Book reviews: three to think about

I’ve been so busy that a small pile-ette of books to review has built up. Oh, OK, there are three. And I have to say that they are all quite distinct. One is wonderful, one is inspiring, and one is – well, for me, a bit meh. So let’s start with the first one…

The Essential Guide to Color Knitting Techniques, by Margaret Radcliffe.

I love Margaret Radcliffe’s books on technique, and have reviewed several of them. When I heard this one was on the cards, I was actually quite excited (I know, times have changed, once it was men, now it’s books about stranded knitting, but I know which has the more lasting impact). And it does not disappoint.

There’s all sorts of general information about colour – differentiating tone and hue, for instance, balancing – or not – colours, and about colour selection.

I find this very useful indeed – as I’ve been messing about with colour selection for a Fair Isle knit this winter, I’ve been debating many of the issues here (with myself, admittedly). It’s good to find them in one place instead of in a variety of sources, and to find them well illustrated.

There’s the usual mix of specific advice and step-by-step help; the very practical section at the back is clear, and there is a wealth of stitch patterns included, thematically arranged (I’m already finding the ‘stripes’ section useful in my preparations for next season’s craft fairs). But for me the stand-out section discusses something I’d not seen covered in such depth before: working with variegated yarns. Fascinating. And there are many colour techniques described too, from the familiar – stranded knitting and intarsia, for example – to the less well known, such as twining and helix knitting. And how about using maths and colour – knitting a fibonacci sequence, for example, or knitting in a colour code…?

Fortunately Color Knitting Techniques is very well bound. It’s going to need to be.

The inspirational book – not that the Radcliffe isn’t; I just suspect that this next one will be looked at more than actually used – is Knitting Fabric Rugs by Karen Tiede.

These are not, in the classic sense, rag rugs. They are made from strips of fabric (and there are some very clever ways of cutting this to get the maximum lengths, clearly described), and are knitted in garter stitch, not prodded through a backing cloth.

Why garter stitch? Well, the strips are difficult to purl on the large needles (I can vouch for that – tried it, though I’ve to gone so far as to knit more than a couple of rows and cannot vouch for the patterns working or the hands holding out*), but garter stitch also gives a flat fabric. It also, apparently, makes for ‘springier’ rugs – ones that are much more comfortable to walk on.

Again, there’s an emphasis on colour, and on collecting colour (I went to a rag rug workshop where the tutor described herself as ‘being on a mission to save colours’, and I get the impression that this is very much the same). There’s also a strong ethical dimension, which I really like – it’s classic recycling, making do and mending. This makes it sound like a rather brown and gritty, knit your own yoghurt, child of the seventies thing. It’s not.

It’s stylish.

I’ve already found myself thinking about making one of these for the bathroom – smart stripes of peacock and jade, with perhaps some darker colours to… wonder what else is in my rag bag…

(*Incidentally, Karen Tiede does put an emphasis on comfort – and physical safety – while assembling the materials and knitting these rugs. Among other things, she states that if your hands are beginning to hurt, it’s an indication that the needle size is wrong. And you knit strips and piece them together; you don’t have half a ton of fabric on the needles. Almost, but not quite.)

‘Stylish’ can be said about some of the patterns in the third book. Some.

No, I’m being unfair – we all have different taste, and there’s something in One-Skein Wonders for Babies (edited, as usual in the One Skein series, by Judith Durant) for everybody.

Some of the patterns are highly traditional (I have photographs of myself as a baby wearing things which are more modern), and some are – er, idiosyncratic. Knitted bibs? Masticated rusk and garter stitch?

However, there are also some which are really rather funky, and I have fallen completely in love with a hat (the hat section is good):

It’s ‘yarn dependent’ – but I love it. I want it. If that baby had a bigger head, and happened to be in Snowdonia, I’d have that hat off its curly little head.

(I must mention here that whatever I may think of some of the patterns, the photography is excellent.) I also rather liked these ‘sleeveless baby vests’ – the vests are sleeveless, mind, not the babies – though I would never have been able to pull one over the head of most babies I’ve known.

