How about a little Christmas knitting…

As it’s the beginning of September, and as I’ve been clearing odds and ends from my stash (many of which are being transformed into a Colinette-type throw, why I bought enough mohair to refill Cardigan Bay I do not know, I don’t even like it), I was looking for patterns with which to enliven the existence of my friends and family.  And I found some.

Perhaps a cowl or two? These are fetchingly described as ‘wind cheaters’ and, yes, he is wearing one too. What you can’t quite make out on this shot – it’s difficult enough on the original – is that the white fringed job that Mrs Stepford is wearing has fringes on both ends, so you fold it over to give a second attractive line of fringing half-way down. Plus, of course, it gives the appearance of really pronounced musculature in the shoulder area, as though Mrs S had either been spending time with Arnie in the gym, was about to go ‘arrrrghhhh’ and burst out of her clothes as some sort of middle-class Incredible Hulk, or had developed a strange disease. She’s also clearly spaced, but then knitting pattern models from the 50s and early 60s often are. Quite what this says about the modelling scene in about 1961 I hate to think. And there I was, thinking the 1970s were the times of true excess. Clearly not.

I rest my case:

What is in the cigarette that the chap – definitely the right word – in the ‘evening scarf’ is holding? (‘A’ for ‘A twit’?) Something tells me I won’t be knitting any of these for my brother.

Nor will I be knitting these, but only because he doesn’t play golf, of course.

Otherwise I’d be seriously tempted.

Can you imagine the reaction you would get, appearing on the golf course with these? ‘I say, old boy, you’ve got something rather strange on your golf clubs, you know’. ‘Ah yes, I’m afraid Gwladys has been busy again…’. ‘You want to give her some of these, old man. [Hands over tablets] Keeps my Winifred’s needlepoint under control.’

And let’s not get onto the subject of Uncle Bill, who is clearly the sort of uncle who is not mentioned at the dinner table, but who appears every so often when his on-course betting business goes astray, seduces the housemaid and then disappears for another twelve months, possibly with the silver-backed hairbrushes from Mother’s dressing table:

I mean, he’s even nicked Father’s pipe.

All I can say about the final one is please don’t:

Judging by the caption, the writer suspected that reaction: ‘I can see quite a lot of you blanching with horror at the thought of a knitted tie, but this one will break down all your prejudice’. No, it won’t. And what the heck is ‘wool string’?  But oh for the days when chaps wore ‘week-end tweeds’ rather than crappy jeans and a nasty band T-shirt that has seen better days. Maybe I should knit one after all, as encouragement?

Pass me those dodgy cigarettes, I’m heading back into the stash…

Book Review: Knit Your Socks on Straight

Now, I’m not a sock knitter – and one reason is that I can’t manipulate double-pointed needles properly with my hands in the state they are (the surgery has helped but I’m still prone to tendon flare-ups when I overdo it or hold my hands in a cramped position for longer than about ten minutes). There are other reasons, but they are gradually being whittled away, and when I was sent Knit Your Socks on Straight by Alice Curtis by Storey Publishing, more whittling occurred. Some of the patterns are just sooo tasty.

But that’s not the real point of the book – the real point is quite exciting: knit socks using straight needles. No messing about with four or five dpns, no more dropping them down the side of the sofa or finding them being used for strange engineering tasks on a motorbike engine (excuse me???). And you don’t have to learn magic loop, either. The subtitle says it all: ‘a new and inventive technique with just two needles’.

I’ve been waving this book at people, and the non-sockies have leapt upon it. But the reaction from existing sock knitters has been interestingly varied. One almost sneered – ‘why would anyone want to do that?’ – until I pointed out that some people, like me, can’t manipulate multiple needles. Another was seized by enthusiasm and I had to prize the book off her so I could do this review.  The patterns have got everyone going, and the technique? Well, it’s so intriguing…

You can find patterns for two-needle socks, and they sometimes come up in books. I’ve done some myself, ages ago, as a sort of snuggly bed-and-house sock but they were uncomfortable. The seam went under my foot and no matter how careful I’d been with finishing – and I’d been very careful – it was lumpy. Alice Curtis had encountered the same problem, but she set out to solve it instead.

The key is in the seam, of course. It’s often placed on one side (these socks come in a definite right and left) and is worked so that it’s extremely smooth. The edge stitches have to be slipped, and closing the seam is critical – but it’s easy with slipped purlwise stitches to work on.

