Gansey Nation

After all the excitement of recent weeks, it’s time to put the emphasis back on the gansey – which is, after all (theoretically), the point of the exercise.

I’ve now finished the right sleeve, cuff and all, and made a start on the left. Of course, being me, all it took was a short holiday in the USA to forget everything I did on the right sleeve, and I’m now reduced to trying to piece it together like an archaeologist reconstructing a Roman wine jar from shards. (I can even recall the insouciance with which I breezily thought: “Notes? I won’t need to make any notes. Of course I’ll remember what I’ve done.” Ah, hubris; for some of us it’s a way of life.)

As I’d consciously made the armhole on this gansey narrower than on others I have knit (c. 8.5 inches, whereas they usually end up 9-10 inches, despite my best intentions), I had to be careful not to decrease it too much as I worked my way down the sleeve. So I kept a careful count, and when I reached 98 stitches in the round I stopped decreasing; the last 2.25 inches to the cuff is knit straight, with no decrease. (One neat, but purely coincidental, effect of all this, has been the reduction of the last 2 tree panels on either side of the seam stitch to 2 half-panels – so, they make one complete tree separated by a seam stitch. Which looks rather cool, and I can pretend in future that it was a deliberate part of the pattern.) There is just over an inch of plain knitting before the cuff, as usual.

I reduced for the cuff by 10%, which is the usual amount the books recommend – as I had 98 stitches I reduced them by 10 to leave me with 88 including the seam stitch (which I incorporated into the final “purl 2″ of the knit 2/purl 2 ribbing). The final number has to be divisible by 4, of course. Then I just kept knitting the ribbing for 6 inches, leaving me with a nice long tube, which can then be folded over on itself for a 3” adjustable cuff. The final cast off row, like the collar, is cast off in the same ribbing pattern (knit 2/purl 2) so it lies flat.

By the way, I’ve found an animal I can totally sympathise with as I watch my hair disappearing like snow in summer (hence the recent adoption of baseball caps to go with my old flat cap!) – a hairless cat. Which is either a thing of wonder and joy, or the sort of thing that you see floating in a test tube in the background of a scene from Alien. Anyway, Margaret took pity on her sister Faith’s hairless cat Gus and knitted him a gansey cat-coat to keep him warm. There may be stranger things out there in the cold depths of infinite space than Gus in a gansey, but somehow I really hope not…

Finally – apart from stretching my mind trying to remember what I’d done on the other sleeve (the “utmost gaping of brain”, as Ted Hughes so eloquently put it in one of his Crow poems) – I’ve decided what I want to do when I grow up. I’m going to be a consultant, because – like lawyers – there are never enough consultants in this world.

I’m going into partnership with a very good friend of mine, also an archivist, as cultural heritage and information management specialists. It’s a long-time dream of mine, but I’ve never quite had the courage to go for it ’til now – and I really think it’s now or never. It’s not without its risks in the current climate, however. Do you remember the old quip about the change of ministers of religion in the English Civil War (“new presbyter is but old priest writ large)?” Well, there’s a real risk that “new information consultant is but old unemployed layabout with delusions of grandeur”!

I shall, of course, be able to chart my descent into poverty, destitution, madness, knitting and death on this blog, as a warning to posterity (“Well, officer, it was hard to make them out, he was so far gone with laudanum, but I think his last words were something like “Argh! Not the three needle bind-off! Then ‘a babbled of swatches, but to be honest it sounded more like cursing to me. After that the end came mercifully quick. He’s cast off good and proper now, I tell ‘ee.”)

I can hardly wait…

It’s not often I compare myself with Shroedinger’s Cat, but this is definitely one of those times.

You see, Margaret and I are due to fly to the USA this afternoon for a holiday – first we catch a flight from Edinburgh to London, then from London to Boston. But – and how unfair is this? – the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland is currently drifting back over the UK, and is affecting (you guessed it) airports in Scotland and London. Edinburgh airport is currently closed till 1pm, and our flight is scheduled for 1.45pm. Tension mounts.

And this is where the cat comes in. If you remember, Schroedinger’s Cat is a thought experiment, devised to show how bizarre quantum theory really is. The cat is in a box, with a container of poison, and a small quantity of radioactive particles which have an equal chance of decaying or not. If they do decay, then a mechanism releases the poison and the cat is killed; if they don’t, the cat survives. The weird thing is, according to quantum theory, the cat is both equally alive and dead until the box is opened and it is observed – when it is found to have been either dead the whole time, or alive. But both states exist until it is observed. Or something like that.