Even more impractical – IMO – is the ruffled ‘bumper’, over-nappy knickers, basically. One of those sudden upwards-and-downwards exploding nappies and this would be dust. Or something. And on another, anyone who knits in Noro for a baby has probably won the lottery, because there’s no way Noro’s going anywhere near a washing machine. Mashed banana a) gets everywhere, even before it’s been through the baby, and b) sticks worse than Agent Orange, and a gentle soak in Euclan will not do the business. I know this. But out of 101 patterns there are bound to be some you don’t like and some you do.

Time to up-size that hat. Now that would work in Noro.
For me.

 

Earworms and felted bags

I need to apologise for this, but just in case you thought I was getting a bit sensible… and I accept no responsibility for the consequences, by the way.

I clicked onto Facebook yesterday, and a friend of mine who lives inland was lamenting the presence of an earworm – she’d popped out to feed her hens, seen that the Moelwyns were looking spectacularly blue in the early light, and started channelling Laurel and Hardy with a slight adaptation – ‘In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Ffestiniog / in the shade of the lonesome pine…’. All. Day.

I felt (ouch – wait for it) for her, because I’d also been suffering. Only I’d been channelling Gilbert and Sullivan, and I don’t even like Gilbert and Sullivan. And I’d been singing to some cute felted bags I’ve been making for a commission. At least she’d been singing to something animated: her hens.

Think Mikado, OK?

Three little bags from Wales are we,
Fat as a felted bag can be,
We’re really sweet, not ‘ach a fi’,
Three little bags from Wales…

Three little bags which slightly vary,
Due to the kemp we are still quite hairy,
Even so, we are soft not scary,
Three little bags from Wales,
Three little bags from Wales…

There is more, but personally I would like to get through the day without conjuring up visions of dancing bags in Japanese wigs (though it is worth clicking on the YouTube rendition of ‘Three Little Maids’ which involves Lily Savage, who is surprisingly restrained but a good antidote to the cod geishas which populate amateur versions – and some professional ones – of The Mikado).

Oh, and ‘ach a fi’ (‘fi’ is a ‘vee’, not ‘fee’ sound), in case you didn’t know, is a Welsh expression of disgust. Quite.

So. Small bags knitted in a 100% pure wool – Hebridean, in this case, with a stripe in some left-over New Lanark Falklands wool – and felted. Stuffed with newspaper,

which you can just see here, to give them a nice rounded shape, then dried on a radiator during a brief period (soon to be back) when the heating clicked on. Buttons added, labelled, packaged and delivered, all to the accompaniment of fecking Gilbert and fecking fecking Sullivan. And if WordPress changes ‘fecking’ to ‘decking’ once more I will hunt them down and sing to them.

(I haven’t been this irritated by an earworm since the time slugs drove me to rewrite the national anthem. They did, honest.)

The Woolwinding Eyelet Shawl is born…

Actually, it’s something of a toddler now, as it was ‘born’ in 2012, but I’ve only just got round to putting the pattern on Ravelry. I know, I know, I’ve been saying for ages ‘I must put this on Ravelry’, and doling out photocopies and printouts all over the place, but I have finally done it.

It’s up (or will be very shortly, as soon as approved – yup, it’s here). And it’s a free download if you’re on Rav. All you need are one skein of sock wool, or something similar, and 3.75 needles. Or needle, rather: it needs a circular after the start.

And it’s called the Woolwinding Eyelet Shawl.

Sorry it’s not called something more exciting, imaginative or creative, but it’s what it is. It’s an eyelet shawl and it comes from Woolwinding. I did think about finding another name for it, but my mind went completely blank and – apart from silly suggestions, including almost anything you could think of in Welsh including ‘ffwlbart’ (polecat – gee, thanks) – I couldn’t come up with anything reasonable.

That’s not to say that it hasn’t been called names, mind. This year in Shetland two of us were knitting it and, boy, did it get called names. Basically you need to concentrate at the very start for the pattern set up, not chat / order tea and cakes in the Peerie Cafe / get distracted by what your neighbour is knitting / watch an exciting DVD.