She starts with a basic, worsted-weight sock for you to practice on, with amazingly clear instructions and illustrations, but soon moves on to other exciting developments, such as these which almost everyone to whom I’ve shown the book wants to have a go at knitting:

As you can see, the seams aren’t an afterthought; they’re part of the design. Sometimes they’re deliberately more obvious than others, but they don’t create a comfort problem. And I’d just like to add a personal thank you: on sizes, and a comfy cast-on. I spent far too long doing ballet – until I discovered real men as opposed to teenage crushes, that would be, men who use your dpns to mend their motorbikes – and still have big calves (possibly also a consequence of walking up and down my hill all the time). Many sock patterns are too tight for me; these are not. And I want these, too:

There are chaps’ socks, baby bootees and some rather scary ‘moccasocks’, but there really is something here for everyone. The straight-needle-sock sceptic whose reaction I mentioned above really likes the moccasocks. Got her.

Where has August gone? Hm?

What? It’s nearly the end of August? How can this be?

This is Sion, by the way, and he was purchased recently to accompany me when I go to spin in public. Unfortunately he’s not made of real wool, but I’ve been searching for ages and Spinning in Public Day is nearly upon us. September 21 for anyone who doesn’t know this momentous date, and some members of our Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers will be at the National Slate Museum in Llanberis, doing our wooly thang. Why is it not possible to find sheep toys made of sheep’s wool? Probably has something to do with washability, I guess.

Watch out for more of Sion, as time goes by. He doesn’t look like the sort of sheep who’ll be happy posing on one of my half-finished projects – need to do non-stretchy handles when I get round to it – for very long.  (Sion is pronounced ‘Shaun’, of course – I’d have liked to be less derivative, but apparently that’s his name. Or so I’m told…)

And I’ll leave you pondering that while I go bravely forth, equipped with water bottles and emergency rations, to do battle with the Bank Holiday traffic. I love living in Snowdonia, but it does go a bit bonkers on a Bank Holiday.

Sheltering shepherds

Near us, there are some mountain bothies; one, Arenig, has recently been vandalised. That got me thinking about these remote and very basic huts, now used by hardy walkers and climbers – and by (possibly local) vandals. When you look at this shot of the Arenig bothy from The Mountain Bothies Association website, you do realise exactly how basic they are, how rough the terrain around them is and how determined the vandals would have been to go up there and trash the door and window, but there you go. The word ‘bothy’, incidentally, probably comes from the Gaelic bothan, meaning ‘hut’, but the Welsh for a small cottage is (unsurprisingly similar) bwythyn. And that’s just what many of them originally were. Very small… Some, especially in the Highlands, belonged to river watchers – but many were originally used by shepherds.

They are a world away from the downland shepherd’s hut, especially in its more florid and floral Country Living incarnation (though I have a friend with a delightful shepherd’s hut, and she’s got the balance absolutely right). When you’re somewhere isolated with your flock, whether that’s somewhere on the South Downs or somewhere in the Southern Uplands, you have to have somewhere to put your stuff – sheep salves, equipment, bits and pieces for lambing and for yourself. It’s particularly vital when you’re up in the hills or indeed when you have to be near your flock at all hours, wherever you are. Upland shelters were essentially temporary, like Scottish sheilings, but they’re rather different; sheilings were clusters of one-roomed cottages where people lived while looking after their cattle in the summer, and are often in more accessible locations. In Wales, hafodau had a similar function and were also sometimes in groups. Oh dear, I have got distracted. Anyway, I started thinking about shepherds and their shelters, possibly sparked off not just by the Arenig shelter but by a recent addition to the genre near here: a shipping container. There’s a whole heap of difference between Country Living and country living…

So, in upland Britain, shelters were often rather makeshift lean-tos, sometimes shared with the animals. One reason they tended to be small was so that the animals could huddle and keep warm that way, and that must have included the shepherd in some of the wilder parts of Britain. In the Highlands, however – this is before the Clearances and the arrival of new breeds of sheep and new methods of shepherding, I’m not getting on to that or I’ll start throwing furniture about – sheep just went with the people to the shelling. They were a smaller breed and were generally tethered by day and housed at night in ‘sheep cotes’. Even so, the mortality rate was severe.

Distracted again. Back to the downland huts.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the familiar wheeled shepherd’s hut came into wider use, generally on Downland farms, on the rolling chalk of southern England (this shot comes from a 1938 edition of Sussex County Magazine, and is by G. A. Lock.) Wheeled huts, naturally, were impractical in rough or boggy terrain. Roofs were often of corrugated iron, and the wheels were iron too – reminding me of Terry Pratchett and Granny Aching’s hut in The Wee Free Men; Pratchett’s Discworld is firmly grounded in this-world reality. On a more, er, exalted literary level, Gabriel Oak has his shepherd’s hut in Far From the Madding Crowd; in fact, it’s so essential to his character that it puts in a very early appearance. ‘The hut stood on little wheels, which raised its floor about a foot from the ground…’ says Hardy, going on to describe the interior a few paras later, in a description which is almost country living with caps, as indeed is much of Hardy (hrumpf). ‘The inside of the hut … was cosy and alluring, and the scarlet handful of fire in addition to the candle, reflecting its own genial colour upon whatever it could reach, flung associations of enjoyment even over utensils and tools. In the corner stood the sheep-crook, and along a shelf at one side were ranged bottles and canisters…’

