Thurso II (Donald Thomson): Week 8 – 25 March

A month or so back, the local camera club met to discuss upcoming events. One of the outcomes was, “Let’s Put on a Show!”. Accordingly, the venue was chosen, someone was contacted to matt and mount all the photos, and the size of the prints was determined. Any camera club member was welcome to take part. After having acquired an elderly but excellent photo printer near the start of lockdown, I decided to participate. It was high time to get to grips with printing photographs at home. Little did I realise the work involved.

Since the printer had run out of ink, it was necessary to source some. Original cartridges are pricey, and don’t last very long. There are alternatives, but the only viable one was refillable cartridges. Accordingly I purchased a starter kit which included cartridges, ink, gloves, and the bits needed to refill the cartridges. Then the learning curve got steeper. I had to fill the cartridges, but the kit had no instructions. The internet, as usual, was the fount of all knowledge.

‘Aquarelle’

Ink cartridges are little marvels of design. Filling them for the first time is more involved than squirting ink into a hole. They need to be ‘primed’ to fill a tiny reservoir within the cartridge. After watching a video, the first cartridge was primed successfully. But the second one . . . there was yellow ink everywhere. There is a reason the kit included disposable gloves! The cartridge flew out of my hand, leaving essential parts behind and the cartridge on the floor (the carpet was o.k.!).  The rest of the cartridges – there are 9 in total – were filled without any serious incident.

So, if you’re in the area between 5 April – 11 May, the Thurso Camera Club is having an exhibit at the art gallery in Thurso Library. The exhibit consists of prints and a slideshow, with 5 prints and 5 slides per participant. Entry is free.

Thomson of Thurso

In gansey news, the chart is now done. It took a lot of thinking to arrive at nearly the same chart I’d begun with. The nub of the problem was fitting in 8 stitches. One solution would be to enlarge motifs, making the panels wider. But if the diamonds are wider, they’re also taller, so at the final height of the yoke there might be a partial diamond instead of a complete one. Eventually, a solution appeared – add one stitch to each edge, and one stitch either side of the diamond panels, without enlarging the diamonds.

But there was a heart-stopping moment at the end of the first round of the pattern, when there seemed to be about 5 extra stitches. A recount was in order, during which various fixes rolled were thought of, none of them pleasant. Fortunately, there was only one extra stitch. To avoid decreasing, a 1×1 cable moved the purl at the gusset edge over the extra knit stitch, which moved under the purl to become the increase on that side of the gusset. As a workaround, it’s satisfactory – a good mantra is “no one will ever stare at your armpit”.