Gansey Nation

First the good news: my cold has gone and I’m off the betablockers my doctor prescribed to stop me getting migraines, so I no longer shuffle through the streets like a survivor of the zombie apocalypse with hay fever. The bad news? Oh yeah, the migraines. (I wish now I’d kept the receipt for this body – then I could take it back and demand a new one, or alternatively a refund.)

Thanks for all the cat stories and comments last week. Now the evenings are slowly getting lighter the little beggars have abandoned their camouflage and no longer shadow me up the path; instead when I get to the door they seem to just materialise out of thin air directly between my ankles, as if the Enterprise’s ship’s cats had learned how to work the transporter—the only warning being what I used to think of as a plaintive meow, but which I now believe to be the sound a cat-sized quantity of air makes when it is displaced.

I have—hurrah—finished the collar of the gansey, which consists of an inch of knit 2/ purl 2 ribbing, cast off in pattern. So that’s the body substantially complete, and just the sleeves to go. As I’ve said before, this for me is when the gansey really starts to come together, and you feel you’re on the downhill straight; like reassembling C3PO in Star Wars, he may not have all his arms and legs yet, but you feel you could attach a head and have a conversation.

The armhole is 9.5 inches high, so with a stitch gauge of 9.25 stitches to the inch that gives me about 88 stitches to pick up per side. The sleeves are going to replicate the body patterns all the way to the cuff, so that it all looks of a piece, which means the section closest to the shoulder will be the same pattern as the yoke (but necessarily shorter, so instead of three trees or anchors in a column there will just be the one).

As I work down the sleeve I’m also decreasing the gusset out of existence; the rate of decrease is the same as the increases, to get that nice parallelogram shape, i.e., decreasing one stitch each side every four rows. (I used the red yarn from the Filey gansey as stitch holders for the gusset; the only downside is, if you’re not careful, stray wisps of the stitch holder yarn get snagged when you transfer the stitches to a needle. But I’m not worried – I mean, pink stripes in the gusset were traditional, right?)

Margaret has now finished her magic shawl, fashioned from angels’ eyelashes and sea foam. When it’s stretched and blocked she’s going down to the river on midsummer eve to catch fairies with it.

Judit continues to come up with fun and novel uses for leftover gansey yarn: this time it’s a delicate little mobile phone bag or case which you can see here, which is the kind of thing I imagine archaeologists would be raving about if they found in the tomb of a bronze age princess, assuming her phone was buried with her (not that you’d get much of a signal in a lead-lined coffin, of course). She’s also helpfully tweaked the photo of Dave’s gansey so you can see the rich complexity of the pattern more clearly, so many thanks to Judit for that.

Finally, this week I came across a splendid entry in a register of applications for poor relief back in the 1870s: a woman who was receiving money for looking after an old lady had asked for an increase, on the grounds that she had “grown increasingly fatuous” – I’ve been wondering how best to keep myself amused in my old age, and I must say this sounds like a plan…

After I complained so much about the weather in last week’s blog we’ve been graced by two or three days of sun, as if God decided to trade in his old black and white television set for a colour one, and the world is no longer being broadcast in a grainy monochrome by people in dinner jackets with clipped, posh accents.

It’s amazing the difference the sun makes, especially up here. As above, so below, as the medieval mystics used to say, and it’s true to the extent that a bright blue sky turns the sea blue too—and when you add to that a fiery sunrise, well, it’s pretty spectacular in a wrath-of-Jehovah sort of way. We had to go to Inverness last Wednesday, and driving down the twisty coast road at around 8.30 a.m. we watched the sun rise behind the clouds like a candle flame shielded behind cupped fingers (while at the same time neglecting to watch the road—which explains why the last words of so many Caithness visitors are, “Wow, isn’t that beautifaaarrrghhh…”).

John o’Groats Harbour with Stroma in the distance

Some good news—I’ve finally got a hospital appointment later in February for getting my eye sorted, the one that’s afflicted by posterior capsule opacity. (In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t read the article about how it’s fixed by firing a laser at it, punching a series of holes round the circumference of the lens until the film is punched out, like a tax disc or a postage stamp.) It’s not without risk for me, so it’s going to be a nervy few weeks.

The corner of the whipped cream. Border finished, starting the inner frame.

Meanwhile I’ve subdivided the front of the gansey, and have embarked on the shoulder straps. As it’s a cardigan, I’m not as worried as I usually am about a deep neckline—the buttons or zip will allow the wearer to determine the height of the neck as they see fit. So there’s only 5 stitches indented to shape the neck over 10 rows. As the width of the gansey is 210 stitches, each shoulder strap is 70 stitches wide. I’m going to replicate the herringbone from below the yoke, knit it all from the front and join it so the seam is on the back.

Finally, did you know that most migraine sufferers get migraines at weekends? No one knows why, apparently, but it’s thought to be connected to relaxing after getting through the working week. (Mind you, in my case, it’s probably got something to do with spending so much time staring at sunrises over the ocean…)

Recto

You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little distracted this week, a little off my game. You see, the doctor has prescribed me some medicine to prevent me getting so many migraines—four or five a month is considered by experts ‘too many’, she said (she should try it from the inside sometime). So the number of brightly coloured pills I have to take has increased by one; and as a result the world has slowed down.

Rather a lot, in fact. Honestly, I had to check to see if they’d mixed up my prescription with elephant tranquillisers by mistake. I now have such a tendency to slump forward over my desk that the cleaner is demanding extra payments to keep my keyboard free of drool; or at least a bucket to wring out her cloth. My colleague keeps a spoon handy so she can hold it up to my lips to see if I’m still breathing. Like someone in an Edgar Allen Poe story, each time I close my eyes I expect to open them on a sealed coffin lid.

Recto, detail

On the other hand, a week has passed and no migraines. So now I have a decision to make: do I live the rest of my life at half speed, shuffling about like an inmate of a retirement home for the recently undead, but free of pain; or do I rejoin the human race, but accept that two or three days a week I shall be as broken as Humpty Dumpty? (There are many reasons why I hope God exists; but increasingly it’s so that I can give Him a piece of my mind—preferably the piece that’s responsible for migraines.)

Verso

It’s had a knock-on effect on the knitting, as my evenings are now spent counting my fingers and falling asleep before I get to ten. Even so, I’m inching my way up the front, about halfway up the yoke. (Incidentally, we forgot last week to include a picture of the completed back, minus shoulders, so here it is.)

Since all my eyesight problems kicked in a few years back, I’ve found nothing goes so well with knitting as listening to audiobooks. Terry Pratchett always works well, as does Charles Dickens—we’re listening to the splendid Our Mutual Friend at the moment. Of course, you have to be careful with modern fiction—few things are more disconcerting than signing for a parcel at the front door while an energetic sex scene plays out in the background, complete with farmyard noises.

Verso, detail

On the parish notices front, happy New Year to Harley and Pat Sutherland—thank you so much for your card! And a special mention to Tamar, Judit and Gracie, who posted the most comments last year (well, after me, but I don’t think I count). I don’t have any special prizes to give out, alas, except that I plan to continue the blog throughout 2013, and it’s the enthusiasm of so many readers and posters that persuades me to keep going.

Thanks also to Evelyn for nominating me for the wholly mysterious Liebster Blog Award. Apparently you’re supposed to recommend five other blogs for your readers to try—but I do that anyway, and selecting just five would be unfair. So can I suggest that readers take the opportunity to suggest other blogs they think people would find interesting?

And so, as the caffeine pills wear off, and I return to my narcoleptic coma, and my strands of drool start to resemble the web of an incontinent spider experiencing a sneezing fit, it’s time to catch up on some z’s.