Gansey Nation

[* Gansey Nation is taking a short break and will be back on Monday 3 June*]

How steady are your hands? Steady enough to wipe your eyelids with a cotton bud without poking yourself in the eye? Mine, alas, aren’t, as I’ve been finding out this week to my cost.

You see, I’ve been diagnosed with a chronic dry eye condition (“chronic” just meaning it will never go away). So every night or so I have to soak a cloth in cooled, boiled water and press it against my closed eyes for ten minutes, and then wipe the inside of the softened-up lids with a cotton bud dipped in baby shampoo.

Cleaning the lower lids is easy; but I find it impossible to negotiate the upper lids without obscuring my line of sight with the bud, which makes aiming it something of a matter of guesswork, like trying to open a high window with a pole while blindfolded. At least once a night I jab myself in the eye, making the cure so far worse than the disease. (On the other hand the sharp pain makes my eyes water, which may be part of the treatment?)

By the way, did you know that the great Isaac Newton –“great” in the sense of stark, staring mad – once conducted an experiment to see if changes in pressure affected the way the human eye sees colour by inserting a darning needle into the back of his eye and wiggling it about? (This is one of those facts that, once known, can never be forgotten.)  There are times when I stand before the bathroom mirror, cotton bud poised, when I fear I am just one sneeze away from replicating his experiment…

In gansey news, I’ve reached the start of the gussets of my Filey gansey. As usual, I shall be increasing at a rate of one stitch either side of the gusset every 4 rows. It’s always encouraging to reach this stage as it means that dividing front and back isn’t far away, the gansey equivalent of the coming of springtime.

Also in gansey news, congratulations to Lynne for completing a rather stunning Eriskay gansey, which you can see pictures of here. (And, if that wasn’t enough, she tells me the temperature was 25C when the photos were taken; it’s a brisk 10C in Wick and the buds on the trees are shrinking again in the sharp north wind like reverse time-lapse photography.)

There won’t be a blog next week – Margaret will be whooping it up in Edinburgh and I plan to spend the weekend in a paralytic alcoholic stupor – but we’ll be back on Monday 3rd June.

Finally, the cardiganification of the cream cardigan is finally complete. Here’s Margaret to tell us if the operation was a success, and whether the patient will live…

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e finito!

The patient will, I think, survive.

Ends have been darned in, front bands have been severely steamed several times, and the buttons have been sewn on.  The buttons are unobtrusive, and not as small as feared; they look about right.  As can probably be seen from the photos, they’re two-hole pseudo-shell plastic buttons, with a bit of a ripple (from Ribbonmoon. More buttons than you can shake a stick at. And ribbon.)  One side is shiny, the other matt, and I chose the matt to be the upward face.  I’ve also sewn them on with a wrapped stand, due to the thickness of the fabric.

In the last photo, you can also see the herringbone stitching to secure the facings so they don’t flop about.  This should also further protect the cut & sewn edges from wear.  I’ll be delivering it in Edinburgh later this week.

It’s a Bank Holiday weekend in the UK, and to celebrate we took the old jalopy for a spin up to the north coast, in quest of a tea shop selling good quality coffee and cakes. (This is not as easy as it sounds; in fact, in the first draft of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Frodo was offered a choice between venturing to the wastes of Mordor to destroy the Ring of Power, or finding somewhere in Caithness where Gandalf could get a decent latte; our hero chose the former quest because he thought it would be easier…)

Spring hasn’t quite made up its mind yet, and is hedging its bets, like a gambler studying his cards and debating whether to raise or fold. When the clouds part and the sun comes out it’s staggeringly beautiful, there’s really nothing between you and God, and the sky just recedes away to a hazy blue infinity; other times—Saturday, for instance—the temperature is just above freezing, the rain turns to sleet (ah, snow—Caithness’s May blossom) and you start thinking about what you want for Christmas.

John O’Groat Hotel. The debate still rages as to whether the new extension fits in.

The daffodils were out at John o’Groats, as were the first tourists of the season. (You could tell they were tourists by the way they stood on the sea wall and stared longingly into the fog as it condensed on their cycling shorts and tried to imagine a view they could only hear.) The swallows have arrived too, our avian tourists; we saw them clustered around signposts, trying to work out where they’d taken a wrong turning to end up here—birds and humans both thinking, “We came all that way just for this? Well, if you think I’m buying a souvenir lang-may-yer-lum-reek tea towel/ bird bath after this you can blooming well think again…”

So, it’s not time to put away the gansey just yet, not while there’s still ice in the rigging, and the wind is strong enough to pick up young girls and send them spinning out of Kansas. I’m about a foot up the body of my Filey gansey, the one I plan to donate to the crew of the Reaper (although, as Margaret has observed, my way of describing this as the “Reaper gansey” does rather make it sound as if I’m knitting a sweater for the harvester of souls…).

Now it’s over to Margaret for a progress update on the button bands for the cream cardigan.

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Despite the general murkiness of the Bank Holiday in Caithness (especially since England is basking in tropical sunshine), progress has been made on the button bands.  The button-holding band is now finished.  It’s a bit crinkly, but if blocking doesn’t fix it, there is always the option of ripping it out and doing it again.  After all, it isn’t a whole gansey.   The button-hole band is nearing completion, with only the cast off to do.  Both bands will have an i-cord cast off.

The Oystercatcher on the Roof

The buttonholes were made using the method described last week, and generally speaking came out well for something I just made up.   Each buttonhole has a tubular/i-cord edge.  That is to say, as I knit each section between buttonholes, the right-hand side was knit with a tubular selvedge.  At the left-hand side, the yarn was wrapped around the needle at the turn.  At the end of the last row of the section, these wraps were used to knit an i-cord edge down to the base of the buttonhole.  Then these stitches were used to make the tubular edge on the right-hand side of the next section. None of the sections were bound off, so after the last section was completed, one row was knit in pattern across all the stitches.  Except at the buttonholes, where the last two stitches of one segment were overlapped the first two stitches of the next segment.  Sort of like a two needle bind-off, but with only two pairs of stitches and not actually binding off.  It would of course be easier to visualise if I’d taken pics as I went along, but I’ll do some samples when I’ve finished the band, for better explication and delectation.