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Mrs Laidlaw 8: 21-27 October

FrontFirst of all, apologies to anyone who tried to access the site on Sunday 27th. I’m afraid we were hacked again by another bunch of Middle Eastern crazies (their motto: ‘Bringing down decadent western imperialism, one knitting blog at a time!’). Anyway, Margaret and her friends in the US did their best Captain Philips impersonations and repelled the invaders with water cannon and barbed wire, and we’re back in business, at least for now.

This week’s blog is mostly about knitting the neck and shoulders, so perhaps you should go make yourself a strong coffee at this point and soak a towel to wrap around your head. (Warning: blog may contain some mild maths, bad language and cartoon violence.) Ready? Sure? All right, here we go.

As you’ll see from the (pretty lousy, but Margaret will be back soon) photos, I’ve done quite a lot of knitting this week. This is largely down to jet lag, which has filled my head with something like cotton wool and morphine, and has left me tired and remarkably stupid. (This week’s highlights included putting the laundry and detergent in the drier instead of the washing machine and switching it on; and also carefully setting my breakfast tray of porridge on the floor, removing my slippers, and then turning round and treading in the bowl. It’s like being a possession horror movie, where it turns out the house was built on the ancient burial ground of Laurel and Hardy.)

The completed back

The completed back

Anyway, to business: I’ve finished the right shoulder, including the ridge and furrow shoulder strap, and just have to join the two halves together before moving on to the left shoulder. (You can of course put the shoulder stitches on a holder at this point and go ahead and do the other half; then do the whole joining/casting off thing for both shoulders at one go. It doesn’t matter: I just find it easier to join each half as soon as it’s completed.)

I follow the traditional practice of dividing each side of the gansey (i.e., front and back) equally into 3 sections at this point (left shoulder, neck, right shoulder); therefore, as I have 204 stitches, that gives each of these sections 68 stitches.

Front Detail

Close up of right front shoulder

As the dedicatee requested a relatively deep neckline I decided to make the neck a whole tree deep, consisting of 32 rows. If I decrease 1 stitch every 2 rows that’s a total of 16 decreases. So, I took 16 stitches from the central neck section, and added it to the right shoulder, giving me 84 stitches on the needle (68 + 16 = 84). By the time I reached the shoulder strap I had made 16 decreases and was back to the correct number of stitches on the needle (68, for those still awake), to match those on the back shoulder strap top which it will be joined. Hopefully by next week I’ll have finished the other shoulder, and maybe even the collar.

Red Brook Pond

Happy days – autumn on the Cape

In other news, it’s shameless self-promotion time again. My Victorian detective story, The Cuckoo’s Nest, is on a free promotion on Amazon kindle till Friday. It’s the one of my books that’s sold the most copies and received the best reviews, so if you’re idly curious and would like to give it a go, now’s your chance. In fact, let’s be honest, it would be rude not to.

Now it’s time to man the water cannon and prepare to sell our lives dearly as we await the next cyber-attack. And if you’re uncertain about whether the site has been hacked or not, here’s a simple test: mildly irreverent persiflage about life, the universe and stitch gauges – that’s probably us; extreme propaganda about the condition of the Middle East and global jihad – well, that could still be us, to be fair, but best to assume it’s hackers unless they also mention 5-ply.

Mrs Laidlaw 7: 7-20 October

Body Shot

The completed back (it’s not really purple, though…)

And we’re back—or I am, anyway: Margaret’s staying out in New England for another couple of weeks, which I think of as time off her sentence for good behaviour.

Meanwhile, I have this whole jet lag thing to work through. When the alarm goes off my eyes tell me it’s 7.00 am, but deep down my body knows it’s 5 hours earlier. I’m shambling through the day like a precursor to the zombie apocalypse; I’ve already run two loads of laundry forgetting to add detergent, and last night got frustrated when my soup wouldn’t heat, only to find I’d turned on the wrong burner.

Of course, the weather doesn’t help. I’d left Massachusetts with the temperature in the mid-60ºsF, blue skies, sitting on the deck watching the bees drift about aimlessly and listening to the birds in the trees; I woke up on Saturday to 48º, strong winds and rain lashing the windows as though someone had positioned a cannon on the driveway and was firing bags of water at the house instead of grapeshot. Any bees foolish enough to stick their heads out of the hive would find themselves heading for Greenland at about 40 mph before they could even get their backside in position for the SOS emergency waggle dance (“Quick! What’s the abdomen signal for Brace! Brace!?”).

