This week has been busier than last week, for a change. For the most part, it’s been busy doing nothing, and this is intentional. For last Tuesday, I had day case surgery on my scalp. I’d been to the local hospital for a biopsy at the end of May. Then the hospital phoned a fortnight ago to say they had an opening in their surgery schedule, would I like the appointment? At this stage, I hadn’t received the results of the biopsy, which was read over the phone. The biopsy had revealed a basal cell carcinoma, which does not spread but needs excision.
Another sunny day
The surgery was done under local anaesthetic, which was topped up regularly whenever I said, ‘Ouch!’. Mostly, though, I didn’t feel anything but could hear the hair being shaved and the zap of the cauterisation tool. The surgeon said the lesion was large at about 1 cm, and a 4 mm margin also needed to be removed, creating a wound of nearly 2 cm (that’s 0.79”). Near the end of the procedure, the surgeon recommended a skin graft because the skin on my scalp wasn’t stretchy enough for the edges of the wound to meet. He also added that a graft could be done at a later date, using skin from an arm. In the meantime, he re-shaped the wound to draw the incision closer together, and I’m hoping I won’t need a graft.
Swirls of foam
The procedure took an hour and a half. Afterwards, the nurses did their best to clean up my hair, joking about the ‘pink rinse’. The incision has been stitched with both dissolvable and non-dissolvable sutures, and on top of it there’s a giant gel/gauze dressing stuck to my scalp. On top of that are more gauze pads, held in place with stretchy gauze strips. For the first few days, the strips were tightly bound around my forehead with criss-cross strips to hold the dressings in place. This was uncomfortable, making it difficult to get my glasses on and off and putting pressure on my temples. However, the dressings are changed daily, and we changed to having the gauze around my chin, which is much more comfortable. There hasn’t been any bleeding; day to day, there’s been no change in the wound except for the better. The nurses say everything is looking good. I see the surgeon again on Wednesday.
The surgery set me back far more than I’d anticipated. On first day this was understandable, but I was very tired the following days too, and am only now getting some energy back. On the positive side, I’m out of the house every day because I need to get the dressing changed at the surgery. The pain is manageable too – it’s mostly a dull ache, except when I raise my eyebrows.
Because I’ve been lazing around doing as little as possible, the knitting has taken a hit. Even so, only about 20 rows remain until the cuff, and the gansey, is finished! If I’d been told that I’d finish a gansey in 11 weeks, I’d have been incredulous.
Another quiet week has slipped into history, drifting down the stream of time with few events poking above the surface. One of these was the dress I’d been making, which is a few stitches away from being finished. When one of the lapels is tacked down to keep it in place becomingly, it will be complete.
Sea View
The fabric for the next project, a lightweight jacket, has been washed and dried. The fabric for it, a mid-weight tufted denim, immediately caught my eye when I saw it online. One of my hurdles to jump in this project, was when I found a shortfall of over half a meter in the amount of fabric I had compared to the amount required. Over the past few days I’ve figured out that I bought the fabric to make a different jacket. Another hurdle was that the fronts on the jacket are cut double, which won’t work with this fabric. Online reviews mentioned this, and it had puzzled me. But these reviews also pointed to a way forward – line the jacket with a lighter fabric. Fortunately, there was the remains of a large cotton sheet from another project in stash. Lining the jacket should both conserve the outer fabric and simplify construction.
Thorny galaxy
Saturday’s handbells was a whole day practice. Many of us are going to a ‘handbell symposium’ in Aberdeen at the beginning of August, and got together to practice the ten massed ringing pieces and the ‘entry’ music. The massed ringing pieces were provided by some of the countries attending – ringers are coming from as far away as Singapore. The ‘entry’ piece, an arrangement of the Skye Boat Song, will be played by Scottish ringers as the representatives of the various countries progress into the hall. We practiced nearly all of the pieces, and it was a long and tiring day.