Sleeve detail

Body detail

So with me and this blog. By the time you read this, I will either be off to wild fun and excitement in the States, or sitting at home thinking some very black thoughts indeed (though I may not interact with any poison – you can take a metaphor too far sometimes). Both futures are, at present, equally possible. Of course, the challenge you will have is observing me – especially if I don’t leave the flat – but that’s another matter.

Meanwhile, I paid a return visit to the Ear, Nose and Throat department last week where they stuck that wire coat hanger up my nose again. The fun part was, this time I got to watch it on TV. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the inside of your nose in close up? Mine was very pink, rather unpleasantly hairy in parts, and disconcertingly squishy in others – like poking a strawberry blancmange with a biro. On the whole, I have come to the conclusion that humans look at their best when seen from the outside. The upshot is, I am now on the waiting list for a septoplasty – I’m afraid you’ll have to look it up, as after having the after-effects explained to me (in which the words “crusting” and “discharge” featured once more, but this time with illustrations) – I don’t really want to think about it right now.

It’s been hard to concentrate on knitting with all this going on, but as you will see I’m progressing slowly down the sleeve. It takes about 5-6 minutes to do a row at this stage, and as I’m decreasing on every 5th row, I tend to work in blocks of 5 rows at a time, or about 30-35 minutes at a stretch (which is conveniently the same length as a Mozart piano concerto!).

When I come back from America – if I get there – expect some exciting, possibly foolhardy news about my career plans. Now I’m off to observe some cats, and hope that at least 50% of them survive the experience.

Next scheduled post to this blog will be on Tuesday 1 June 2010, deus vult.

Well, I duly had my interview for the job working for the Western Isles Council last week – and I didn’t get it.

It’s a disappointment, though unlike the Hebrides themselves, I can honestly say it’s not the end of the world – since there were enough complications to make me a bit ambivalent. It would, for example, have meant relocating yet again for a temporary job, it’s a very long away from my parents who are in their eighties, and then there’s the wind, rain and the endless winters to consider. I imagine it would be like living in an Ingmar Bergman movie. Plus I very much doubt there’s a Starbucks on the islands.

And, as ever in these situations, I tend to feel that somewhere out there is something more exciting than the job I didn’t get. So – I’ve just turned 50, I’m unemployed, and we’re in the biggest recession and public spending squeeze for 70 years – the world, as Terry Pratchett would say, is my mollusc. How bad can it be?

In the meantime, I’m free to indulge my three great passions (or the ones I’m prepared to discuss in public anyway – and I’ve always maintained, like PG Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred, that a more enlightened judge would have let me off with just a caution): namely, baking bread, listening to Wagner – and, of course, knitting ganseys.

After last week’s herculean effort picking up the stitches for the sleeve, all I had to do next was get the pattern to fit. I wanted to use the same pattern elements as the body, so the gansey would look all of a piece. I’ve replicated the yoke pattern at the top of the sleeve (diamonds flanked with inverted yarn-over chevrons), with below that a narrow band of the diagonal trellis pattern as a border, while the rest of the sleeve will comprise the tree and starfish patterns all the way down to the cuff. Each pattern element is exactly the same as it was on the main body of the gansey (I know some patterns traditionally were knitted smaller on the sleeves, but I’ve decided to keep this one big and chunky). I’ve only made the sleeve “yoke” one panel row deep (the body yoke was 3 panels deep), because I reckon the main patterned part of the sleeve should end above the elbow – or at least I think it looks better that way.

The gusset decrease was 2 stitches every fourth row, to match the previous rate of increase. Now that I’ve finished the gusset, I’ve switched to a rate of decrease of 2 stitches every 5 rows, so as not to run out of sleeve too soon.

So at the moment I’m doing quite a bit of knitting – as you can tell by how much of the sleeve’s been done – while listening to Wagner and waiting for the dough to rise. Now I’ve got used to baking with fresh yeast I’m getting ready for the next great trial: preparing a sourdough starter with wild yeast and keeping that alive indefinitely to bake with. (I already keep back some of each batch of dough to use in the next loaf, but it’s not the same.) And then my final challenge – a harvest loaf (Google it if you don’t know what they look like) – and then a gansey made out of bread…