It’s been yet another quiet week, and I’ve barely been out of the house. This is mostly the weather, and indolence. Most of the week, rain has been forecast, and most of the week, the forecast has been correct. I’ve been staying indoors to avoid it, as being caught in a downpour and slogging home soaking wet is just not my thing.
Approaching Storm cell
I did slip between the showers to walk into town for my regular hearing test. I started having one yearly when I didn’t have anyone at home to tell me how deaf I was. The good news is that my hearing has barely changed since last year, and the measured change may be due to annoying static on the headphones.
A new mis-spelling
On Thursday, instead of going to the museum, I went down to Inverness for the day to take the car for its first year service. One of the other volunteers from my museum shift came along, as she coincidentally had an appointment at the hospital the same day. We were lucky with both the weather and the traffic, with no rain to speak of and no slow vehicles. I trudged around town window-shopping while she went to her appointment. Then we ran into each other, twice, just when we needed to liaise. The car was ready mid-afternoon, with no work necessary, and we were home by 5 p.m.
Rosebud in June
I’d taken the gansey with me to Inverness, hoping to sit somewhere quiet for a while and knit. Alas, this didn’t happen. Despite this, there’s been good progress. The front is now complete, and the first shoulder strap has been started. The last rows of the shoulders were the set-up rows for the strap, when the stitches were decreased by 1 st in 4. Otherwise, there are too many rows in the strap. The reasoning goes like this: each stitch on the body will have two rows of the strap associated with it. By decreasing the body, the number of rows on the strap is reduced. Say, for example, you have a 4” wide shoulder and a gauge of 8 sts and 12 rw per inch. This would give you 32sts for each shoulder (one front and one back), and 48 rws on the strap. However, as you will be knitting two rows of strap for each stitch of the body, you will have 64 rows over your 4”. If you decrease the last row of the body to 24 sts, hey presto, you will have 48 rows, which is exactly what you want. Too many rows on the strap causes the shoulders to widen.
Kitchen still life
Unfortunately, as the gansey lay one the floor ready for its photos, I spotted one small mistake and one really obvious one. Most of the strap has now been ripped out, and the next step is to ladder two stitches down about 8” and reknit them back up. But even though it will be tedious, it’ll take less time than re-knitting the whole front yoke.
The sun is at last shining today, after a week of sometimes quite heavy showery rain. When I was at the museum, it was pelting down so hard I could hear it as I sat at the reception desk. As they say up here, “It was dancin’”.
The rain has kept me indoors more than I’d like, but as a consequence I’ve caught up on various admin tasks, particularly e-mails that needed to be written but had been put off. Some were regarding a bamboo pipes short course in the autumn and some related to my brother-in-law’s estate. Most of his cars have sold at auction and another two privately, with two cars are left. He’d bought these for parts and sat in the yard covered in tarps. They’ll go in July. We’re still trying to sell the family home. The feedback we’re getting from the auction house is that it’s too unique!
Last year: Summer Rain
I’ve been doing a bit of sewing too and working on a Celtic knotwork design for a friend. This last has been an unexpected time drain, mostly due to setting up the underlying grid in a graphics program. Then the grid is printed and the knotwork itself drawn by hand. However, it’s now nearly done, and hopefully the final iteration will be ‘the one’.
As it’s been such a quiet week, I’ll need to fall back on the old standbys of ‘what happened today’. Of interest to textile historians, on 6 June the first nylon parachute was tested in 1942, by parachute tester Adeline Gray, near Hartford, CT. Dupont developed the fabric in partnership with a parachute company. In 1944, Operation Overlord began. More commonly known as ‘D-Day’, 156,000 troops landed in Normandy. This operation led to the end of World War II a year later. Finally, today is World Ocean Day, which “catalyzes collective action for a healthy ocean and a stable climate, working in collaboration with youth leaders and a wide range of organizations in nearly 200 countries.”
Plumlet
The word of the week is ‘servant’, for I wondered if it were related to ‘serf’. They are, both coming from the French ‘servir’, to serve. ‘Servant’ is the earlier usage and has roughly the same meaning in use today. ‘Serf’ is a later borrowing: “A person in a condition of servitude or modified slavery, distinguished from what is conventionally referred to as ‘slavery’ in that the services due to the master, and his power of disposal of his ‘serf’, are more or less limited by law or custom” (OED).
Last year: Armeria maritima
This week’s rain has of course proved beneficial for growing things, knitting included. The back is now finished, and the front is under way. The pattern exemplifies the best of traditional gansey patterning – simple, elegant, good to look at, and not too difficult to knit. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been making mistakes – there have been lots of those! Thankfully, they are usually spotted within a couple of rows, which means they’re time-consuming but not difficult to fix.
The first of June, and the year is nearly half over! As we learned in school, the names of the months come from the Latin – June was named after Juno, Roman goddess of marriage, fertility, and many other roles. The names of the days of the week also had Roman origins, but indirectly. The Roman days were named after celestial bodies: the sun, the moon, and the five visible planets (Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn). This convention goes back to the Babylonians, and occurs in many languages. When the Anglo-Saxons named their days, they used the same convention, but changed the gods involved to their own gods. So Saturday, Sunday and Monday are still named after Saturn, the sun and the moon, but Tuesday is from Tiw, god of war (Mars), Wednesday from Woden (Mercury), Thursday from Donar (Jupiter), Friday from Frigg (Venus).
View at the end of the path
Interestingly, in Denmark Saturday is ‘lørdag’, which comes from an old Norse word meaning ‘bath day’ or ‘washing day’. This conjures up images of burly Vikings pausing in their looting and pillaging, setting aside their helmets, swords and shields, and climbing into steaming hot tubs. And this is actually what they did, for the Vikings placed a high value on personal cleanliness. Hair was regularly washed and combed, faces and hands regularly washed, and clothes were kept spotless. A clean Viking was more socially acceptable than a slovenly one.
Waiting for chips
This past week has been quiet, so quiet that I can’t think of anything of great import. Handbells on Saturday was different than usual in that we played in public instead of a practice. The event was in Thurso town centre and was organised by the Thurso Community Development Trust to entertain and delight passengers from one of the large cruise ships that regularly dock at nearby Scrabster. As well as handbells and Scottish dancers (not together!), there were craft stalls. Cruise ship passengers and many locals strolled past; I’ve never seen Thurso so busy. We had a slot of an hour and a half, and played our plant-related pieces three times through.
‘View of Wick’
With the gansey, the milestone of dividing for front and back has been reached. The achievement came quicker than originally planned. After some thought, I re-visited the planned measurements and decided that the gansey would be too long if I adhered to them. Thus, the gusset was started at the beginning of the week and half-finished by the end. The pattern of diamonds is becoming apparent – alternating panels of ‘long’ and ‘short’ diamonds. On the short diamonds, the pattern changes every row. On the long, the pattern changes every other row, and this is what makes them ‘long’. There are two ‘short’ diamonds for every ‘long’ one, but not exactly. The patterning will continue to the chosen length, meaning that diamonds may be incomplete at the shoulder. This is in accordance with the original photo, and that’s good enough for me – fewer calculations!
It’s been yet another quiet week, and I’ve barely been out of the house. This is mostly the weather, and indolence. Most of the week, rain has been forecast, and most of the week, the forecast has been correct. I’ve been staying indoors to avoid it, as being caught in a downpour and slogging home soaking wet is just not my thing.
