Interlude 1: Week 7 – 27 January

Shall I start with the weather again?  After a brief respite of calm weather, storm Éowyn stampeded in with the riders of Rohan at her back.  While it was definitely breezy in the far north, we weren’t affected as badly as the central belt of Scotland.  As far as I know, there were no power cuts, no flooding, no road blockages.  But then, I heeded the warnings and stayed in that day. 

And what does one do on a cold, windy, rainy day in mid winter?  Hurkle-durkle, of course.  This term appeared on my Facebook feed one morning, and my first reaction was, ‘This is my life!’  It’s an obsolete word from southern Scotland, popularised by the internet, meaning to cozy up in bed long after you should get up. 

Calm Sea

When I’m not hurkle-durkling of a Monday morning, I go to the Wick Heritage Museum to peer at scans of photos from the Johnston Collection that contain ganseys.  It’s an ongoing project I’ve been working on for the past five or six years.  Initially, I edited the photos, cleaning up noise from the background or repairing ‘holes’.  These ‘holes’ are plate damage, where emulsion has worn away or suffered water damage.  Some of the plates are so damaged at the edges that repair of those areas is impossible.

Colour on the quayside

Because Wick was a centre for the herring industry, there are many photos of fishermen.  By and large, the ganseys tend to be plain, and many, to my surprise, were machine knit.  Prior to this, everything I’d read indicated that ‘ganseys were hand knit’.  But this is simply not the case when looking at the photos.  There are, of course, many photos of hand-knit, patterned ganseys.  Some of these are ‘Sunday best’, and just as many, if not more, are simpler.  In some photos, the ganseys are worn under a waistcoat, jacket, or both, with only a tiny glimpse of a gansey at the neck.  Most photos have a decipherable pattern.

Flaking slate

The interpretation of these patterns into chart form is what I’ve been doing for the past year or so.  Because the photos are portraits of a person and not a gansey, the quality varies.  Some are so clear you can nearly count every stitch.  In others, it is possible to interpret the pattern even if you can’t see the stitches.  In others, the pattern is out of focus, or perhaps the sitter moved.  It will take a while to get them all charted, but there have already been some interesting finds – for instance the cabled cuffs and cuffs with lace panels.

Speaking of lace, the lacy jacket is complete and stretched on the blocking boards.  I had hoped to stretch it slightly more lengthways, but the i-cord edging on one of the fronts was knit too tightly.  Bell sleeves are not my favourite, as the trailing edges get into everything; as a solution, an i-cord laced through the loops could be used to gather the edge and keep it out of the way.