Support Gansey Nation -
Buy Gordon a cuppa!
Many, many thanks to those of you who have already contributed!
|
 And so we begin the yoke, the point at which the gansey ceases to be the plaything of an idle hour and becomes serious business. Of course, even the simplest pattern can be tremendously effective, but the north of Scotland ganseys were celebrated for their high levels of decoration—so it’s time to, as it were, push the boat out and get all twiddly.
 I’m using a combination of Hebridean patterns from Michael Pearson’s book. The main features are the three 25-stitch, 39-row panels (two flanking trees and a central anchor); each panel will have three alternating pattern sections going up the yoke like little totem poles. There are also two “horseshoe” panels of 15 stitches each, consisting of chevrons made of yarnovers. And at either side of the yoke are two little 10-stitch ladders. Separating the pattern panels are my ubiquitous cables. The cables themselves consist of 6 stitches cabled every 6 rows; but in deference to the north-of-Scotland theme, instead of my usual two purl stitches either side, this time I’ve gone for four stitches of moss stitch.
 I’m well into revising my sequel to The Wraiths of Elfael, which clocks in at around 80,000 words. If you open the window and listen carefully you’ll hear the reproachful screams of several of my characters being killed off, despite surviving the first draft. Ah, the godlike power. (I sometimes wonder if God’s a novelist and we’re all just characters in his book—if so, I personally intend to demand a rewrite. And, of course, a happy ending.)
  Unfortunately both knitting and writing require the use of one’s eyes, which is starting to become something of a challenge for me, what with the secondary cataracts and all. My superpower is a sense of unease, and it made me phone the doctor’s last week—could they just confirm that they really had passed on the hospital referral nine days ago? Ominous pause, followed by being put on hold (never a good sign): actually no, they hadn’t, because ‘no one had passed it for typing…’ (‘Are you all right, Mr Reid? It sounds like you were caught in an earthquake.’ ‘No, that’s just my teeth grinding…’)
  Now, my feelings towards John o’Groats have always resembled those of God towards Sodom—except that God wanted to destroy the town because it was wicked, not because it was desolate, bleak and boring. But just as Abraham persuaded Him not to destroy Sodom if just one righteous man was living there, so I have relented in my wrath for the sake of one decent coffee franchise (one of several important ways in which I differ from the creator of the universe): for John o’Groats now serves Starbucks coffee, and is now one of my favourite places in Caithness.  (Assumes Miss Piggy voice: ‘Shallow? Moi?’)
By the way, the Caithness Archive Centre now has its very own Facebook page, run by my colleague Fiona and me, where we’re going to put up lots of fun facts about Caithness history and images from the archives. (Not that I’m begging or anything, but you should totally “like” it.)
So there we are. Tune in next week to see the gussets halfway and the ceremonial dividing of the front and back.
 So there we are, the centre strap is finished, the herringbone picked clean as the cat’s dinner, all two and a half inches of it. Next week, it will be on to the yoke. Meanwhile, I’ve made a start on the underarm gussets, increasing at my usual rate of 2 stitches every four rows.
I was down in Edinburgh at the start of last week (I’m on the board of my professional association, and once a year they take pity on me and meet in Scotland, though Wick is still 250 miles north of Edinburgh). The city was heaving because Scotland were playing New Zealand at rugby—Scotland got thumped, so as an undercover Kiwi I decided it was prudent to keep my head down on the airport bus and not perform a celebratory haka.
  We stayed in The Scotsman hotel, just round the corner from Waverley rail station on North Bridge. It’s the old Scotsman newspaper building, all wood panelling and columns and marble, and is really rather swish (I spent one evening fending off chambermaids desperate to turn down the bedspread, and once while one kept me talking at the door another slipped in and folded the toilet paper into what looked like origami cranes so sharp I almost cut my—well, I almost cut myself). The breakfast menu ran to two pages, and when I said I only wanted toast and coffee the disbelieving waiter went off sobbing and had to be consoled by the concierge.
 Edinburgh Airport: The departure lounge for Wick I always lose my bearings in hotels. (Perhaps like migrating geese I need the sun to navigate? But then I get lost outdoors as well, so perhaps not.) The reception staff got so used to seeing me walking past the front desk every ten minutes or so, that by Tuesday morning they’d stopped asking if I needed help and just took me by the arm, gently spun me round, and propelled me in the right direction with a shove between the shoulder blades. Personally, I think it was a hotel built on the same principles as Hogwarts and the stairs rearranged themselves every night.