Let’s take a quick look at reality. Sometimes, when shepherd’s huts are being restored, the restorers find graffiti. One Dorset shepherd (source: Dorset Life) engraved his thoughts: ‘This weather is enough to make a man swear black is white and red is blue and chills through the ass of his trousers…’. Yerss. However, the traditional huts did have stoves, as Hardy describes – affording some warmth for the shepherd and any lambs needing it – and they had windows, too. These were usually on three sides, so the shepherd had a good all-round view of the flock. Even outside lambing time this was useful: sheep were often used as ‘moving dunghills’, keeping ground manured, and constrained by hurdles to ensure a particular patch was well fertilised. The hinged stable door would be angled away from the prevailing wind, of course. (Illustration by John Vince, from Old Farms.)

But the wheeled huts have a longer history than just the nineteenth century; there’s a sixteenth-century reference (Maskal, 1596) – ‘…in some place the shepherd hath his cabin going upon a wheel for to remove here and there at his pleasure’ – and a fourteenth-century manuscript illustration. It’s even got the windows, and I think I prefer the shingled roof to one in corrugated iron! Shepherds have, of course, always needed some form of shelter and there’s been speculation that Shepherd’s Bush – now about as far away as you can get from rural life – was named not after someone called Shepherd but after an actual ‘shepherd’s bush’, a green shelter, one made out of hawthorns (they were the preferred choice), grown and shaped into a living cave. An alternative was a shelter hollowed out of a bank, also sometimes called a hut.

Rather more like the bothies, and definitely fitting the description of bwythyn (small cottage), were the ‘looker’s huts’ of Romney Marsh, though there’s a Fay Godwin photograph of a downland wheeled hut on the Marsh. But more permanent buildings were the norm and it’s estimated that there were probably about 350 on the Marsh in their heyday. There are probably about 12 or so today. When I lived in London, Romney Marsh was one of our favourite places for a day out (especially when followed by tea in Rye), and I often noticed the strange brick-built, blocky buildings and wondered what they were; now I know (there’s a reconstructed one at the visitor centre in New Romney; my photo was terrible and this one comes from Romney Marsh Visitor Centre’s website). Lookers could live in their huts for six or seven weeks around lambing time, but by the 1950s they had largely fallen out of use, at least for their original purpose.

As, indeed, had most shepherd’s huts. They represented a real investment – most were owned by the landowners rather than the shepherds as they could cost as much as six months’ salary. Farming changed and they almost disappeared, being left to commentators on Hardy or those people interested in old farming techniques, so the present revival of interest can only be a good thing; they’re part of rural history, after all. The situation was already changing before WW2 (during the war some were used as Home Guard outposts) as sales declined in the 1920s and 30s: one manufacturer only sold a single hut in 1930-1, and none at all the following year. But shepherds and sheep farmers still sometimes need something, and nowadays you might see an old caravan in the corner of a field. Or, as on that farm near here, a shipping container. Something tells me they won’t be refurbished and treasured in the same way, though…

Millet, The Sheepfold: Moonlight (somewhere between Barbizon and Chantilly)
Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore

What to do when it’s too hot to knit…

All right, this is getting silly. This is Snowdonia, for heaven’s sake, it’s not supposed to be warmer than the Mediterranean,

especially not in the evening, and it’s not supposed to be dry either. Everyone knows Wales is the land of song and squally showers, don’t they? (They are often wrong, mind, and on both counts if you’ve heard some of the contributions to the first cliché in our local pub. I shall mention no names but let’s just say that band practice carries and I do wish it didn’t.)

But, in defiance of the fact that I know the stereotypes for what they are – rubbish with but a grainette of truth –  and am quite capable of coming to terms with reality, I decided to knit a winter sweater.

I know, I know, but we’d briefly reverted to what passes for the norm – a bit cloudy, not too warm – and I was allowing for the fact that I have to go slow and take care of my hands, and that it will soon(ish) be autumn. I also want to use up the stash, so I selected Norah Gaughan’s Kenobi jacket, found some yarn I bought at Wonderwool ahem, ahem years ago (a cone of green 100% wool DK tweed from Curlew Weavers) and fiddled with the tension to get it to work with the yarn doubled.

Not only is it working, but it’s also a quick and comfortable knit – or it was until we became surprisingly warmer than Nice (admittedly Bordeaux, Montpellier and Toulouse were beating us, but there you go). At this point it became rather like knitting with an uncooperative labrador on your lap – minus the dribble but not entirely minus the smell, and with quite a bit of shedding also involved. I kept sticking to the work, the yarn, the needles, the pattern, the settee, the carpet, the rather nasty knitting bag I got from Rowan as a freebie. I gave up. So what to do instead?

There’s work. Let’s pass over that.

