Gansey Nation

Just a short blog this week, I’m afraid, since Margaret is off on her annual jaunt to France (polymer clay-ing, drinking red wine and lounging about in a generally sophisticated, Gallic sort of way), and has taken her trusty camera with her. So it’s just me, the instruction manual and an iPhone for now – hence the rather disappointing pictures, for which many apologies. Normal service will be resumed next week, assuming Margaret comes back, of course. (In the old days I could hold the cats hostage against her return; now they’ve gone to the great Scratching Post in the Sky it’s not so straightforward any more.)

So I’m nearly a third of the way up the body, which is a nice feeling – about 8 inches in fact, and hopefully you can start to get a feel of how it’s going to look.

Or you would if you could see if properly. Sigh. (My ruin came from reading how many servants Prince Charles requires to get him through the day, including one to put the toothpaste on the royal toothbrush, and deciding to model my life on that. Really, if this keeps up I’ll have to work out how to switch on the vacuum cleaner, or tie my own shoelaces. And no one wants to see that.)

The odd thing is, it really doesn’t take me much less time to knit a row – it’s still about 30 minutes – as it did when I knit the cardigan, with all its fiddly knits and purls. It just seems less, somehow, since every row isn’t like doing complicated algebra. Just nice, clean, simple patterns which build up nicely into a very effective combination. And lots of cables. The only problem I’m having is the old matter of losing concentration; so although I keep a 7-barred gate record of how many rows I’ve completed, I keep forgetting to score a mark at the end of a row. So I find myself having to count up the diamonds, chevrons and cables and matching the total against the tally to find out if it’s time to cable yet! (Sighs wearily.)

Since the theme this week is classic simplicity, the featured bread is a basic soft white loaf. I stopped baking loaves because it took us so long to eat them they were starting to get stale by the end. (The secret, I’ve found, is of course to slice the loaf on the day it’s made, then bag it up in 3-4 slice portions and freeze them, and so keep them fresh.) So it’s honey and toast for tea, in a surreal Rupert Graves-meets-Winnie-the-Pooh sort of way.

As I say, things will hopefully be back to normal next week. (I just checked – Margaret’s got her iPhone and her camera with her, but she didn’t take the cardigan – so it looks like she’s coming back, then, folks. Phew.)

It’s that time of year again, when spring turns to summer (or autumn, depending on its mood), and Edinburgh loses its students who fly away like migrating birds – the student flat across the road is vacant once more, while we have an anxious wait to see if it will be occupied by another crop of young ladies who haven’t worked out that if you want privacy it’s best to draw your curtains.

Anyway. Here by popular demand are the long-awaited pictures of the recently-completed cardigan, stylishly modelled by Margaret. (Just out of frame is the SWAT team I hired with laser sighted weapons to ensure she turned up for the photo shoot. Only one made it back to base.) It’s already getting a fair bit of wear – I don’t think either of us expected it still to be gansey weather in June, even in Edinburgh!

Meanwhile work continues on my uncle’s gansey, which we’ve christened “Balerno” after the part of Edinburgh where he lives. I’ve finished the ribbing, all three inches of it, and am currently on the band of plain knitting that was traditionally placed between the end of the ribbing and the start of the body pattern. This time I’m also including his initials (“J” and “R” either side of a seam stitch). I use the letters which are graphed out in Rae Compton’s book, which are 14 rows high; so with 2 plain rows before and another 2 after, that makes 18 rows in all, or 1.5 inches.

I cast on 364 stitches for the ribbing last week. At the end of the ribbing I increased by 40 stitches to 404, remembering to increase as evenly as possible, so that meant 20 stitches per side. (Note the “high tech” stitch markers to delineate the seam stitches between front and back, cut from an old frayed length of cream gansey yarn to contrast with the navy blue. While they’re not strictly necessary, I use them till I get settled because I’m more than capable of “sleep-knitting” my way through an entire row without noticing the seam…)

Now all I have to do is finalise the pattern. Brace yourselves people for the Big Reveal next week.

Congratulations to Lynne on finishing her rather stunning gansey, illustrated here. I’ve floated on a number of occasions that I’d like to devote a section of the website to ganseys knitted by other people – or any knitting inspired by ganseys, or using gansey patterns – so if any of you have any pictures you’d like to share, please send them through.

Meanwhile I’m writing again, another semi-fantasy novel while I send out my previous novel to literary agents (“on the chance, you know, just on the chance!”, as Otter says in the Wind in the Willows). I’ve set myself to write 2,000 words a day, 5 days a week. After 3 weeks I’ve reached 30,000 words, or about a third of my estimated total. (As Terry Pratchett says, writing is the most fun anyone can have by themselves.) So far it’s quantity rather than quality, but you can’t win ’em all. (As for the publishing industry, I’m a great believer in the old Welsh proverb, “many drops wear away the stone”; or even the other one, “even the blind pig sometimes finds an acorn”. Sooner or later persistence will pay off, gobeithio – I hope!)

Oh, and if you know any students planning on coming to Edinburgh – please remind them to draw their curtains…

And here we are. The ewige werk really is vollendet.

