Gansey Nation

OK, well, I guess this one isn’t going to detain us long…

First of all, I’d like to wish everyone a happy New Year, and a belated welcome to 2015. I hope you had a happy Christmas, that Santa was generous, and that any oranges in the bottom of your stockings were chocolate.

My cold pretty much wiped me out over the festive season, so that knitting was just about all I was up for. As a result I got rather a lot done; a staggering amount, in fact, since I only cast on the first row on Christmas Eve.

Now, if you remember, I said I was going to take a short break from ganseys to try something different. But why a Lopi pullover? Well, as I said last year, I’ve been thinking for some time of learning how to knit more than one colour, and one day would like to try my hand at Fair isle (ganseys’ technicolour brethren). But I’ve always liked the look of Scandinavian jumpers.

The turning point came a few months back when Margaret knitted me an Icelandic pullover in Lopi wool based on a design I’d seen online. This was a revelation: I’d no idea they were so warm, and soft.

You see, I’ve always associated “proper” wool with being a bit, well, scratchy. But the Lopi yarn, which consists of two strands loosely entwined like a drawing of the double spiral of DNA, is hardly spun at all, and feels almost as soft as cotton wool. (I like to think of the finished jumper as hunting down your favourite childhood teddy bear, killing him and wearing his skin.)

It’s also knit on big, chunky needles—6 mm, as opposed to the 2.25 mm I’m used to. So, as many of you pointed out, and as I’ve just discovered, it really doesn’t take a lot of time to knit compared to a gansey.

Well—put all this together, since the principle of knitting with more than one colour at a time is the same as Fair Isle, and it seemed like a perfect learning opportunity. I got a kit from the good people at Shop Icelandic for Christmas, which came with a pattern, needles and yarn, and got stuck in.

For those of you not familiar with how this sort of jumper is constructed, this is what I’ve learned. You start at the bottom, and knit the body as a tube, just like you do with a gansey. But when you reach the armpits, you set the body aside. You then cast on the first sleeve, starting with the cuff, and knit the sleeve up as another tube, increasing as you go; then you set that aside and do the same for the other sleeve. (This was a bit disconcerting, reminding me of Frankenstein’s laboratory with cloned body parts draped over the back of the sofa.)

Then you knit the truncated body and sleeves together by just knitting a new row in the round, and knitting over the sleeves when you come to them, and so attaching them in the process. (You leave a few stitches from both the sleeves and the body in the armpits on holders, where a gusset would be on a gansey, so you can join them together later.) You then keep knitting up the yoke, body and shoulders together, to the neck.

It’s been a huge amount of fun. (You must remember, this is the first time I’ve ever knit anything other than ganseys, and the first time I’ve followed a printed pattern.) I don’t think I’ll quite finish it this week—alas, I have to go back to work—but I won’t be far short. I plan to knit another couple of Lopi jumpers in the course of this year, but as promised my next project will be a gansey, based on a Wick pattern.

Finally this week, I’ve been reading children’s books, as I often do when I’m feeling poorly. This time it’s been Tove Jansson’s marvellous Moomin stories, an integral part of my childhood, and is a third reason to be grateful to Finland (along with the music of Jean Sibelius and of course our very own Judit).

In one exchange, Jansson perfectly anticipates the lot of the blogger. Moomintroll is explaining to the Snork Maiden how his father spends his time:

“Mostly he writes in a book called “Memoirs”. It’s all about what he has done in his life, and as soon as he does something else he writes that down too.”
“Then surely he hasn’t got time to do very much?” said the Snork maiden.
“Oh, well,’ said Moomintroll. “He makes sure of doing things now and again, even if it’s only to give himself something to write about.”

We were down in Edinburgh last week, seeing old friends and packing a year’s worth of shopping, coffee drinking and culture into just four days. The highlights? The sights and smells of the German market, which was like stepping into an Alpine village nativity play with added gluhwein; and the beautiful concert of Christmas music by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge at the Usher Hall.

Oh, and I caught another cold: it’s lodged in my chest so that I now have a cough like someone starting a motorbike on a frosty morning, and my breathing sounds like a rusty gate swinging in the breeze. (Immune systems are for sissies.)

Imperial Stormtrooper at Waverley. Sort of.