There’s the garden, some of which has started harvesting itself. I’d been wondering when to pick the garlic when it all fell over, making debate somewhat academic:

but working in the garden achieved very little except giving me mild sunstroke, a deep and as yet unsatisfied desire for a Magnum (holiday traffic preventing me getting near shop), and an interesting criss-cross sunburn pattern on my feet due to the straps on my sandals.

So now what? I suffer, you see, from a sort of Protestant work ethic, except it’s more of a Catho-Judaic-total-non-believer-for-generations-on-both-sides work ethic. I have to be up and doing. There’s always something and you’re a long time dead. Well, there’s always something except housework; I mean, there are limits. Maybe some other, more realistic, knitting? Hmm. I managed to tell myself off after trying to finish a shawl in some lovely silk/cashmere mix and getting into even more of a mess – not so much of a labrador on the lap as an elegant Persian cat. Contemplated becoming a Bond villain briefly, then decided to just chill, man, went and found rug, hat, cold drink, cushion, book

(Les vacances du petit Nicolas, Goscinny et Sempé, super-superbe – been translated but the translation struck me as oddly twee, what a shame – an ideal summer book), and then went back for suntan stuff, cherries, another cushion, to change my top, get another drink, change my sandals for more comfortable espadrilles. This relaxing thing is sooooo exhausting.

Tried staring into tree for a bit.

Hello tree.

Tree roughly same colour as silk/cashmere mix. Want to knit! Wonder if knitting outside – where it’s cooler – is better than knitting inside?

I can now answer that question. It isn’t. It’s very similar to knitting inside, plus you get leaves in your knitting and ‘help’ from Next Door’s Cat. NDC is not an elegant Persian, thus no good when it comes to plans for world domination, but rather scrappy B&W moggie with a disturbing fondness for all forms of animal fibre. Threw cold drink in NDC’s general direction and she pissed off, but I knew she was just lying in wait and so started taking things in, including the knitting – plus, by now there was almost more clutter in the garden than in the house and I thought I’d redress the balance a little. Stupidly left the door open while I went to get more stuff and came back into the house to discover NDC on the table, stalking the shawl. Threw her out and closed the door. Now what? Ah – beach.

I can – fortunately, due to weekend traffic – walk to the beach. The fact that this was a wise choice should have given me a clue about how crowded it was likely to be, but our beaches are never heaving and I thought it would be fine, particularly if I walked behind the dunes and across to the beach itself on the farther boardwalk which only the dog walkers seem to know. Now, the council have issued dog bans on many local beaches. Nobody seems to be quite clear which parts are OK and which are not – and in all fairness I must say that the maps are vague and completely lacking in ‘you are here’ arrows. However, there is absolutely NO excuse for what I put my foot in once I came off the boardwalk and set off down the stones towards the sand. I’ll just say that my sprint to the sea was worthy of Usain Bolt. With extra gagging accompaniment. BLEAGH.

(And while I’m on the subject, picking up after your dog is fine and dandy and lovely, but not if you then suspend the plastic bag from a tree / hang it from the handrail of a boardwalk / deposit it by the side of a picnic table and then forget to pick it up. Mucky pups, and I’m talking about the bad dog walkers and not their pets.)

Fortunately I was rescued from this life of relaxation and no knitting by a trip out to see a friend, her garden, her shepherd’s hut, some new and different countryside.

And there was even a real labrador to have resting on my lap. One whose owner feels equally violently about the plastic-bag amnesiacs, too.

That’s more like it.

How’s everyone else coping?

The way we knit…

My ancient hand injury – shh, it may be coming back but I’m trying not to notice in the hope it won’t be there if it’s unobserved, the ‘Shroedinger’s Tendon’ approach – made me reassess my attitude to knitting needles. Some are just more comfortable than others. Intrigued, I’ve been doing some research into the history of knitting needles, but that will have to wait because I’ve been distracted by knitting methods instead.

My health bollocky-bollocks (ahem, I’m not the most patient person in the world and this has been going on for far too long) is also affecting my whole attitude to the way I knit. ‘Irish Peasant’, I like to call it – lots of flapping needles, a style taught to me by my mother when I couldn’t grasp her ‘tuck the right needle in your armpit’ method, and taught to her by her ma, and to her by her ma, and so on right back into the depths of the Celtic twilight, and to a time when everyone lived in turf-covered cottages and spun in the street:

(Typical Irish village scene with spinner, not remotely posed, oh dear no, about 1910. 
Photograph by R J Welch, from the collections of the National Library of Ireland)

OK, or at least to Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century. (I’ve had a good rant about stereotyping relatively recently, so I won’t repeat myself, though I will say that the above postcard is only missing the turf-cutter’s feckin’ donkey*.) I’ve given up on the armpit method, also handed down the maternal line and a style most likely adopted as a substitute for absent knitting sheaths or belts. However, I am hoping to try and channel the paternal side of my ancestry and try continental knitting, putting strain on a different part of my hands, but last night all I got was a horrible mess and an evil temper. And I even did a very good workshop on it a while back – boy, I wish I’d used it more promptly.