But once you’re off, you’re off. You knit on until you either run out of yarn or lose the will to live (something common to almost all shawls, I have found). Then you block it – and there are instructions on the pattern, which is written so that novices to lace / shawl knitting can follow it, as well as more experienced knitters. I tend to block it so that the two end points of the triangle curve upwards, as I find that makes it more wearable – and the lace pattern is designed to allow for this.

And then  you wear it. Or rather Doris wears it:

and, more sensibly from the back,

These two are in Noro Kureyon Sock, and the top one is a skein of hand-dyed loveliness from Mam a Mi; I’ve often knitted it in Araucania’s Ranco Sock (the last image is another hand-dyed yarn).

I’m getting quite used to seeing it around now, as it’s been available through Knit One in Dolgellau for some time. A couple of weeks ago I sat behind one at the garden club, and another won the knitting section in the village show last year. Copies have been used by members of the the Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers I go to, and this next one is by one of them. It uses all the bits and pieces from the Guild’s dyeing picnic:

The cast off has been a little unfamiliar to some people, but It’s worth persisting as it’s very elastic and also gives a lovely finish, especially with a variegated yarn:

It’s really simple, honest: right side facing and with a slightly larger size needle, knit two together. Slip the resulting stitch from the right needle back onto the left needle and repeat.

Anyway, there you go: tah dah, the Woolwinding Eyelet Shawl. And if you’re not on Ravelry, then do join – it’s fantastic. What a resource. Even if you don’t use the forums, and many people don’t, it’s so useful for pattern ideas, yarn information, storing a record of your stash or your patterns – and of course finding lots and lots and lots of patterns. Like this one…

Life is learning (and sometimes swearing)

One of the kicks I get from knitting is learning something new. Last week, for instance, we had a visitor at our knit and natter (we love having visitors) who showed us a knitting mill – a sort-of hand-powered knitting dolly for producing fine i-cord. I need one, and I need it now. But the big plus for me this week has been the provisional cast on.

OK, I can hear the gales of laughter now. I know, everyone can do this. Yeah, maybe everyone can – but the people I know who could actually show me use a crochet provisional cast on and, as almost everyone on the surface of the planet knows, I do not crochet. OK?

I’ve been knitting cowls for the various fairs and pop-ups I’ve been involved with this summer (it’s a testament to the sort of summer we’ve been having that big cowls have been flying out) and have also developed a little bias-knitted cowl-stroke-necklace which uses one skein of Louisa Harding’s fabulous – and about-to-be discontinued – mulberry silk:

I’ll pop the pattern on Ravelry just as soon as the mad rush is over, and as soon as I’ve come up with a catchy name for it. But the whole point is that even my fine-stitched seam is a little too untidy – for me, that is, nobody else seems (ho ho, did ya see what I did there?) bothered by it. So out came the books, including the wonderful Cast on, Bind Off, and out also came the bad language and the evil temper. But I did glean one thing – use smooth thread, like cotton, which can be pulled out easily.

Or, indeed, frequently.

However, I’ve got it now.

Tah, as they say, dah.

This is entirely due to YouTube, though perhaps not quite in the way you’d expect. There are plenty of vids on there of people doing a provional cast on, some of which are clear but which I am too daft to follow, but many are either too fast or too badly filmed to follow (well, for me, anyway). Every time I hit pause in my attempts to flipping follow I dropped my knitting; cue more swearing.

But then I fiddled about and thought about what I was doing, or rather trying to do: wrap live stitches round a string. And I started from exactly the opposite point as the YT vids I’d been watching and the instructional books I found – I began with the working yarn at the bottom as opposed to the top and ZIP! It was like Audrey Hepburn being sung (or rather shouted) at by Rex Harrison playing Professor Higgins: by George, she’s got it!

So here is the working yarn (the orange silk) and a short-but-long-enough length (too much is silly and leads to more bad language) of the waste yarn knotted together like this, with the needle on top of the yarns and in the middle. Oh, and using a circular needle is not easy. I know this. You just end up with a mystery third ‘yarn’ which inexplicably has a needle tip attached, and a lot more swearing.