Rosa rugosa
The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed from the photo of the gansey that the two stitch markers have been removed. When I started to pick up the stitches for the second sleeve, I noticed that the adjacent shoulder strap was different to that of the first shoulder. The patterning matched, but was reversed. Somehow or other – inattention, I expect – one shoulder strap was worked from the armhole edge to the centre, and the other from the neck edge to the armhole. The only solution seemed to be to rip back the 2nd shoulder strap and reknit it. Fortunately, the 2nd strap was worked from the neck edge to the armhole, which meant it was a doddle to frog. The last few rows were left in place because the neck ribbing was already complete. Serendipitously, the stitch-marked stitches were directly below the frogged shoulder strap, meaning the two offending stitches could be laddered, corrected, and knit back up. All told, the strap was re-knit during a shift at the museum, and the corrections took another hour or two. Currently the 2nd sleeve is well under way, with the gusset just completed.
As I write, I’m sitting in my office in the attic. In summer, this is the hottest place in the house; in winter, the coldest. However, it’s warm enough today that I opened the windows in the bedroom to let the fresh air of summer in and the stale air out.
The weather this past week has been, as a friend from Kent says, ‘tower bridge’: up and down. There has been cool cloudy weather and hot sunny weather. There have been prolonged spells of thunder and lightning, thankfully not directly overhead. There has been heavy rain too, and gardeners were grateful.
Field of buttercups
I returned to the museum on Monday for more gansey charting. I figured out a chart for the machine knit pattern mentioned last week, which will need to be test knit to ensure it’s do-able. That was followed by the start of a chart for a gansey with a fetching pattern of vertical zigzags and hearts. The zigzags are generally called ‘marriage lines’ in the gansey world, but I prefer the more descriptive ‘zigzags’. The hearts are unique in the Johnston negatives, not appearing in any of the other photos.
Late may blossom
I’m still working on that chart, trying to get the ‘frequency’ of the patterns right. Another way to put it would be I’m trying to make sure the relationship between the repeats in the different panels is correct. While it’s easy enough to see the number of repeats in each panel, getting 12 repeats of one panel to end at the same time as 13 repeats of the other panel can take some experimentation. When the chart is done, I’ll add it to the short list of what to knit next.
Riverside path
I’ve been dodging the showers this week by simply staying indoors. I did get out for one walk, however, and luckily the rain held off until I was walking up the front path. As always, there’s plenty to do indoors, and I’ve been working on another sewing project. It’s a complicated shirtdress pattern, made more difficult by sometimes-puzzling instructions. Yet it’s more likely I’m not reading them carefully, skimming, wanting to rush ahead. Things become clear if I slow down, read carefully, look at the diagrams properly, and duplicate the diagrams with the garment itself. There were a few panicky days when I found I’d cut the fronts wrong way round – what should be the right is now the left front. This could cause problems because the left and right fronts of skirt and bodice are different, and wouldn’t fit together if, for instance, the skirt were cut properly and the bodice wasn’t. Happily, I seem to have cut the skirt fronts the wrong way round too, as the pieces matched.
Bloomin’ grass
While the sewing project has been tower bridge, the gansey is coming along nicely. The sleeve patterning is finished, ending at a good stopping place. Beneath it, there’s a narrow border of small moss stitch diamonds flanked by bands of garter stitch. This border is an interpretation of what seems to be in the glass plate negative, which is difficult to interpret on the damaged plate.
I’m really struggling to find something to write about this week, for, as usual, not much has been happening. Last Monday was a Bank Holiday in Scotland, which left those of us who don’t follow the news scratching our heads as to why the shops were shut. The holiday was to celebrate Scotland’s win in their first match in the World Cup. They haven’t competed in the Cup for 28 years, so it was a big thing. I have not been following the competition. The summer’s sports coverage is underway now – tennis at Queens is on at the moment, quickly followed by Wimbledon. While the World Cup is avoidable, with most of the games taking place several time zones away, Wimbledon is harder to avoid, as both main BBC channels cover it.
Grasses in the wind
There is, of course, always knitting and talking books instead. Related to this, I returned to the museum last week after a hiatus of a few months to chart ganseys. It had got to a point where my files and database were in such disarray that I didn’t know what to work on next. After several migraine-inducing days at the computer, the path ahead is clear. Last week’s photo had three fishermen in ganseys. Two of these were machine-knit, with a simple pattern of 5K 2P ribbing. These were noted but not charted. The third, also machine-knit, was more of a puzzle. It has a yoke of diagonal lines which appear to consist of tuck stitches, also called ‘blister’ stitch. This can be hand-knitted in two ways. One way is to slip a stitch for three or four rows. Another way is to knit a stitch three or four rows below. Gordon did a gansey a few years ago with this technique where the blisters were arranged in horizontal bands. Arranging the stitches diagonally will be more of a challenge, and will need to be swatched.