 It was great being back in Edinburgh—the crowds, the bustle, the coffee shops, the homeless beggars, the roadworks. I went on a mission to try to find an iPad Mini, but everywhere had sold out, no more expected till the end of the month. Sales staff had the harassed look of aid officials in an African township, fending off desperate consumers with machine guns fired in the air. I got to play with a demo model at the airport but the assistant asked me to put it down; he said my drool was damaging the finish.
 Speaking of drool, I’ve been slowly recovering my pancake mojo, inspired by the need to use up leftover bananas each weekend. There’s something about the acid combination of lemon juice blended with the rich flavour of ripe bananas and the double-shotgun-sweetness-blast of maple syrup that is the taste equivalent of jumping into the ocean on New Year’s Day: potentially fatal, but invigorating. (Thing is, I’m just not sure my left arm’s supposed to feel numb like this…)
Another nifty idea for using up leftover gansey wool from Judit this week (it’s an open question which will run out first—the ideas or the wool!). It’s a very spiffy collar, which you can find over on Judit’s gallery page.
So now I have to sit down, get out the calculator and plan out the yoke—horizontally and vertically. I’ve been toying with a gansey app for iPads and cell phones, and I think what it needs is the functionality to adapt any pattern (a tree, a chevron) or combination of patterns to the number of stitches you need. So you pick which patterns you want to incorporate and it automatically resizes them for you.
Meanwhile, however…
 Just a short blog this week, as I’ve got to get ready to head off to Edinburgh this afternoon (Sunday) for a meeting on Monday; and I’ve got a stack of banana pancakes to whip up for Sunday brunch, too.
There’s a splendid Welsh proverb—’many drops wear away the stone’. It’s an encouragement that if you persevere, even if it’s just a little bit each day, in the end you’ll get there. (Either that or I’m reading it wrong, and it means that no matter how resilient you are in the end you’ll be worn down—I mean, think about it from the stone’s point of view.)
But let’s go with the positive meaning for now. After knitting away, just 1-2 rows a night, a couple of inches a week, I’ve finished the body pattern; the first stage of my rocket is completed, and I’m on to the second, the central strap that divides the body from the yoke. Suddenly I have the feeling that I’m getting somewhere. (At this rate I’ll have to start thinking about yoke patterns soon…)
 I wasn’t quite able to get my zigzag and diamonds to coincide in the end, but that’s OK. It only took half an inch more to zag the last zig, so I just added half an inch of plain knitting to the top of the diamond column—which mirrors the plain knitting between the welt and the start of the body pattern.
The central strap is a herringbone pattern, common to Scottish ganseys, running from right to left (so the wearer should always stand on the right in photographs). It will consist of 30 rows, or two and a half inches in my stitch gauge, and will, I think, be quite distinctive. (See pattern chart for details.)
 I’ve included a picture I took on my phone this week, of a couple of ducks on the river paddling away from me as fast as they could go. There was some chemical foam in the water, so that as they zipped off they left these neat lines, like a jet’s vapour trails in the sky. I expected to see an empty river the next time I passed by, just a load of ducks floating upside-down, all their bodies except for their little legs underwater—or even a new breed of mutated evil super-ducks, seeking vengeance on anyone caught in possession of an orange—as my colleague at work observes (rather wearily, it seems to me) I probably watch too many cartoons—but no, everything was normal. (Maybe it just takes time.)
 Right—time to pack. But before I go, I thought I’d share this with you. We reached a couple of milestones last month—there have now been 3,000 downloads of my novels on Amazon since May, and for the first time in a month we passed 200,000 hits for this blog. And if that doesn’t deserve a big stack of fluffy golden banana pancakes marooned in a rich, deep tropical lagoon of prime quality maple syrup, thick and gurgling warm from the bottle, I honestly don’t know what does. (Hey, banana’s a fruit—it counts as one of my five a day, right? And maple syrup comes from trees, so that’s probably two right there… And then there’s the lemon juice…)
 First of all, to everyone who has been affected by Hurricane Sandy—our commiserations to you, and hope things return to normal soon.
So that’s Halloween been and gone, and no trick-or-treaters made it as far as the front door (remember folks, an alligator pit really does pay for itself).
Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m slowly losing my sight—again— everything’s out of focus, I struggle to read print, and driving is becoming more exciting than my passengers and other road users would prefer. It’s really not serious, though: the condition’s called posterior capsule opacification, and a simple laser zap can fix it.
