Gansey Nation

It was Margaret’s birthday last Tuesday; as I had the day off work and it was forecast to be bright and sunny (eventually—the day had dawned in thick fog, a real pea-souper, guv’nor) we drove down to the Falls of Shin, a celebrated waterfall and salmon leap about two hours’ south of here, down by the Dornoch Firth.

Well, it was spectacular enough in the warm sunshine, but it wasn’t really a waterfall; being more what I believe the experts call a river—which, when you come to think of it, is only a sort of horizontal waterfall, after all. The river comes rushing down a gorge, tumbles over a lip and then crashes a few metres down into a broad pool where it swirls around a bit to get its bearings, and then carries on downstream to the Firth and the open sea.

It was too early in the season for any leaping salmon, so the only leaping being done was by tourists: not from the midges, but from the life-size wax statue of Mohamed Al-Fayed in full Highland dress (kilt and all) which greets you as you enter the visitor centre. It’s quite a shock if you’re not expecting it, and I kept turning suddenly to look at it, to see if it had moved while my back was turned; I didn’t quite trust his smile.

After a seam-splitting lunch we left for home, following the scenic road around the Firth. It’s very beautiful and lonely out there, the open sweep of water ringed by hills – a real Highland landscape in a way that Caithness (lovely in its own way but undeniably flat as an oil spill) isn’t.

Then we saw something amazing: the fog had cleared as we went south, but now the hills were once more being enveloped in a wave of mist or low cloud drifting in from the sea, and pouring over them like a tide of dry ice, something from a vintage prog rock concert or a low-budget horror movie. (Ah, mist – nature’s way of letting everyone experience what it’s like to have cataracts.) We tried to outrun it but it caught us within a few miles, so the view for the rest of the journey home was limited to the verges and the taillights of the car in front, as though the universe had run out of power and until someone put another shilling in the meter it was shutting down all non-essential scenery.

Congratulations to Sara Phillips for completing this splendid Norfolk gansey, based on the pattern of John “Sparrow” Hardingham of Sheringham whose picture is in Cromer Museum.  The gansey is modelled by her husband Max and a scene-stealing cat; and as so often it just goes to show how effective these kinds of patterns can be.

My own project continues haltingly apace: three diamonds completed now; if I can keep up this rate I’ll be starting the gussets before the end of the month.

Now it’s over to Margaret for an update on the cream cardigan’s buttonholes:

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1.

The buttonhole band is now finished, but still needs a good steaming before it’s ready for the bright lights of Gansey Nation.  In the meantime, I’ve done a sample to illustrate how the buttonholes were made.

As you can see, in the first photo, stitches have been picked up along the edge.  Then the first segment, from the edge to the first buttonhole, has been knit.  The right-hand edge is a 2 stitch tubular selvedge (slip the first two stitches of the row with yarn in back; on the return row purl these stitches).  The left-hand edge shows the ‘wrap and turn’, where you make a yarnover before knitting the row.  Leave these on the left hand needle.

3.

2.

In the second photo, an i-cord edge has been knit down the left hand side.  When the buttonhole is the length required, and you’re back at the left-hand edge of the segment, slip the last two stitches onto the left-hand needle.  Knit one, knit the next stitch together with the yarnover next to it.  Slip two stitches to the left-hand needle and repeat.  When you get down to the bottom of the buttonhole, the last i-cord row will be knit one, knit the next stitch together with one of the picked up stitches.  The third photo shows what it look like from the back.

4.

5.

In the fourth photo, if you’re still with me here and haven’t dozed off, the next segment has been knit.  In this case, the tubular selvedge on the right-hand edge is made using the two stitches from the i-cord edge that you just made.  The left-hand edge (not shown) has the yarnovers as per the first segment.  The fifth photo shows it from the back.

7.

6.

So continue in this way, segment by segment, until all the buttonholes have been knit.  The only variation is, on the last segment, to make a tubular selvedge at the both edges.  The next step is to close all the buttonholes.  Knit back across the row in pattern.  Place the last two stitches before a buttonhole on a cable needle and hold them in back.  In pattern, work the next stitch on the left-hand needle and the cable needle together.  Repeat for the next stitch.  This is sort of like a two-needle bind-off, but without binding off.  Knit in pattern to the next buttonhole, and repeat. Photos six and seven show the front and back of a buttonhole when this step has been completed.

After you’ve done all this you should be back at the edge where you started.  To cast off, make an i-cord edge similar to that on the left-hand edge of the buttonhole segments:  knit three, slip three onto the left-hand needle.  Knit two, knit two together; slip three:  repeat until all the stitches are gone.  Keep an eye on your tension as there’s a tendency, as with many bind-offs, to work too tightly.  The last photo shows the i-cord bind-off.

By next week the gansey proper should have its bands steamed and buttons sewn on.

I’d been referred to the eye clinic in Inverness because my optician had spotted a dark patch at the back of my eye – which, as is the way of medical matters, would either prove to be completely harmless (most likely), or potentially very bad (quite unlikely but you never know).

