Gansey Nation

And then you get a day like Saturday, when the wind drops and the clouds part and the sea is so flat and calm it shimmers like taffy cooling in the tin. It was one of those days when the sky is as blue as a child’s painting, and clouds of delicate white butterflies, disappointed in love and tired of life, try to end it all on your car windscreen as you drive past.

I was in a reckless mood myself: I drove with the car window open. Well, it was 13C—we may not see temperatures as high as these again, so it’s best to make the most of it.

The ocean off Mey (yes, it really did look like that)

We went up to the Castle of Mey’s teashop for coffee and cakes. I had a piece of chocolate cake so dense it had its own centre of gravity, like an imploding star, and started to attract cutlery from across the table; what I had taken at first to be icing turned out on closer inspection to be an event horizon. Afterwards we did our best to impersonate a bus tour, since it’s embarrassing when the staff keep asking if you’re enjoying your trip to Scotland and you have to tell them you only live 20 miles away…

I’ve been making good progress on the gansey while we’ve been offline, reaching the halfway point on the gussets and dividing front and back. I’ve made these gussets slightly smaller than I usually do, 15 stitches wide instead of my usual 19-21, just to see how it works out. The body will be 7 diamonds long, shoulder to welt, so as you can see I’m not far off finishing the back. Meanwhile I’m still having a lot of fun knitting the pattern, which is almost foolproof (even for me), and which is rapidly becoming one of my favourites—certainly one I’d recommend to a beginner.

Many thanks for all the suggestions for eye drops to treat my dry eye condition. I still have to talk to a pharmacist, but in the meantime I must admit I rather enjoy spending ten minutes every evening with a warm flannel pressed against my closed eyelids, a sensation not unlike being licked by a very affectionate bison.

I spend the downtime listening to an audiobook. In another life I might be meditating, or praying; in this one I’m listening to Proust. In some ways I find it resembles a traditional religious service: I have no idea what the words mean, but they sound nice.

Finally, here’s Kathleen in her Edinburgh garden wearing the cream Hebridean cardigan I knit recently. Of course, in any other country the beginning of June would hardly be a suitable time of year to wear a gansey—but then, we’ve been through all this before…

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:

– ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ –

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.