But this débâcle did make me stop and consider various knitting methods – not of continental knitting, because that’s comparatively straightforward, but the main styles of ‘yarn on the right’ knitting with straight needles, sometimes called English or American knitting. Essentially there are three: my Irish Peasant and the variations thereof; the supported needle method – my Ma’s preferred style, the one she failed to teach me – with one needle either under your arm or in a knitting sheath or belt of some kind; and elegant, refined, ‘drawing room’ knitting (aka ‘parlor’ knitting in the US):

You know the sort of thing, holding your needles like the woman in Harold Knight’s painting.

I have to admit that I do not understand why people knit in this way, which is surprising given that several of my friends use it perfectly successfully. Richard Rutt is interesting on its history, saying (and he is supported) that by the start of Queen Victoria’s reign ‘ladies’ had abandoned the older, under the palm, way of holding needles. Not that the rest of the population did, at that point. People who depended – at least in part – on knitting for their livelihood, those such as Shetland knitters or the sock knitters of Barmouth, Bala or Dolgellau

went on using the older method. I’ll get on to why later…

Rutt is the one who dubbed this pen-like method of holding needles ‘drawing room knitting’. It was more elegant, and also distinguished a ‘lady’ knitter from her less respectable sisters – you can even hold your little finger up in an affected gesture while knitting, should you wish to do so, as you might when holding a teacup (absolutely none of my friends do this, thank heavens). After all, ‘no feminine employment is better calculated to display a pretty hand and graceful motions than knitting’ (Annie S Frost, Ladies’ Guide to Needlework, US, 1877).

See? Like this, from the illustrations to Mary Thomas‘s 1938 Knitting Book:

where it is the only method given. Love those nails, by the way; so useful for undoing any knots. Admittedly, Mary T does go on to say that ‘the position of the fingers is exaggerated to show the placing of the yarn’, but still… (Completely incidentally, this method was made fun of even in Victorian times.)

There’s been speculation that most of the original drawing-room knitters made small or light objects with fine yarn, and to me that seems likely. Firstly, these items were more elegant in themselves, and secondly the major disadvantage of this method only becomes evident when you’re trying to work on something large or heavy. The whole weight of the fabric is draped over your thumb or hand. June Hemmons Hiatt also points out, in The Principles of Knitting (2012 ed), that some of the fabric is also bunched up between thumb and needle, plus your hand is trapped under the needle which ‘…is bad for you, plus it restricts the flow of stitches down the needle’. She adds that ‘other methods present fewer problems’.

But it caught on, nonetheless, raising interesting questions about why people adopt something which is inefficient despite having an older and more effective alternative. Here’s Rutt again: ‘Before long, working-class knitters, especially in Southern England, began to emulate the new fashion, which is inefficient and limits the speed of knitting.’ Interestingly, one of my friends initially began knitting more like I do but was sharply corrected by, and I think I’m remembering correctly, a great aunt. And I had never seen anybody knit like this until I went to university in Cambridge, in the strange and foreign land of southern England…

So do I really knit like an Irish peasant? No, I don’t – I knit like people have been knitting for centuries:

with my right-hand needle under my hand. It may be known as the ‘English method’ in some places, but it was evidently quite common in Europe; the above detail is Italian; it’s by Lorenzetti. Not just employed by the Virgin Mary, but by many more of us. So there, nineteenth-century style police.

And my other not-quite-inherited style? Underarm, you hold the work quite high – perhaps that’s why I couldn’t get the hang of it; it was always slightly out of focus. More relevant nowadays is the fact that you can’t stick a circular needle under your armpit, either. You’re also restricting your movement in a way that you wouldn’t if you used a knitting belt, but knitting belts fell out of use in many places during the last century (it was lovely to see them being used so normally when I was in Shetland). Incidentally, the work’s at the optimal height with a belt, too.

For myself, I also hold the yarn along the right needle, with my right hand operating like a kind of shuttle and the yarn held between my thumb and forefinger, rather than would round my fingers. I used to think this was odd until I found it praised by Julia Hemmons Hiatt for its excellent tension control. I also used to think I was slow – admittedly I am now, as I have to be careful, but before that – and then I went to a few workshops and discovered I was one of the quickest knitters there. In view of my current circumstances, it’s interesting that JHH says it’s good for someone who ‘lacks dexterity’, because of ‘youth, age or disability’. Does this give me a Licence to Knit, then? OO7.5? (Sorry, I’ve just finally seen Skyfall. Fab. And I’m not really a James Bond fan.)

