Time this week for some number-crunching, and for a small confession.
First, the numbers. After weeks of “climbing Mount Improbable”, to use Richard Dawkins’ splendid phrase, gradually building up the body row on row I suddenly find I’ve done over 14 inches and it’s time to start the gussets and the yoke pattern. (As a typical gansey to fit me would be 27-28 inches long (welt to shoulder), and my preferred distance from the start of the gusset to the start of the shoulder strap is 12 to 12.5 inches, it’s a simple calculation to start the gussets and yoke at about 14.5 inches. This will give me a 3.5 inch gusset and an 8 inch sleeve, plus an inch for the shoulder strap.)
After many years of trial and error it occurred to me to keep a record of the number of rows this takes, to save me having to work it out each time. So, I know that the 12 inches in my last gansey from gusset to shoulder strap took 145 rows. As this one is going to be 12.5 inches (I want to knit a deeper gusset this time, 3.5 inches instead of 3), I can add an extra 6 rows for the additional half-inch, giving me a total of 151 rows for the yoke, rounded down to 150.
Now it’s time for the confession. I always knew deep down that it wasn’t going to be possible for me to replicate Henry Freeman’s gansey exactly. As far as I can tell, either he was a very small man (i.e., a dwarf), or his ganseys are knit in a rather larger gauge than mine – perhaps 5 or 6 stitches to the inch instead of my 8 or 9. This means, if I knit his pattern as recorded, instead of that rather nicely textured, spaced effect on his ganseys I will end up with a closely dappled texture, which isn’t really what I want. (You can see what I mean on the yoke of Gavin’s gansey here.)
I put this off as long as possible, but now it’s decision time – what to do? Knit as recorded, dividing the yoke into maybe 4 bands across the chest, and accept that it won’t look the same? (This is more or less what Gladys Thompson records as her Staithes pattern.) Or try something different, maybe a moss stitch variant with alternating blocks of 4 stitches?
The solution I’m most minded to try isn’t one I can recall seeing written down anywhere (though I’m willing to stand corrected) – which I guess suggests that it probably won’t work! But I’m thinking of alternating the pattern rows (knit 2, purl 2) with not one, but two, count them, two rows of plain knitting. I’m hoping this will separate out the pattern rows just enough to bring out the pattern without turning it into a sort of moss stitch effect. (The risk is, of course, that at my stitch gauge, 2 stitches of purl alternating with 2 of plain will just not be big enough to make it work.) I’ll aim for 3 bands across the yoke of 50 rows each, which at least has the virtue of simplicity.
Ah well, if it doesn’t work I can always quietly toss it in the garbage and pretend it was eaten by tarantulas, or something. (Or owls, for all Futurama fans out there!) And if this website disappears, blame covert surveillance by the security services, and not a rather desperate attempt to cover up the author’s shame and embarrassment…
Well now, imagine our surprise when Margaret opened her March edition of Slipknot, the journal of the 
Fame at last, I thought. But no; it’s obscurity again, I’m afraid. The picture has actually been lifted from this website (uncredited, which is a little bit naughty) to illustrate a new gansey project taking place in Scotland, organised by one Kathryn Logan of the Moray Firth Partnership. The stated aims of the project are to locate, conserve and record old ganseys of the area and their patterns, and to get more local people interested in knitting and in their coastal heritage.
But as the photos this week show, this is where it all starts to pay off: just doing a row or two each night builds up to an inch or two each week. So that, almost without my noticing it, my embryonic gansey is about a foot in length – the gussets are perhaps only a couple of weeks away, and it’s almost time to think about working out the pattern.
Another way of measuring progress is in yarn used, and I’ve included a picture here of the cone I’m working from alongside an untouched 500g cone – which looks remarkably fat in comparison!
It’s a curious thing that gansey wool, which feels quite soft to the touch in swatches, when knitted at this tension to a height of 10 inches or so takes on the consistency of canvas – i.e., becomes stiff and unyielding. Maybe it’s all the caked-in salt from the sweat of my fingers, or all the hot salt tears I’ve wept over it, I don’t know, but I’m tempted to make my next project a gansey tent, or even a natty pair of shorts. Anyway, I’m hoping it will retain its firmness once it’s been washed and can then act as a sort of corset, thus turning me into the William Shatner of herring fishermen.
I have a growing pile of novels on my bedside table, each of which is there just in case I feel in the mood for it, and a similar pile which I’m accumulating for the move to Edinburgh, like a squirrel squirrelling away for the lean times ahead. (In the same way I’ve iPodded over 100 audiobooks over the last year, and stocked up on some big, fat classical cd box set bargains (60 cds of Beethoven, and boxes of Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Wagner, Haydn).
Now, I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but every now and again I seem to shed some forty of my almost fifty years, and revert to my inner eight-year-old. It happened again recently when I picked up a copy of Thomas Hardy’s early novel “A Pair of Blue Eyes” and discovered that chapter 18 is entitled “He Heard Her Musical Pants”. This has cheered me up through some difficult days recently, and has popped into my mind at odd moments – when I’ve been introduced to the Keeper of the National Archives of Scotland, say – and the thought of what sounds they made has made stuff come out of my nose at the most inappropriate times.
Ah well. You’ll see from this week’s pictures that progress is still slow. I spent most of last week in Edinburgh, right enough, and a fair portion of it was spent in my hotel room, listening to the streets below being dug up in preparation for a new tramway for the city. But I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped, partly because I had homework to do most nights (and how unfair is that?) but also because I was usually just too tired. In fact, some nights it was as much as I could do to slump on the bed and watch the cricket test match between England and the West Indies unfold (5 days and it still ended in a draw – what a great game cricket is!).
I keep having to remind myself that I’m really making progress, since the body with its garter-stitch welt has started to lose its resemblance to the sort of hats worn by the English soldiers who burned Joan of Arc – progress of a sort, I guess.
We had one fun day last week, arising from our imminent closure. We’ve put a sum of money into an arts programme (“New Expressions”), and got some Arts Council money to match it, so we’re funding 10 museums to employ a contemporary artist to use something in their galleries as inspiration, and produce a new work of art. On Wednesday, we all got together in Taunton, and the artists showed us what they’d come up with.
And Plymouth Museum’s artist is creating a circular display based on all the little cardboard labels from their natural history collection, each one taken from a species that is now extinct. (We joked that they should add a label for us too…) But the best of all is from the wonderful Falmouth Art Gallery, who’ve employed a surrealist painter to create a surrealist frame for one of his pictures! If you’re ever in the vicinity, you really should look it up.