A slightly late blog this week because I am laid low with computer problems. They’re completely of my own making. I won’t bore you with details but suffice it to say that I deleted a lot of data to clear space on the drive. I hoped that should I need to, the data would be easily accessible again through backups, but it hasn’t been that straightforward. The backups are there, but the computer takes a long time to put everything back in place. While I wait for files to shift from A to B, I find other things to do so it can work without interruptions.
Back yard snowdrops
The weather this week is finally shifting towards spring. It feels like it has been a very long time coming. A few mornings ago, I heard a bird singing, always a sure sign of the changing season. The snowdrops in the back yard are in full bloom, and I’m happy to see that they are spreading. Daffodils are pushing up along the river side.
Lybster lighthouse
The small Gansey group who meet a few miles down the road started up again this week after a break while the venue was closed. We got to talking about words and the names of things. One of the questions was, where does the word “gansey” originate? The answer seems to be “lost in the mists of time“, but it possibly has a Nordic origin. A very similar word is used for a pullover in Scandinavia and from the north of England up to Scotland. This led to one of the women mentioning that in Egypt the word for beer is “buza”, and of course she wondered if that was the origin of the English “booze”. The trusty Oxford English dictionary is mute on whether this is the origin of the word, but it first appears in English in the 14th century, as a verb meaning “To drink deeply, or for the sake of enjoyment or goodfellowship”. In the 18th century, it began to be used as a noun. Another OnLine source traces its origin to germanic languages.
The old Lifeboat House from above
As I’m not much one for boozing, I have been soberly knitting the gansey. I’ve done the tedious picking up of stitches around the armhole for the first sleeve. The ratio that seems to work best is two stitches per three rows. Using this ratio, 72 stitches on front and back were picked up, plus 24 for the shoulder strap. The shoulder straps were knit from the armhole edge to the neck, starting with the magic cast on from Knitty. The advantage of doing it this way is that there are live stitches at both ends of the shoulder strap. The sleeve will have the same patterning as the yoke and body, ending with a ribbed cuff.
That’s clever! I will have to look up the Magic Cast On.
Back in the ‘60s or early ‘70s, I was told that “gansey” originated with the island of Guernsey, to differentiate a sweater from a jersey from Jersey.
It was in one of those fine old books of ganseys and jerseys.