The gansey’s been pinned out on its drying boards for the best part of week while Margaret and I took it in turns to keep watch with a shotgun and blast to smithereens any moths which dared approach. Today it was time for the cardification to begin.

As my role in this was limited to wielding the shears for the waiting reporters, much like a lord mayor cutting the ribbon on opening a new landfill site, credit for the rest of the process goes to Margaret. (Rumours that she initially locked herself in her room and refused to come out, shouting through the keyhole “I’ll get you for this, Reid” and “You can’t make me”, until lured out with pieces of ginger coated in dark chocolate are, of course, completely unfounded.)

So, it’s over to her:

Front detail, on the blocking squares.  What’s that ripply pleat thing, you ask?  Well if it weren’t there, the front would be larger than the back.  So to make the front nicely blocked, the back would have to be overblocked.  The pleat takes up the excess in the front, making for balanced blocking.	Sleeve detail.	A closeup of the pleat.  It was roughly basted with another colour of gansey wool.
The Zipper.  Despite commenters’ good opinions of my perspicacity, I didn’t start looking for a zipper until the gansey was nearly done.  Many hours legwork and internet searching later, I found transparent zippers with chunky teeth.  Regular dressmaking zippers were too wussy for a jacket, chunky teeth are more appropriate.  Unfortunately chunky teeth zippers only come in about 5 colours, none of them remotely like the colour of this gansey.	The pleat has been unbasted and the very centre has been marked with pins.	The first row of stitching commences.  The plan is to stitch two rows then cut between them.  Cutting then stitching would probably lead to stretched-out edges.  My sewing machine has a fancy pseudo-overlock stitch.  Zigzag or three-stitch zigzag would probably work just as well, or a few rows of fine straight stitching if your machine can’t zigzag.
The first row of stitching, to the right of centre.	And the second row of stitching.	An overall view of the two rows of machine stitching.
And a slightly more close-up one.	Let the cutting commence!	Nearly to the end . . . it wasn’t scary at all.  Much.
Yes, it really did get totally sliced up the middle.	The back of the machine stitching.  The colour of the bobbin thread doesn’t really matter as it won’t be seen when the zipper installation is finished.	The first side folded over and basted down. Two stitches from the steek will form the zipper placket, and the rest is folded underneath.  The zipper will be stitched along the column of purl stitches.
Now both sides have been folded and basted.  I’ve used a doubled length of yellow rayon machine embroidery thread.  It’s visible and is smooth for easy removal.  It does kink up alot though.	The zipper basted in place.  The two protruding ends of the zipper tape will be folded and stitched down later.	Oops!  We cut some of the machine stitching.  No worries, I just machine stitched over it again.
Everything basted in place.  You’d hardly know there was a zipper in there.	Sewing the zipper in, by hand.  Doing it by machine just didn’t seem right somehow.  For one thing, hand stitching is more flexible than machine stitching.  And machine stitching might leave a more definite seam.  I used a darning needle, a single thickness of the sweater yarn, and a running stitch.	The back side of the zipper showing the stitches.  Here I’m securing the zipper tape and seam allowance with herringbone stitches, using a sharp needle and sewing thread.  One stitch in the zipper tape, then one stitch in the body of the gansey.  Where possible, I’m catching the backs of purl stitches.
A shot to show why I’m securing the zipper tape.  It’s nice and smooth(-ish) on the right where it’s stitched down, but it’s ripply on the left.	The zipper installed.	And a close-up view.  The zipper pull is a bit naff but I should be able to change it.  It’s also plastic so I don’t expect it to last too long.

So, in brief:

Materials:  Sewing thread in a sorta matching colour; bobbin thread in any colour; smooth basting thread in a contrasting colour; yarn from the gansey; 22″/55 cm transparent open-ended zipper with chunky teeth; a blocked gansey

Tools:  Sewing machine preferably with zigzag stitch; sewing needle for basting and herringbone stitching; darning needle for installing zipper; scissors (sharp dressmaker’s shears will be easiest).

Process:

1.  Sew two rows of stitching up the centre.

2.  Cut between the two rows of stitching.  Yes, you can do it.

3.  Fold the raw edges under and baste them, using a sharp needle and smooth thread.

4.  Place the right side of the unzipped zipper face up under the right side of the gansey.  Starting from the bottom up, baste in place, using the sharp needle and smooth thread.  The folded edge should be at the centre of the zipper.  Repeat for the left side of the zipper.

5.  Sew the zipper in place, starting from the bottom up, using the darning needle and gansey yarn.  Why from the bottom up?  If it’s really crap it’ll be less noticeable at the bottom, and by the time you get to the neck you’ll have had lots of practice.  Fold down the protruding ends of the zipper tape and sew them in place.  Occasionally run the zipper pull up and down to make sure your stitches aren’t obstructing the teeth.

6.  Sew down the zipper tape and gansey seam allowance using a sharp needle, matching thread, and a herringbone stitch.

7.  Carefully remove the basting threads.

8.  Open the zipper.

9.  Put your left arm in the left sleeve and your right arm in the right sleeve.

10.  Zip up the zipper.

Caveat:  This is the way I did it – but it doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it.  YMMV.