The reverse of the dimple and cable pattern

Well, it turned out to be harmless. No tumour, no detaching retina, no problems at all in fact (so as they say in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, anything I still can’t cope with is therefore my own problem). Of course, in order to find that out, the doctor had to do the whole anaesthetising and dilating-the-pupils routine which made me look like a surprised barn owl, and shine bright lights into the retina, focusing the beam like a sadistic schoolboy using a magnifying glass to incinerate ants in the back yard. I can still smell a faint trace of smoke even now.

The small broch at Castlehill, with Dunnet Head in the background and slate fences in the foreground

I don’t know if you’ve ever had your eye anaesthetised? They do it to check the pressure, and it’s the weirdest feeling. Your eyeball seems to shrink in its socket and feels like it’s been coated in varnish. When you wipe your eye on a tissue you get a bright yellow smear, as though the anaesthetic is made from pureed canaries.

A Tale of Two Bands

At least no one took my picture when I was all numb and dilated like that. I gave a talk to the good people of Castletown Heritage Society last week, and asked them if they could send me some pictures of the occasion so we could use them for publicity purposes; and they kindly obliged. Goodness, it’s a shock to see yourself taken unawares! (Hear that popping noise? That’s the sound my amour propre makes as it bursts like a soap bubble.) In the best of them I look like I’ve just burst out of a cake; or like Gandalf at Aragorn’s coronation party, if the photographer had pressed the shutter just as a slightly inebriated Galadriel, after one too many “Rivendell slammers”, had decided to give the old wizard the wedgie of a lifetime.

Left-hand band from the front . . .

After all these distractions – hospital appointments, talks, and time spent sobbing in my room – I haven’t done a huge amount of knitting. Though I am making inroads into the second diamond, and the pattern is getting clearer by the day. So by way of distracting you from my own project, Margaret is now going to take you through her progress on de-steeking the cream cardigan.

Which, as you can see, is coming along nicely.  The stitches for the left-hand band have been picked up, at a rate of two stitches per three rows.  The first row is garter stitch, and then there’s about an inch of seed stitch.  Aforesaid stitch is good for bands as it lies flat, but it’s about as much fun to knit as ribbing.

. . . and from the back.

The right-hand band will have horizontal buttonholes. I’ll probably knit them individually, as a series of little tabs, then knit a few rows across the top to join them all together.  Think of a comb with its teeth at the edge of the centre front – without so many slits of course.

The facing, once the stitches have been picked up, folds very neatly to the back.  When all the knitting is said and done, it’ll be catchstitched down so it has no chance whatsoever to flop about.

The band is bubbling a little, but hopefully a good steam with the iron should sort that out.  This is the band the buttons will be sewn to.  Alas the chosen buttons are a bit too big; to rest nicely on the band I’d have to knit another half inch or so, and that would make the bands too wide.  So it’s off to the local knitting shop or t’interwebs to find better buttons.

I don’t know if your satellite navigation system has a setting called “drunken ant wandering across a carpet”? Ours has, and the dial seems to be stuck on it.

We drove back to Southport this weekend (900 mile round trip, 2 days—but still 3 days shorter than a cricket match) with a view to collecting our now repaired car. On the map the final stage seemed straightforward: down Road A for a mile, then left up Road B for another mile, garage on the left, sorted.

But like one of those fairy will o’ the wisps that lure unsuspecting strangers onto the moors at night, never to be seen again, the sat-nav seduced us onto little known byways, into housing estates, up people’s drives and in one instance, unless I was hallucinating by then, into someone’s front porch. (I couldn’t swear to it, but at one point I thought I heard the computer’s tinny voice sniggering.)

Of course, it’s also possible that Wigan is the secret location of Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry and the roads rearrange themselves when you’re not looking. (I did see some odd-looking people in fancy dress who I naturally took for wizards but, disappointingly, they just turned out to be football supporters.)

In the end we found our way to the Renault garage by the simple expedient of winding down the windows and driving towards the sound of the howls of anguish from the other customers who’d just been presented with their repair bills.

So once again, I’m afraid, we haven’t been able to turn our attention to the cardigan and the ancient ceremony of the Cutting of the Steek—usually done to the accompaniment of a noble bagpipe pibroch—but we’ll do it next week, hopefully. Till then, I’ve been working on and off on my new Filey project, and have now reached the point where I’ve started the pattern.

This is based on Matt Cammish’s gansey recorded in Gladys Thompson on pages 21 and 24 of her book. I’ve always liked the look of it, and the fact that a member of the Cammish family wore it in the Navy in the Second World War gave me an extra reason to want to try it.

The pattern is in two sections: one of a diamond of 13 stitches and the other of ribs flanking a central cable, comprising 28 stitches. I wanted to keep the ribs and cables exactly as they were, so that meant that any tweaking of the pattern to fit would have to be done with the diamonds. In order to fit my total of 210 stitches per side, I ended up with 5 panels of ribs and cables, and 4 panels of 19-stitch diamonds (see charts).

Nigel has alerted me to the fact that Eyemouth Museum currently has an exhibition on called Casting the Nets, part of which involves a “gathering of the ganseys”—see their website. Eyemouth is a lovely little town, well worth a visit anyway, so if you’re in the vicinity it would be rude not to drop in.

I’d love to go myself, but at the moment I’m frightened that if I programme it into my sat-nav I’ll end up plunging off a cliff into the North Sea, on the grounds that it’s probably slightly quicker to float there…