It’s nice to reach the second sleeve. The end is in sight – feels like forever – so you’re motivated just to put in the hard yards and get it done. This time I’ve been helped by a couple of factors.
First of all, England have finally beaten Australia at cricket – hurrah – and won back the Ashes, after a long, hard summer of 5 test matches. (As a true Kiwi I find myself reverting to type – as the old joke says, I support New Zealand and anyone playing Australia.) And even though the games were only live on satellite TV, which we don’t get, I was able to listen to the radio commentary and knit. As Nigel said, this is real thing when it comes to cricket, and it doesn’t come much better than beating the Aussies. Mwa ha ha ha.
Secondly, and it’s probably not a coincidence, I’ve rediscovered my love of Wagner, in particular his epic Ring cycle of 4 operas, a mere 15 hours of music. The astonishing thing about the Ring, not only did Wagner write both the text and music himself (and what music), but he used old legends to illustrate his thoughts on the nature of human society and human nature. So the Ring is, in one sense, a portrayal of the world, from creation to dissolution. (To give one example of the originality of Wagner’s thinking: he devised his own creation myth, to get the cycle underway; but in it he portrayed the gods as morally corrupt, “mired in sleaze” as the saying is, requiring human beings to renew the world and offer a hope of redemption. Usually it’s the other way round.)
And of course, Tolkien, despite his denials, nicked a crucial part of his mythology from Wagner, and not from the old stories, as he claimed… (Can anyone guess what it was?) “They both have a ring in them and it’s round” was, I think, his rather testy (and disingenuous) rejection of the suggestion.
Thirdly I’ve been listening to Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel “Anathem” as an audiobook while I knit, which has got me hooked, even though I know I’m not getting all the implications. It’s pretty heavy going at times, but at least (unlike Wagner) it’s got some good jokes.
So lots to keep me entertained while I put my feet up and knit, as the rain hammers on the roof and the howling wind rattles the windows, in what passes for summer up here. All of which explains the dramatic progress of the last few days, and the euphoria that follows the realisation that I will never, never have to knit a row of this soul-destroying pattern ever again. (Yes, all right Suzanne, I admit it, you were right! Woody Allen has a character in one of his stories who falls out of a box at the opera and lands on his head; rather than admit it was a mistake, he goes back every night and repeats it to make it look like it was deliberate… In some ways that’s not a bad metaphor for me and this pullover.)
And I’m already thinking ahead to what I can tackle next – something Scottish, of course. Something to keep out the rain…
Apologies for the break in transmission over the past couple of weeks – normal service is now resumed, albeit using the word “normal” in its loosest sense.
Our window at the National Archives looks out on a plaza in front of a shopping mall, and every now and again a busker is incautious enough to set up close to the wall. If the music goes on long enough to become annoying we have perfected the technique of reaching out, grabbing them by the shoulders, and suddenly pulling them inside like the creature from Alien dragging another victim into a cooling duct. (Once we’ve got them inside we can go through their pockets, then set them to work cataloguing archives until we consider they’ve paid their debt to society. Or just until we feel like it. This of course is how the National Archives recruits most of its staff – it works just like the old-fashioned press gang.)
Anyway, back to the pullover. I think I made the sleeve a little too wide for my taste at 10 inches at the armhole. I normally aim for 8 to 8.5 inches, which works fine with my standard decrease rate down the sleeve of 1 in 6. This time the sleeve looks a bit puffy, the kind of thing Lord Byron would have worn if he’d been into fishing for herring instead of writing poetry. Of course, it’s all relative, and this sleeve is fairly typical of those shown in many of the old photos, so it’s not a problem. But best worn by someone with muscular upper arms, not the likes of me whose arms most closely resemble those animals made out of air-filled balloons.
Here’s a fun experiment to try. First, change the bed and put a new duvet cover on. Then take some clear apple juice and put it in a saucepan. Set it on the stove, and gently heat it till it’s about the same temperature as the average baby’s bath water (you can test it with your elbow to be sure), and then fill a hot water bottle with it and go through to the bedroom. Hold it over the bed, remove the cap and press both sides simultaneously, sending a strong squirt of yellow liquid all over your nice clean duvet cover.
That’s what it’s been like since we moved, as our elderly cat does not seem to be adjusting well to life in Edinburgh (for apple juice, substitute – well, you get the picture). Ah, well – at least we know the washing machine works.
Slow but steady progress this week, not helped by Edinburgh having its annual heatwave, uncomfortably hot and sticky, temperatures in the unimaginable high twenties/low thirties celsius, seagulls flopping down exhausted in the shade, too fagged to peck the garbage bags open. All in all, not the kind of weather to have the equivalent of a woollen blanket on your lap, even if you’ve got the windows open and are exposing your pale, unsightly legs to the faintest hint of a breeze, not to mention the neighbours (well, they deserve some excitement, I thought) as I was. Also still troubled by this cold I can’t seem to shake off, which resulted in my sleeping through about half of the weekend (it’s just like being a student all over again).
The cold it was that made me miss the Moray Firth Partnership’s Scottish Traditional Boat Festival at Portsoy this weekend, with workshops and displays on knitting and ganseys. If anyone has any information about it, how it went, I’d be interested to hear. (According to their website they seem to have most of their funding in place for their gansey project, so that’s one to keep an eye on.)
In the meantime, on with the sleeves. I’ve almost finished the gusset, and will soon have finished the pattern band, after which it’s plain knitting all the way to the cuff. As I’ve mentioned before on these blogs, it’s a good idea to keep moving the stitches around the needles if you’re knitting in the round on double-pointed needles, so the break doesn’t always come on the same stitch. Otherwise, the danger is that you slacken the tension slightly as you move from needle to needle, and that can have the unfortunate effect of producing a line of looser stitches running down your sleeve, which looks like a pull in a pair of tights. As my pattern row comes every third row, I just slip a couple of stitches from needle to needle when I reach them to break things up a bit. Sorted.