Today’s word is ‘moniker’, which I found myself using and then wondering where it came from. The Oxford English Dictionary says the origin is uncertain, although there are theories. It first appeared in print in 1851, in a book by Henry Mayhew titled London Labour and the London Poor. For the next 90 years, the citations are in predominantly Australian publications. After this, it would seem to be a mostly British word. Thus, disappointingly, it has no interesting origin story.
Front yard orchid
In this week’s photo of the gansey, you will spot some stitch markers randomly placed in the front yoke, which mark the mistakes I found last week. One, where a purl stitch was in the wrong place, has been corrected. These two, so far down that I couldn’t face laddering to correct them, are where purl stitches were omitted, and will be fixed by darning. With the error correction pushed forward, it has meant I could progress to joining the shoulders, knit the neckline ribbing shoulders, and start the first sleeve. The pattern band on the sleeve will finish at the elbow, more or less.
It’s been yet another quiet week, and I’ve barely been out of the house. This is mostly the weather, and indolence. Most of the week, rain has been forecast, and most of the week, the forecast has been correct. I’ve been staying indoors to avoid it, as being caught in a downpour and slogging home soaking wet is just not my thing.
Approaching Storm cell
I did slip between the showers to walk into town for my regular hearing test. I started having one yearly when I didn’t have anyone at home to tell me how deaf I was. The good news is that my hearing has barely changed since last year, and the measured change may be due to annoying static on the headphones.
A new mis-spelling
On Thursday, instead of going to the museum, I went down to Inverness for the day to take the car for its first year service. One of the other volunteers from my museum shift came along, as she coincidentally had an appointment at the hospital the same day. We were lucky with both the weather and the traffic, with no rain to speak of and no slow vehicles. I trudged around town window-shopping while she went to her appointment. Then we ran into each other, twice, just when we needed to liaise. The car was ready mid-afternoon, with no work necessary, and we were home by 5 p.m.
Rosebud in June
I’d taken the gansey with me to Inverness, hoping to sit somewhere quiet for a while and knit. Alas, this didn’t happen. Despite this, there’s been good progress. The front is now complete, and the first shoulder strap has been started. The last rows of the shoulders were the set-up rows for the strap, when the stitches were decreased by 1 st in 4. Otherwise, there are too many rows in the strap. The reasoning goes like this: each stitch on the body will have two rows of the strap associated with it. By decreasing the body, the number of rows on the strap is reduced. Say, for example, you have a 4” wide shoulder and a gauge of 8 sts and 12 rw per inch. This would give you 32sts for each shoulder (one front and one back), and 48 rws on the strap. However, as you will be knitting two rows of strap for each stitch of the body, you will have 64 rows over your 4”. If you decrease the last row of the body to 24 sts, hey presto, you will have 48 rows, which is exactly what you want. Too many rows on the strap causes the shoulders to widen.
Kitchen still life
Unfortunately, as the gansey lay one the floor ready for its photos, I spotted one small mistake and one really obvious one. Most of the strap has now been ripped out, and the next step is to ladder two stitches down about 8” and reknit them back up. But even though it will be tedious, it’ll take less time than re-knitting the whole front yoke.
This week has been busier than last week, for a change. For the most part, it’s been busy doing nothing, and this is intentional. For last Tuesday, I had day case surgery on my scalp. I’d been to the local hospital for a biopsy at the end of May. Then the hospital phoned a fortnight ago to say they had an opening in their surgery schedule, would I like the appointment? At this stage, I hadn’t received the results of the biopsy, which was read over the phone. The biopsy had revealed a basal cell carcinoma, which does not spread but needs excision.
The surgery set me back far more than I’d anticipated. On first day this was understandable, but I was very tired the following days too, and am only now getting some energy back. On the positive side, I’m out of the house every day because I need to get the dressing changed at the surgery. The pain is manageable too – it’s mostly a dull ache, except when I raise my eyebrows.