Anyway, here’s the thing. Over the last year or so I’ve been mulling over two questions: do I want to continue writing this blog, and do I only want to knit ganseys to the end of my days?

Let’s take the blog first. We started it back in 2008, and since then I’ve written over 300 posts and knitted a boatload of ganseys; over 100 people a day dial in to look at the site, and this year alone there’ve been some 110,000 web views. So I know it’s worthwhile. On the other hand, as Bob Dylan once said, there are times when a man feels he’s written enough songs—and let’s be honest, the same could be said of blogs about ganseys.

Edinburgh Castle glows in the last rays of the day’s light

But, while there are still plenty of patterns I’ve yet to explore (yes, I have a list), I never intended to knit only ganseys all my life. I’ve heard rumours, myths spoken in whispers by travellers to far-off mystical lands, of jumpers created using —I hardly know how to say this—more than one colour. I know it seems improbable but it is apparently true, and it’s something I’d rather like to try.

Which brings us to the point: if I were to take a break from ganseys to explore something different, what should I do about the blog? Would there be any point in continuing a blog about ganseys when it’s not in fact about ganseys?

Well, after thinking it through carefully, here’s what I’ve decided to do: starting in January, I’m going to try my hand at knitting an Icelandic Lopi sweater from a kit Margaret’s buying me for Christmas. I have no idea how I’ll get on, but it’ll be fun to find out; and, yes, I’ll still carry on with the blog as usual.

Meanwhile, the old year is still with us, and so is the heather gansey—just the last half-inch cuff to go, and then the darning-in and washing. (By the way, we were going to take a break over Christmas, but under the circumstances we’ll add a short extra post on 29 December to put up photos of the finished garment.)

In parish notices, Judit’s been at it again, this time knitting a lovely collar using gansey patterns which she’s posted on Facebook. Have a look and give it a like; I think it looks as though it should grace the throat of a Lutheran pastor, or someone from a Holbein painting, it’s so elegant.

What else? Oh, yes. My two most popular novels (An Inquisition of Demons and The Cuckoo’s Nest) will be on a free promotion on Amazon until Boxing Day—so if you get a nice new Kindle for Christmas, there’s no excuse now not to download them.

And now it only remains for Margaret and me to wish you all a very happy Christmas, and to thank you for reading, and to so many of you for commenting, or emailing me offline. Happy knitting!

It looks as though Winter has finished all his chores, done all the washing up and ironed all his shirts, and is now free to devote his full attention to Caithness. So today an arctic gale has been blowing showers of sleet and rain horizontally across the fields all day, as though the frost giants had got themselves Indy cars and gone racing across the north Highlands.

I took a day off work last week and we travelled the 104 miles south to Inverness, our nearest big town. In retrospect, this proved to be a schoolboy error: I’d naively imagined we might do some Christmas shopping, but when we arrived we discovered that the Black Friday sales have penetrated even as far as the Highlands of Scotland. The town centre was heaving with people like the Tokyo underground in rush hour and Marks and Spencer’s reminded me of archive footage of the Beatles playing Shea Stadium.

I suppose I’ve just become acclimatised to living in Wick (pop. 7,333), where a crowd means having to queue behind two people at the checkout in Tesco’s. Going to Inverness in the sales involves the same amount of culture shock for me as sending one of the Pilgrim Fathers into hyperspace.

I came away from Inverness with a pair of socks and a migraine. (I mean that these were additional things: I didn’t actually lose all my clothes—though there were one or two moments in the scrum in Marks’ when the issue seemed to hang in the balance.) Next time I could probably achieve the same result more cheaply by climbing into one of the industrial driers in the launderette.

Safely back in Wick, I’ve been working hard on getting the heather gansey finished and am already some 14 inches down the first sleeve with three inches to go to the cuff. I decided to go for just three pattern blocks on the upper arm because the jumper is already quite wide across the chest, and with a drop shoulder style there’s already a bit of “overhang” on the sleeve; I don’t like the pattern extending over the elbow. Having disposed of the gusset, I’m decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every fifth row.

By next week I hope to have the first sleeve finished, and, if I can stand it, to have picked up the stitches ready for the other one. My target is to finish it by the end of the year, and then take stock. In the meantime, there’s little else to do but wrap up warm, crank up the heating, and make sure that in future all my Christmas shopping is done online…