I’ll leave with a shot of our knitting group:

Oh, all right, it isn’t – because some of our knitters do, after all and as I noted above, knit like ladies. So how do you knit? And have you ever tried to change?

* The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey by Patricia Lynch, 1934. This was one of my favourite books when I was growing up; I found it on my grandparents’ bookshelves. How my discovery escaped my mother’s ‘Celtic Bollocks’ sensor, I don’t know, given that it features two children called Seamus and Eileen, and they meet, among other things, a leprechaun and the salmon of knowledge…

Taking the Mawddach Trail – OT, ish…

The weather has been fabulous, the intensive physiotherapy is beginning to work, an old friend is moving away – and so she and I spent a day walking along the Mawddach estuary.

This isn’t quite as OT as it seems due to the importance of the textile industry in Wales (honest). We were waking from one place with a significant woolly history – Barmouth, where knitting socks and stockings was what kept some people from starvation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,  to another: Dolgellau, where weaving was equally vital. The stocking knitting was no minor adjunct to fishing; in 1799 annual production at Barmouth was estimated at 192,000 pairs and valued at £18,000. Still, this isn’t 1799 and now comparatively few people knit socks here, let alone stockings. And much to my shame, I was wearing commercial walking socks. Oh well, tant pis ou tant mieux…

In this direction the walk starts by crossing the mouth of the Mawddach river on the footbridge running next to the railway.

The views, especially inland, are stunning (this estuary has been cited as one of Tolkien’s models for the Grey Havens) but I was concentrating on keeping my balance and avoiding cyclists too much to take many shots. Yes, it looks idyllic and timeless, but that would be a mistaken assumption; the estuary was once much more industrious, with shipbuilding and transport featuring in the past, as well as the now-abandoned railway along which we were going to walk.

It’s even had a martial history. During WW2 nearby houses were requisitioned for troops practising the use of landing craft for D-Day – you can still see tank traps at one point – and the RAF continue to fly along it today. Our walk was punctuated by the sound, so familiar to anyone living in a remote area, of low-flying jets. But that was really the only intrusion, once we got started down the green lane that was once a railway track…

There was an attempt to develop an alternative holiday resort to Barmouth here in the later nineteenth century; in fact, there were two. One (Fairbourne) took, and one, on Fegla Fawr, the hump on the horizon to the left of the photograph below, didn’t.

That’s probably just as well. And the whole headland was later commandeered for a pre-invasion training base, too, called Camp Iceland. Hardly appropriate in the weather we had – and we collapsed in the shade here for lunch.

One of the joys of the Mawddach trail is that – being an old railway – it is completely flat and even walking. While we were eating our sarnies quite a lot of people went past, and this was mid-week and not in the height of the holiday season. Many were on bikes, including a couple with toddler carts attached – I’d have loved one of those when I was little; I had to put up with a silly seat behind my Dad and all I could see was his back (and his hand when he flapped back at me to stop me wildly leaning from side to side, trying to see something rather more entertaining) – and there were a couple of people with mobility scooters. You can access the trail at a couple of points along it, and it’s perfect.

I also like the fact that you can see quite clearly where you are going. I’ve often been stumped in the hills, scratching my head and trying to work out whether I’d suddenly lost the ability to map read or whether the path had been swallowed by bog (generally the latter). It is also refreshingly free of bogs, and I am a walker who can be guaranteed to find a bog even after six weeks of drought, and fall in it.

It was a real change not being covered in reeking mud, but just in case I was missing the sensation of repelling anyone I encountered, we went off piste and walked up beside one of the rivers joining the Mawddach.

Astonishingly, I failed to fall in.

Even more astonishingly, they used to build boats – commercially – near here. It would have made a perfect lunch spot, one without the passing ‘traffic’ we had earlier, but that’s one of the constants of walking. You decide that you absolutely must stop and eat or die, snaffle down behind some rock – then find you are still at the mercy of a howling gale, so much so that half your lunch blows away. Then you press on to discover a sheltered little glen of wonderfulness round the next bend. Oh well, tant pis ou tant mieux encore une fois, and we rejoined the Trail where I became obsessed with colour and texture, and took about 500,000 photographs.

I wonder if I can knit this… the browns are almost those of natural fleeces, after all. Hmm.

By now we had an aim in view: the George III Inn. It was wonderful walking in the sun – well, it was wonderful not walking in rain, drizzle, snow, sleet, hurricanes (delete as appropriate, all available in Snowdonia, sometimes on the same day) – and we were prepared for it with hats and lots of water. But the long straight stretch running up towards the George nearly did us in; I even thought I saw Omar Sharif on a camel coming towards us – ‘Orrens! Orrens!’ – but it was only another cyclist, alas. Tantalisingly, we could see shaded parts of the path ahead, but it seemed to us take ages to reach them. Happily, it didn’t take ages to be served with tea at the George,

where they are clearly used to sweaty walkers appearing out of the heat haze demanding refreshments. It was so lovely to collapse and watch the world go by: people enjoying the sun, walking dogs, watching ducklings; a few cars crossing the wooden tollbridge. You don’t get that when you slog towards the end of most walks. Well, unless you plan very carefully. And anyway I’m not usually fit for human consumption, being covered in fetid lumps of countryside, slowly drying and falling off.