I then take the needle under the working yarn from the top and lift it over the waste yarn, keeping the two threads to the left of the needle separated by the thumb of my left hand. Then I  take the needle and yarn and pass them under both threads (don’t worry about following this…) and pop them through the middle. Really don’t worry about following this.

It looked a bit messy, but as you can see I had achieved live stitches wrapping round string. I went back for the next row and half the stitches fell off, so the next time I did it – after I’d chanted ‘under yarn, over waste, under both, through the gap’ as a mantra several times as I redid the cast on – I knitted into the back of alternate stitches carefully. And it worked!

I couldn’t quite believe that I’d got it. I pulled it out and did it again, still chanting the provisional cast on mantra. It still worked.

I couldn’t quite believe that I’d invented something new, solved a problem that surely must have affected more people than just me, but I did seem to have done so. Now I often have difficulties following knitting etc instructions others take for granted, and I suspect that’s because I am one of those naturally left-handed people whose handedness was changed from babyhood by parents who carefully made me use my right hand all the time – my instincts really came to the fore when I had surgery on my left hand (I’m a left-handed spinner, which is why I damaged that hand through being overenthusiastic/stupid) and found life really difficult, even when it came to simple things like pouring water from a kettle. I’m not alone in this. I know, I thought, such depth of insight for us ‘not actually southpaws but who ought to be’ lot should be on YouTube.

Er, it already is. I should have looked further.

Or possibly I should just have clicked on the first one that came up.

I’d run out of bad words by then, so I just shrugged. But hey, at least it’s there, and nobody will have to look at my nail varnish (or not) instead…

The Fair Isle, finalised.

(I originally entitled this post ‘the final Fair Isle’, and then I realised that made it sound as though I was never, ever going to knit another; who knows, that may well be the case, but let’s not make any rash assumptions.)

So, having been through all my Shetland shots and all the wool I bought in Jamieson’s wonderfully refurbished shop in Lerwick,

that’s this lot, I have made some decisions. At last… I know, I know, that doesn’t look much like wool but bear with me.

It’s been fiddly. For one thing, I  could have chose to approximate the colours in the original pattern (Orkney, by Rowan), but I didn’t because I didn’t particularly like them, and I wanted to echo Shetland colours anyway.

I sorted my colours into earthy, leafy, land-based tones:

and the sometimes astonishing colours of the coast:

and, finally, the monochromes:

And I have managed to use all the colours I bought (happily the pattern uses 13 different ones, though I was prepared to rework that), and I’m pleased with what I’ve got. And I could have chosen a more trad pattern, one which used the same colour repeat on arms and body. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to play with tradition instead.

So the first step was to work out from the original pattern charts which colours were placed together in Rowan’s colour way (no image here, but boring lists do not an interesting photo make). Then I began sketching to see how my colours worked with each other – and that’s the chart at the start of the post. Then I got the actual wool out to check that they worked in reality in much the same way as they had on paper, and they did.

My work on listing all the colours had thrown up one break with tradition that I wasn’t happy with, however. It’s an accepted convention that there are only two colours to a row in Fair Isle knitting, and I think that’s ‘accepted’ for a reason: more colours mean much more bulk. There was one band of pattern which used three, and which also carried the colours across a large number of stitches (another complication I felt I could live with out – yes, I’d be weaving them in, but that would just add even more bulk to something already bulkier than the rest). So I decided to find an alternative pattern.

The pencil sketch on the left-hand page is the original, the others are possibilities:

I went into my stitch library – various old books on Fair Isles – and found several compatible and comparable patterns which also ran across 9 rows and 16 stitches. The middle one on the right-hand page above was quite like the one I was replacing, and because it runs over the same number of rows and stitches, it will be quite straightforward to substitute. I won’t need to mess with the shaping provided I start it in the same position.

Then came the really fun bit – working out the colours for the new panel:

That’s them, done. Due to the rather funky variation in colour between sleeves and body I had to do this twice, but I am happy with what I’ve finally got. The sleeve pattern, in the original, is brighter and so will mine be; plus, I love the Jamieson’s colour ‘ruby’, and my new pattern will give it extra prominence on the body. And I won’t have that extra bulk just where I don’t need it – I forgot to add that this thicker panel would have come right across the boobage.

