Gansey Nation

Have you ever had your blood pressure taken? The doctor (or nurse) tightly straps a broad cuff round your upper arm until the arm won’t bend, and then inflates it so that it squeezes even tighter, like a tourniquet, until the cuff feels as though it’s going to meet in the middle and your fingers are swelling up like something from a Popeye cartoon.

My heart always sinks when the medical profession asks me to roll up my sleeve, since it usually means either a needle or the blood pressure cuff (and nobody seems to offer you a lollipop afterwards, either!). So when the doctor suggested I try a 24-hour blood pressure monitor, I should have known better. But whether it was the cunning use of the word ‘monitor’ that threw me off my guard, or because the doctor was bigger and younger than I, and had any number of strong nurses to hand, I agreed.

Basically, I was fitted with a cuff and a heavy little box, connected by a tube which ran up my arm, over my shoulder and out my collar. I looked like a member of the Borg collective. For the next 24 hours, every quarter of an hour, the box gave a couple of warning bleeps, then started to vibrate with a noise like a drawbridge being raised, which never failed to turn heads in the public reading room; everyone would stop to watch, fascinated. Then the cuff inflated and squeezed, and my arm was paralysed in the position of the lead in a musical comedy preparing to sing – I looked like a malfunctioning Borg hit by phaser fire. I started to dread those (*bleeping*) bleeps.

Winter in the Highlands

During the night the rate dropped to one squeeze per hour, just enough to wake me with a jolt. I naturally sleep with my arm curled under my pillow, so sometimes the first I knew of it was when the pillow started to levitate off the bed as my arm straightened. Who knew nights could be so long?

Never mind. I’ve finished my second star, and I’m two-thirds up the back. (You can maybe get an idea of how it’s going to look from the pictures.) One point of note, the diamonds either side of the star require a bit of concentration – the way the pattern repeat works out, it’s an uneven number of rows, so every alternate filled diamond starts on either a front or a back row, and some are therefore out of sync with the rest of the patterns (the star, the mini-diamonds). As a bear of very little brain when it comes to this sort of thing it’s proved to be something of a trial! If I ever did the pattern again I think I’d add an extra row to the pattern so it always starts on an even (front) row, like the others.

Sunrise in Wick

Anyway, it’s nearly Christmas. This blog will be taking a break over the festive season, and will reappear on Monday 2 January 2012 (Hogmanay hangovers depending). Margaret and I would like to take this opportunity to wish all our readers a very happy Christmas, and all good wishes for the New Year. May all your knitting and craft projects be successful – and certainly do nothing to increase your blood pressure….

Finally, to paraphrase Charles Dickens in his preface to Bleak House: “I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things. I believe I have never had so many readers as in this blog. May we meet again!”

As you’ll see from the photos, I’ve managed quite a lot of knitting this last week. Partly this is down to being up here on my own still, partly down to the weather – for winter has finally come to Caithness and I’ve spent a lot of time indoors, huddled over the fire, listening to the hail rattling the windows. And not just hail – Sunday morning broke in snow; I opened the curtains to see a snowstorm sweeping horizontally towards me across the low fields, as if the ghosts from a thousand Lost Arks had been unleashed and the restless spirits had come to claim the citizens of Wick. (Come to think of it, maybe they have, for I haven’t been out today and it’s very quiet.)

Right. Time for the Big Reveal – the yoke. I’m following Mrs Jackson’s pattern from Michael Pearson’s book (p.102 in his 1984 edition), part of his chapter on keel and sloop patterns from the Humber Estuary.

We’ve had the moss stitch and chevrons up the seams; and last week I started the triangular patterns that lead into the yoke. Now the yoke proper is introduced by 3 purl rows, each 3 rows apart. The interesting thing about these purl rows is that they run the full width of the yoke; the moss and chevron patterns resume above them, but the purl rows slice right through the pattern. (I debated whether or not to let the moss and chevron panels continue uninterrupted up the yoke, and only have the purl rows delineate the centre, but decided in the end to stick with the pattern; and I’m glad I did, because it looks quite striking.)

Ready for some maths? The pattern calls for a centre star 25 stitches across; on either side of that is a double cable of 18 stitches (p2, k6, p2, k6, p2); a diamond panel of 13 stitches; and another double cable. This comes to 123 stitches (25 + 18 + 18 + 13 + 13 + 18 + 18). As the total number of stitches in the centre of my yoke was 142 (excluding the moss and chevron panels), this gave me 19 extra stitches to fill (142-123=19).

I could, I suppose, have increased the star and/or the diamond panels accordingly, but in the end I preferred to add a little 9-stitch diamond panel at each edge, and keep the original proportions. (This still gave me 1 extra stitch per side – serves me right for not working all this out months ago – but I cunningly “disappeared” it with a subtle decrease on one of the purl stitches flanking a double cable.)

Snow outside; it’s that time of the year when they start playing Christmas music on the radio, including Handel’s “Messiah”, which gives me the chance to wheel out my annual joke about “His yoke is easy, his burden is light” – but not this time. His yoke is bloomin’ complicated, and his burden requires rather more concentration than is conducive to watching NCIS on tv. I feel a “Bah! Humbug!” coming on – but after all, there’s only 20 more sleeps till Christmas…