But it’s now bad enough that I went to my optician to persuade him that I deserve the operation. The consultation didn’t take long:
‘Can you read the top line for me?’
‘Er … is that an A?’
‘Very good, now the second line?’
‘There’s a second line?’
‘Ah.’
 He directed an incredibly bright light, the kind they use in lighthouses or anti-aircraft batteries, into my skull, lighting it up like a Halloween pumpkin. It was so like being exposed to radiation I expected to emerge with a superpower. The good news is, he’s going to write to my doctor and kick-start the process. The bad news, it could take several months. In the meantime every car journey is a rich and exciting voyage of discovery. (Drivers in Caithness, be warned.)
I can still see well enough to knit, for the time being at least. I’m just coming to the end of the third diamond and the whole thing measures just under 14 inches so far. Another diamond would take it over 18 inches, which would be too long, so I’m going to resort to my fall-back position—tune in next week for details.
A couple of additions to the gallery for your interest this week. Judit has sent me this fun idea for using up leftover gansey wool, which is not only practical but also unbelievably cute. And David has sent me this picture of a gansey he machine-knit using one of my favourite patterns, Mrs Laidlaw’s from Seahouses. I’ve never tried machine knitting—I steer clear of all machinery after my Dad told me about the time in New Zealand when a man came into the shop with his fingers in a dripping handkerchief after an accident with a bacon slicer—but if they can produce results like this, I’m willing to be converted. Thanks to David and Judit for sharing these.
 Also in parish notices, the Dover reprint of Michael Pearson’s Traditional Knitting is now out in the UK. Takes a few weeks to arrive, but as this is one of the books about ganseys I regard as essential, I urge you to place your order. It would be rude not to.
And finally, speaking of books, thanks to everyone who downloaded my novel “Wraiths of Elfael” last week. I’ve just started rewriting the sequel, so don’t worry when you get to the cliffhanger finale—you will get closure, I promise. (Well I say closure…)
So there we are. At least now that Halloween’s out of the way there’s just all this leftover chocolate to dispose of… OK, maybe enough chocolate for 30 kids may’ve been excessive in retrospect, but you’ve got to be prepared, right? (Type 2 diabetes, doctor? Never heard of it!)
|
|
And so we begin the yoke, the point at which the gansey ceases to be the plaything of an idle hour and becomes serious business. Of course, even the simplest pattern can be tremendously effective, but the north of Scotland ganseys were celebrated for their high levels of decoration—so it’s time to, as it were, push the boat out and get all twiddly.
I’m using a combination of Hebridean patterns from Michael Pearson’s book. The main features are the three 25-stitch, 39-row panels (two flanking trees and a central anchor); each panel will have three alternating pattern sections going up the yoke like little totem poles. There are also two “horseshoe” panels of 15 stitches each, consisting of chevrons made of yarnovers. And at either side of the yoke are two little 10-stitch ladders. Separating the pattern panels are my ubiquitous cables. The cables themselves consist of 6 stitches cabled every 6 rows; but in deference to the north-of-Scotland theme, instead of my usual two purl stitches either side, this time I’ve gone for four stitches of moss stitch.
I’m well into revising my sequel to The Wraiths of Elfael, which clocks in at around 80,000 words. If you open the window and listen carefully you’ll hear the reproachful screams of several of my characters being killed off, despite surviving the first draft. Ah, the godlike power. (I sometimes wonder if God’s a novelist and we’re all just characters in his book—if so, I personally intend to demand a rewrite. And, of course, a happy ending.)
Unfortunately both knitting and writing require the use of one’s eyes, which is starting to become something of a challenge for me, what with the secondary cataracts and all. My superpower is a sense of unease, and it made me phone the doctor’s last week—could they just confirm that they really had passed on the hospital referral nine days ago? Ominous pause, followed by being put on hold (never a good sign): actually no, they hadn’t, because ‘no one had passed it for typing…’ (‘Are you all right, Mr Reid? It sounds like you were caught in an earthquake.’ ‘No, that’s just my teeth grinding…’)
Now, my feelings towards John o’Groats have always resembled those of God towards Sodom—except that God wanted to destroy the town because it was wicked, not because it was desolate, bleak and boring. But just as Abraham persuaded Him not to destroy Sodom if just one righteous man was living there, so I have relented in my wrath for the sake of one decent coffee franchise (one of several important ways in which I differ from the creator of the universe): for John o’Groats now serves Starbucks coffee, and is now one of my favourite places in Caithness. 
(Assumes Miss Piggy voice: ‘Shallow? Moi?’)
