Gansey Nation

Is it spring yet? It’s been another week of strong winds, rain and sleet, and personally I think it’s time for a change. I don’t even bother looking outside now to find out what the weather’s doing: if the water in the toilet bowl has waves with white caps then I know it’s windy.

During a lull in the storm on Saturday I risked an expedition to Tesco, just 10 minutes up the road. By the time I got there I looked like an extra from one of those Deadliest Catch shows on TV, where trawlermen risk life and limb for a handful of lobsters; though my catch was a box of vegetable protein imitation fish fingers from the freezer aisle, which doesn’t carry quite the same element of manliness and danger. Still, if someone had been sailing just a few feet above me in a hot air balloon tipping buckets of water over my head I couldn’t have been wetter.

But what do I care? For we finally have a roof over our heads we can call our own, or will do by the end of the week. We’re (finally!) on the verge of buying our house in Wick, in what everyone refers to as the “posh part” down by the river, not far from where I’m living now. I’ll say more next time, not least because the purchase has dragged on so long I can’t remember which house we’re buying any more; but we won’t be moving in till mid-February, to give us time to sort ourselves out.

Meanwhile, on with the gansey. As you’ll see from the photos, I’ve embarked on the first sleeve. I’ve learned to keep the armholes to about 8-9 inches including the shoulder straps, because with the drop shoulders the sleeve already effectively starts an inch or so down the upper arm, and with the gussets you don’t start to decrease the sleeve for 3 or 4 inches. So you have to be careful not to make the sleeves too baggy.

I had a total of 159 stitches for the whole sleeve, excluding the gusset. What patterns to choose? I opted for the central star, flanked as before with double cables, and then on each side of those a diamond panel and another double cable, all exactly as per the yoke. There weren’t enough stitches to replicate the entire yoke, so something had to go: reluctantly I abandoned the little diamond panels and the chevrons, and stuck with the moss stitch panel, which I hoped would make a strong contrast with the other patterns.

I have to be careful with gansey sleeves where the yoke is patterned but the body is plain: if I’m not careful, the pattern can run down the sleeve too far, so that it covers the elbow, which doesn’t look quite right to me (unless, of course, you’ve opted to pattern the sleeve to about halfway down the forearm, which they sometimes used to do). In this case I restricted the length to the length of the centre star, and then added the 3 purl rows to delineate the end of the pattern. But I thought it would be a nice touch to add the hanging half-diamonds from just below the yoke to the sleeves as well, and give it all a sort of unity.

I’d already decided not to replicate the way the body has the moss stitch and chevron panels running the whole length of the seams, though with some regret. As I said above, there weren’t enough stitches to do everything (and I wasn’t sure they’d work so well in a tube); plus I feared lest the decreases down the sleeve would ruin the effect – so in the end I chose to knit the rest of the sleeve plain. But it could have gone either way.

So there we are. Now it’s time to wrap up in my oilskins, brace my feet against the heaving deck, wipe away the salt spray stinging my eyes, and prepare for another day’s hard cataloguing. Coming soon to a channel near you – Deadliest Archive…

So, it’s the new year and I’m back in Wick, pursued by gale force winds wherever I go like some hero of ancient Greece harried by the Furies (though Odysseus probably didn’t have to deal with quite so much sleet). Even a five-minute trip up the road to Tesco’s involves wrapping myself up like an arctic explorer and borrowing the neighbour’s dog and a skateboard for a makeshift sled.

I drove up from Edinburgh on Wednesday, 256 miles in rain, snow, sleet, and then, for symmetry, more rain. Somehow the bad weather makes it seem further. (There’s a line in one of the Latin poems Carl Orff used in his Carmina Burana that goes, Sum presentialiter, absens in remota, which means “I am with you, even when I am far away”. I used to use absens in remota as a tag line once, I am absent in far away places. Which is one way of describing Caithness in the bleak midwinter.)

Along with my Mahler CDs I brought my New Year’s Eve cold up with me (a gift that keeps on giving, unfortunately; on those rare occasions when I dare peek in my handkerchief it looks like I’ve smashed a bunch of snails in there with a rolling pin).

Never mind! I reached another landmark on the gansey this week, finishing the front yoke and joining the shoulders together. As usual, the shoulders were joined with the standard 3-needle bind-off (it says here), in which each shoulder’s stitches are placed on a double-pointed needle and aligned side by side, and then cast off with a third needle. The advantage of this method combined with a “rig and furrow” shoulder is of course that the cast-off row forms an extra “rig”, or ridge, and makes for a pleasingly seamless effect.

Now, with regard to the neckline (pay attention, questions will be asked at the end of the tour). Traditionally, the front and back would have been exactly the same, so the gansey could be worn with either side facing; both sides were identical, in pattern and length. However, if you want a shaped neckline, and let’s face it most of us do, it isn’t usually a problem – except on patterns such as this one, where you have a large panel like the centre star which has to be cut into to make room for the neck.

I decided to cut the star cleanly in half, rather than fill the space with another pattern that would fit better but which wouldn’t feel right. That in turn dictated how much of a “curve” the neck would have.

The custom for sizing the neck was to divide the row into thirds at the neck (one third for one shoulder, another for the neck, the final third for the other shoulder) – and that’s what I did here, giving me 3 equal portions of 72 stitches.

Now, I want to have a nicely curved neck at the front, not a rigid rectangle. So I have to do some some shaping.

There were 20 rows remaining from the point where I made the division, cutting the star in half, to the point where I would start the rig ‘n’ fur shoulder straps. If I decreased at a rate of one stitch every other row, either side of the neck, (my usual rate of decrease), then that equates to 10 stitches per side. So I had first to move 10 stitches from the neck allocation to each shoulder: I then had two portions of 82 stitches (the shoulders) flanking one of 52 (the neck).

Then it was just a case of working each side back and forth on double-pointed needles either side of the neck, decreasing every other row, so that after 20 rows I was ready to start the shoulder strap with the right number of stitches – 72 – and I had a nicely shaped neck.

Next up: the collar. And after that (shudder), picking up stitches for the sleeves. (As Gandalf would say, “What an evil fortune! And I am already weary…”)

I’m only up in Wick for a few days this time, since on Tuesday I fly back to Edinburgh (I have several meetings to attend in Glasgow and Edinburgh, so I’ll be staying at the flat again and flying back on Tuesday 16th). This seemed like a good idea until I remembered that the planes that fly out of Wick are made out of balsa wood and the propellor is powered by a giant elastic band; and then, of course, there is the wind to think of (hello Edinburgh, goodbye lunch).

At least with the wonders of the Internet I can be presentialiter, no matter how remote the remota may sometimes feel!