They drive on the which now?

They drive on the which now?

At least the flight was memorable. You see, we approached Heathrow at about 5.45 on Friday morning, and had to circle around at 10,000 feet for a while until there was a landing stage for us. It was still night, but the moon was out: it was full, and lit up the city like a spotlight. In fact, at that height the whole of London looked like a model—but, in the dark, it was a model of a city on the moon. It was as though the moonbase in 2001: A Space Odyssey had grown into a city, strange and wonderful, the heart of England transformed into a desolate lunar landscape.

Holiday weather on Cape Cod

Holiday weather on Cape Cod (sob)

I flew from Boston to Heathrow, then on to Edinburgh, and finally to Wick, arriving after a journey of 12 hours, the aircraft getting progressively smaller and noisier (I think we travelled to Wick in something modelled on Baron von Richthoven’s biplane). I knew we were home when I looked out the window and saw the great turbine blades of the wind farm near the airport going round like giant acrobats turning cartwheels in slow motion.

The back

The back

In between yawning a lot I have been doing some knitting, as you’ll see from the pictures (apologies for the poor quality, by the way; you’ll have to wait for Margaret to come back for something approaching reality, I’m afraid). In fact, I’ve finished the back, and only have the shoulders to do and then it’s on to the front. Still on my first 500g cone, too, which isn’t bad.

And now it’s time to rake up the leaves, or as I like to think of them, “tree dandruff”. The wind has stripped the tree out the back so bare it’s shivering, pleading for its own bark-warming gansey, and all its leaves are lying on the lawn thick as lava from Vesuvius. Except that unlike Pompeii I’ll probably unearth the petrified forms of snails, caught in a sudden eruption of leaves and forever trapped in their last moments, expressions of surprise and dismay on their sluggy features. (Or I could just go to bed. Hmm—the coin of fate spins: heads it’s the leaves, tails it’s bed. Heads. OK, best of three, then…)

Mrs Laidlaw 6: 1 – 6 October

ML1006a Well, just when you think it can’t get any worse, what with network crashes and servers not responding and all, our website was hacked on Sunday night by some group campaigning for a Saharan republic. (I can tell you, they just lost my vote!)

Quite why they think the readers of a blog about knitting fishermen’s sweaters would make likely converts to their cause, I am unable to say. (Though for all I know knitted hump-warmers in 5-ply for The Camel Who Has Everything may be all the rage in the desert these days.)

ML1006cIt was a bit of a shock, to be honest. But—and this is the strange part—the new web page actually had the courtesy to tell us it had been hacked, and by whom. It was a bit like being mugged by Jeeves (“Excuse me, sir, I’m most awfully sorry, but I really must ask you if you wouldn’t mind terribly handing over your wallet”).

Anyway, luckily we’d just switched service providers to one that offered better tech support (though what we really require is something more like a Samaritans hotline), and we keep regular backups, so it was a relatively simple matter to restore the site.

ML1006bBut what with one thing and another it’s been a very frustrating few weeks, and has turned the blog from something which was just supposed to be a bit of light-hearted fun into Really Not A Lot of Fun At All, especially for Margaret (who could be seen up on the roof most nights dressed in a white coat waiting for a lightning storm and shouting, “Give my creature LIFE!”).

Well. Hopefully everything is sorted once and for all and we can say, like D.H. Lawrence, “Look! We have come through!” (A book title sniffily dismissed by one critic in the phrase: “They may have come through, but why should we look?”)

FI1006a

Twenty-nine hours of train travel gives you lots of time to knit.

Meanwhile, I soldier on. By straining every sinew I can just about manage a tree a week, about 2.75 inches: and to my surprise and delight yesterday I managed to finish the first half of the gussets and divide front and back. So I’m now romping up the back, only another couple of trees to the shoulders.

FI1006c

Detail. Note how the colours differ from the photo on the kit

I’m enjoying it while I can, for it’s all about to come crashing to a halt. You see, we’re away on holiday later this week, and I’m not taking my knitting with me (it’s large and heavy and troublesome enough to count as a small child on the plane). We’re off to the States—I’ll be there just over a week, Margaret’s staying rather longer—so there’ll be no blog for a couple of weeks.

And remember, if you try to access the website and find anyone trying to persuade you that several million hectares of sand would make a great foundation for a new republic—just say no…

Gansey Nation will (probably) return on 28 October. Allahu Akbar!

(Note: when this blog first went live comments were inadvertently disabled. We apologise for the inconvenience.)