Gansey Nation

So, this must be that winter thingy, which I’ve heard so much about—sub-zero temperatures, snow, sleet, hail, gales, ice and hordes of emaciated Frenchmen stumbling through the drifts, harried by wolves and Cossacks as they make their desperate retreat from Moscow.

This week the winds reached 70 miles per hour, and it says a lot about the year so far that this came as something of a relief after the 90-mile winds of last Friday. It’s rather disconcerting to look up and see a seagull drifting sedately backwards past the window, as though God had just pressed “rewind” on his remote control because he wanted to watch the last few seconds over again.

It was not without its compensations, though. I walked to work last Friday down by the river, just as a mini-blizzard struck. The sun rises around 8.45am this time of year, but the clouds came over so thickly that everything was still dark, in a sort of eerie grey twilight: the wind got up, coming from behind me, and then it began to snow. Soon the wind was whipping the snow past me horizontally. Then I caught a sudden movement on the river and when I turned my head I saw a black bird like a heron flying past, beating into the wind and snow like a Chinese print come to life, before it disappeared again into the darkness. My daily commute, I thought.

When I got to work I found that although my front was perfectly dry, my back was white with a crust of snow which broke off in chunks, melting in pools on the floor. (Luckily the cleaner comes in after I’ve gone home…)

In gansey news, my fingers seem to have rediscovered how to knit with 2.25mm needles and yarn that requires an electron microscope to see, and as a result I’m past the ribbing and on to the body, which will be knit plain up to the yoke. As I said before, I plan to donate the gansey to Wick Museum, as the pattern will be another Wick pattern. It’s taken from the same photograph in Michael Pearson’s book, Fisher-Gansey Patterns of Scotland and the Scottish Fleet as the previous Wick pattern, the one on page 29. I’ll chart it out when I actually start the yoke.

Meanwhile, I cast on 268 stitches and have now increased to 296. I thought I’d aim for a 40-inch chest size, but since it’s going to be given to the museum I don’t have to be too exact, for once!

Finally, by popular demand, we’ve included a picture of me modelling the Lopi sweater down by the river. As this took place in a piercing wind straight from the Arctic Circle I am now in a position to confirm that a Lopi is about as wind-resistant as a string vest; several passers-by assumed it was a desperate suicide attempt when I took my coat off and rushed to help but I told them I was practicing the new sport of extreme ornithology, in which you combine birdwatching with hypothermia, (which now I come to think of it is something of a tautology in a Caithness winter).

OK, well, I guess this one isn’t going to detain us long…

First of all, I’d like to wish everyone a happy New Year, and a belated welcome to 2015. I hope you had a happy Christmas, that Santa was generous, and that any oranges in the bottom of your stockings were chocolate.

My cold pretty much wiped me out over the festive season, so that knitting was just about all I was up for. As a result I got rather a lot done; a staggering amount, in fact, since I only cast on the first row on Christmas Eve.

Now, if you remember, I said I was going to take a short break from ganseys to try something different. But why a Lopi pullover? Well, as I said last year, I’ve been thinking for some time of learning how to knit more than one colour, and one day would like to try my hand at Fair isle (ganseys’ technicolour brethren). But I’ve always liked the look of Scandinavian jumpers.

The turning point came a few months back when Margaret knitted me an Icelandic pullover in Lopi wool based on a design I’d seen online. This was a revelation: I’d no idea they were so warm, and soft.

You see, I’ve always associated “proper” wool with being a bit, well, scratchy. But the Lopi yarn, which consists of two strands loosely entwined like a drawing of the double spiral of DNA, is hardly spun at all, and feels almost as soft as cotton wool. (I like to think of the finished jumper as hunting down your favourite childhood teddy bear, killing him and wearing his skin.)

It’s also knit on big, chunky needles—6 mm, as opposed to the 2.25 mm I’m used to. So, as many of you pointed out, and as I’ve just discovered, it really doesn’t take a lot of time to knit compared to a gansey.

Well—put all this together, since the principle of knitting with more than one colour at a time is the same as Fair Isle, and it seemed like a perfect learning opportunity. I got a kit from the good people at Shop Icelandic for Christmas, which came with a pattern, needles and yarn, and got stuck in.

For those of you not familiar with how this sort of jumper is constructed, this is what I’ve learned. You start at the bottom, and knit the body as a tube, just like you do with a gansey. But when you reach the armpits, you set the body aside. You then cast on the first sleeve, starting with the cuff, and knit the sleeve up as another tube, increasing as you go; then you set that aside and do the same for the other sleeve. (This was a bit disconcerting, reminding me of Frankenstein’s laboratory with cloned body parts draped over the back of the sofa.)

Then you knit the truncated body and sleeves together by just knitting a new row in the round, and knitting over the sleeves when you come to them, and so attaching them in the process. (You leave a few stitches from both the sleeves and the body in the armpits on holders, where a gusset would be on a gansey, so you can join them together later.) You then keep knitting up the yoke, body and shoulders together, to the neck.

It’s been a huge amount of fun. (You must remember, this is the first time I’ve ever knit anything other than ganseys, and the first time I’ve followed a printed pattern.) I don’t think I’ll quite finish it this week—alas, I have to go back to work—but I won’t be far short. I plan to knit another couple of Lopi jumpers in the course of this year, but as promised my next project will be a gansey, based on a Wick pattern.

Finally this week, I’ve been reading children’s books, as I often do when I’m feeling poorly. This time it’s been Tove Jansson’s marvellous Moomin stories, an integral part of my childhood, and is a third reason to be grateful to Finland (along with the music of Jean Sibelius and of course our very own Judit).

In one exchange, Jansson perfectly anticipates the lot of the blogger. Moomintroll is explaining to the Snork Maiden how his father spends his time:

“Mostly he writes in a book called “Memoirs”. It’s all about what he has done in his life, and as soon as he does something else he writes that down too.”
“Then surely he hasn’t got time to do very much?” said the Snork maiden.
“Oh, well,’ said Moomintroll. “He makes sure of doing things now and again, even if it’s only to give himself something to write about.”