It took a real effort to leave and continue towards Dolgellau and our rendezvous with a lift back, but we did… though at a rather more leisurely pace. There were more people now, more cyclists and runners – partly because we were closer to Dolgellau, where once ‘every little farmer make [sic] webs and few cottages in these parts are without a loom’ (Arthur Aikin, 1797), and partly because it was near to the end of the working day and the weather was too good to ignore. We left the actual railway line to follow the last – or first – part of the Trail into the town, but got diverted (again) by attempting to identify wildflowers; there’s more about them on my gardening and plant blog. This quest led us slightly off piste once more, but it was really worth it. We discovered that the Wnion was easily accessible for tired feet,

and it was so quiet that we were able to watch the trout rising to catch flies. However, the call of ice cream proved too strong and we just made it into Dolgellau before the Spar ran out of Magnums. I must admit that I signally failed to think much about the woollen industry at this point, or about the fact that cloth from Meirionydd was considered some of the best. So were the ice creams, that’s what I say…

Back on topic soon. Once I’ve recovered from the sunburn.

Spinning in the green

Yes, that’s right – green, not grease (you don’t want to spin in the grease in public, really). To be precise, spinning in the Green Fair.

For the last few years a local green organisation has put on an eco fair and plant and seed swap in a nearby village hall. It’s been growing – as is entirely appropriate – and getting more and more popular. Last year and the one before, I was asked to take my spinning wheel and demonstrate spinning, alongside a friend who is a weaver.

This year I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to spin, so I asked a couple of friends to join me, choosing them carefully as people who would be quite laid back whatever the day threw at them (hall evacuation and firemen this time), and making sure I warned them first about the possibility of relaxed organisation and semi-feral children. Oh dear, that’s quite unfair. Let’s say children who are allowed to express themselves, quite probably using an abandoned spinning wheel as an way of demonstrating that freedom. And the Fair is actually well organised; it’s just relaxed enough that it appears not to be draconian.

I wasn’t sure enough about my spinning, or about how long I would feel able to stay, so I took a skein winder and some skeins I wanted to roll into balls.

The skein winder isn’t my most successful piece of kit – it’s an example of what happens when Wonderwool Wales is drawing to a close, you begin to panic a little and have a panic-buying attack – but it entertained the woodworkers. ‘How much did you pay for that?’ was the most common enquiry, so I suggested that they studied it and came up with something better. Or at least something sanded, with timber that wasn’t bowed, and with enough holes in the sides to make it fully adjustable. I’ve had a drill at this myself, so it’s even less elegant than it was when I lost my ability to discriminate late one Saturday at Builth Wells. But it attracted some attention, anyway.

As did our little patch of the Fair.

(Note small child contemplating spinning wheels with a slightly worrying air…)

But the main focus for many of us is the plant swap.

I took along a crate and a box, both full with duplicates – tomatoes, begonias, a fuchsia, a spider plant, a money plant – and I wasn’t going to come away with anything, even though my contribution entitled me to a selection of free plants.

I did come away with some, but of course. I took two tomatoes; I came away with two tomatoes. Different tomatoes, mind, and I’m sure I can squeeze them into the greenhouse somehow. Er, and the rest – an aubergine, several types of kale, etc, etc. Oh well. I tried.

And I got my wool wound, so I popped off to do some shopping and found a scene of organised chaos on my return. There’d been a funny burning smell, and lights had gone out. Everyone was being evacuated into the car park / outdoor exhibition space, and that included the people in the kitchen who moved the soup outside. Free (well, contributions) lobscouse or lentil soup for all. And firemen:

All in all, a good day – plants, people, firemen, lobscouse, and wound skeins of handspun. Then the generally positive weekend was cemented by the fact that Sunday was a very good day, the Sunday Market Spinners in Dolgellau, and I managed to spin for the first time in months. I paid for it later, but I spun. Yipee!

(I’m not sure the physiotherapists would approve, but tough.)

Fleece and an almost wordless Wednesday…

I’ve tried to do wordless Wednesday posts before, but I don’t seem to be able to shut up. Strange that. But despite the weather (hailstorms and thunder at the weekend; not that much better since) shearing time is almost come upon us, and this is a sort-of-wordless post celebrating the fact that I do love fleece:

This originally belonged to a Texel cross from a nearby farm – and I do love fleece but…

Normally I get absurdly excited, though not quite to the point of suggesting that shearing feasts be reinstated. But this year I’m a bit flat, partly due to the ongoing health problems (good news: neurologist reckons it’s nothing neurologically serious and that the nerve fibres are not badly damaged; bad news: am still waiting for MRI scan without which we can do nothing and have to come off the painkillers in the meanwhile, ouch, my head), and partly due to the fact that I’m just not that good at fleece wrangling.

