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.
Leave a Reply