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Week 5: 19 – 25 October

maori3aGreat excitement in Reid Towers this week as I finally achieve a lifelong dream, and manage to get my computer to wirelessly send music to my hi fi. Thanks to the magic of Apple computers and their nifty little Airport Express devices I can recline on my sofa, use my iPhone as a remote control, and access my entire CD collection via my hard disc through the amplifier, and then fall asleep, mired in drool.

Not, I hasten to add, because I am too lazy to get up every hour or so to put on a new CD – perish the thought, hem-hem. No, but think of the space I could save if all of my 1,400 CDs were packed up in boxes, and everything was available on the hard drive. We’re living in the future, people! (The real breakthrough was realising that lossless copies of my CDs sounded as good as the originals – which, since I’ve got a hi fi that cost more than my car (new), was a pretty stunning revelation.)

maori3bIt’s possible I may be too attached to my music. In fact, there are times when I go into the lounge and see the great black shape of the hi fi hunched in its corner, lurking like Shelob or something out of a David Attenborough documentary, waiting to be fed, and I think, you know, maybe I ought to get out more…

Another week, another swatch. I’m rather pleased with this one, even if I’m not entirely convinced by the pattern. Pleased because it was my first attempt at translating a design into a gansey pattern; and it came out more or less as I’d hoped. I like the little cables in the boxes – I think that will work well in a longer band up the body. As I’d expected, the border (two purl stitches) doesn’t exactly come off, because when it’s horizontal it’s raised proud of the surface, and when it’s vertical it’s sunken. One possibility will be to do it in moss stitch, maybe make it 3 stitches wide.

I also wonder if there’s too much blank space on it, though, or if that will seem more natural when it’s knitted up as part of the body – after all, the body isn’t supposed to detract from the fancy patterning of the yoke.

Time to go and recline and listen to music. Which will it be? AC/DC’s classic album Back in Black, or a Mozart piano concerto – I think I’ll leave it up to fate and let the shuffle setting decide…

2 comments to Week 5: 19 – 25 October

  • =Tamar

    The changing border gives a slightly Escher-like effect.
    Perhaps in some future design that might be used deliberately.

  • Gordon

    Hi Tamar – I hadn’t considered Escher designs in a gansey! So when you spill your coffee down the front it ends up staining the gusset, or something… (On second thoughts – maybe not.) Actually, I quite like the effect, but it would be nice to achieve raised vertical borders with purl stitches as well as horizontal. Back to the laboratory, I suppose.