(A BFL cross from the same farm.)

Part of me enjoys it, and I certainly manage to make a terrible mess especially when Next Door’s Cat is also involved, which is always. But part of me – the rational part that is not soaking wet and reeking of wet wool – knows that I’m not much cop at it.

I can start with a beautiful fleece, albeit one which is liberally surrounded by a sheep-shitty skirt and decorated with raddle, and manage to reduce it to something that is not entirely – er – useable. Maybe 75% of it is, eventually, on a good day; maybe 50%, maybe less. Not good, though a much more experienced spinner than me once confessed that as she got older and more experienced she threw more and more of a fleece away. That’s because she’s discriminating, not because she’s rubbush at dealing with raw fleece, though.

(More Texel cross)

My new negativity (aka realism) is a shame, because I love the whole idea of controlling the means of production and having absurdly low wool miles to my knitting. But the steaming mounds of wet fleece everywhere, the buckets of mankyness consigned to the compost, the chaos for a whole day, the whole business of carding, etc, without adding lots of unintentional noils by over-processing? Nah. You can buy some lovely roving, quite reasonably, and without becoming over-acquainted with how well gorse spines can hide when the fleece’s original owner has been raised on the hill, foraging under bushes.

Plus, of course, I have got five washed fleeces ready for processing, plus one already processed… and that does make giving into sentiment much less likely. And the money I save on wool I can spend on plants. Though I do have one coloured fleece reserved since last year. It’s been growing up… oh dear.

And a postscript: my reserved fleece (oh, OK, its owner) was unfortunately one of the winter casualties. Sad – he was a ram lamb and had a lovely coloured fleece which he would have passed on when he worked his way up to being the Big Man – but also not so sad: it gets me off the hook. After all, I do HAVE ENOUGH FLEECE…

On not going to Wonderwool

Last weekend was Wonderwool Wales and this year, after much internal (and external – sorry, everyone) debate, I didn’t go. Probably just as well, as I wasn’t too well, but – sigh… I’ve been a lot, and I do love WW:

with one exception, which was last year. Ergh. Yes, I love it – when it’s good, when I don’t freeze despite wearing 85 wooly layers and when I can get an espresso when I need one, which means frequently. And of course memory is selective, which is why I spent some time deliberately reminding myself of the downside to WW.

The Saturday was the bad day for us Wonderwool refusniks, though – as one of my otherwise-occupied friends pointed out – we were saving a lot of money by not being there. But I was feeling OKish, the weather was glorious and the financial advantages of WW avoidance didn’t seem quite so important. In fact, it was just perfect for sitting outside the halls, going through purchases with friends while nibbling lightly on one of Love Patisserie’s delicious treacle tarts. And I was missing out on the best Scotch eggs in the world, let alone all that fibre.

So I took myself off for a consoling walk – along the seafront at Barmouth, which I don’t usually visit for walking, just for shopping – and realised it wasn’t quite warm enough. Brrr. Coooold wind. That made me feel a little less nostaligic (is that the right word?) for what I imagined was happening down at Builth Wells.

I thought I would capitalise on that feeling and got out my stash when I came home, spreading fluff out,

(which gave me the opportunity of updating the mothball situation), sorting through the containers and even delving to the bottom of the Laundry Basket of Doom, which is below the bottom basket:

I really do not need to add anything whatsoever to the stash, nor to the library, nor to the collection of woolly miscellanea: no need for more needles, more stitch holders, more bits and pieces. No need, really, for anything.

That made me feel a bit better too, and then I remembered that this weekend there was a plant fair at Crug Farm Plants, and I could always indulge myself there if I wanted a little specialist retail therapy (Barmouth Co-op doesn’t qualify) – and I can still garden, a bit, even if I can’t look down for long enough to knit and follow a pattern. I’ve been improvising with a music stand, but I still have to look at my knitting from time to time; I can’t do it all by touch. On the other hand, I can look down for long enough to read a plant label, trowel a hole and pop something in to a flowerbed.

And then my friends returned, singing the praises of staying overnight and doing both days (avoids, apparently, the last-minute panic that makes you buy a cone of something which, though lovely, is nonetheless in a colour which makes you look like a corpse). They brought me goodies: some buttons shaped like sheep and some like balls of wool, a porcupine quill for carefully detaching fluff from a carder. I really wish I’d gone.

Or do I?

This was the result of the plant fair. They’re not all mine, I swear it, but if I’d Wonderwooled, I’d have felt guilty. And, as I say, I can at least garden… wonder what all the other WW avoiders did? Mope, like me, for a day? Or cheer up and spend packets on plants?