornwall’s gansey. This is such a classic combination, and the pattern fitted the number of stitches I was working with so closely, that I knew at once I’d found what I was looking for.

The pattern as recorded consists of 7 alternating panels, each of 19 stitches, comprising a central chevron flanked on either side by 2 diamonds (one moss stitch and one open), and then each seam is flanked by another chevron panel. The panels are separated by a 4-stitch moss stitch border.

I’ve made a couple of minor alterations. First of all, Jim Curtis’s gansey is patterned only on the yoke; mine, as I’ve said, is going to be patterned from top to bottom. I’ve also, as is my wont, replaced the moss-stitch borders with cables (for what, as Alice in Wonderland might have said, is the use of a gansey without cables?). And I’ve tweaked the central chevron to be 25 stitches wide, not 19, to fit my stitch gauge. It all clocks in at 404 stitches, including 2 seam stitches and a couple of border stitches either side. (As Margaret has pointed out, compared with the cardigan with its central steek, it actually looks rather small…)

Anyway, it’s nice to go back to first principles and just knit for fun again, rather than feeling I’m sitting for an exam!

Another reminder, the Moray Firth Gansey Project has now published its programme of events for its “Ganseyfest” on 1-2 October in Inverness (it can get a bit nippy up there – so wear a gansey, is my advice…), and among the tutors will be Beth Brown-Reinsel. Timetable, prices and booking forms on their website.