Now I can knit my tension square – and I’m going to do it using the new pattern. Just to see if I’ve got it right…

(You’re probably thinking that I’ve lost my mind, and wondering why I can’t just knit a pattern as given. I don’t know, but I’m not good at doing that; it’s part of the reason why I knit. And I know that this will be truly original – there’ll never be another. Possibly because no-one else would be so daft. Which reminds me, one of my fellow attendees at a Fibre and Fabric Fair this weekend just posted a comment – that adding ‘and shit’ to a phrase like ‘I do crochet’ makes it sound so much more, er, street. So I do Fair Isle and shit, right?)

Intermissione… is that a word?

In any language? Probably not, but this is one. Ar hintermission. I will get back on the decision I made about Fair Isle colours, but for the moment I am frantically trying to finish an editing job. Well, I need the work to pay for more wool, sillie billies!

(And food. And bills. That sort of thing.)

And, for variety, I’ve entered the Tour de Fleece. Yes, there is such a thing – if you don’t know already – and the idea is to set yourself a spinning challenge and spin your wheel each day the riders of the Tour de France spin theirs (only – happily – wearing lycra, pissing in your pants, and not just pissing*, is not involved).

It’s been ages since I could spin properly, and I seem to have lost the knack. Time to get it back. So I’m allowed to spin for ten minutes a day – twenty if my hands behave – and no more. The aim was to use a chocolate-brown Manx Loaghtan fleece I’ve had kicking around since pre-hand-injury days. I got it out, I prepped it, it was disgusting, I put most of it in the compost.

Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t that I’d left it unwashed for three years. That would be an ERGH almost comparable with what happens to some of the Tour riders when they get caught short. But it was full of second cuts and straw and scurf and it was not pleasant. So I’m using what I prepped before I became too nauseated by sheep dandruff, and am going to ply it together with some white Lleyn which is much, much nicer.

Except with all the typing I now need to rest my hands again, and with root canal work I also need massive painkillers (I love dentists). Never mind, it will get done – and I’m much heartened by my progress. On all fronts!

*Really. Croyez-moi. I’m a bit of Tour nerd – and ERGH. Double ERGH. Let’s just say you wouldn’t want to cycle behind some people.

Shetland inspirations: a flash of another colour

I can be quite boring when it comes to colour choices – as I’ve often said, once a Goth, always a Goth. Bring me everything in black, and I’m quite happy. I’ll add colour flashes, and quite often can be seen in (shhh) a coloured cardigan but, basically and for myself, I like black and white.

When I was thinking about doing a Fair Isle after a billion years of no stranded knitting, I first of all thought monochrome. I was supported in this by the latest exhibition at the Bonhoga Gallery in Weisdale, Fraser Taylor’s Shadowed Valley, a response to the Clearances there.

Two things stood out, though. First, when you turned and looked at the panels from the other direction they were all in bright colours; and second, how much emphasis there is with the monochrome on the brown of the wooden floor. Hmm.

Then I went back to looking at the landscape. I knew in my heart that I wanted to reflect that more than I wanted to wear black and white, at least this time. But I didn’t want to be too traditional – I did a lot of traditional Fair Isles once upon a time, and I’m all out – though any FI needs a spark, a zing. I went through my photographs, and then I started deliberately looking at neutrals (I don’t want to frighten too many horses) and sharp contrasts. And there are many, many, many. Here are a few.

A window on Burra Isle. My goodness, it was searingly cold that day.

Sea pinks and lichen and greenery against rock.

More lichen, on a quern stone at Jarlshof (and the shadow of a fence, natch).

The colours of boat hulls, a lifebuoy and a door on a grey day in Lerwick.

Another boat, on a considerably brighter day in Eshaness.

Red, I wonder? Wow…

Or orange, or blue or turquoise. Rust?

And then I came back to monochrome. But I haven’t really; I’m still wedded to the muted landscape with highlights, though – which ones? But I couldn’t resist adding this shot, which just seems to sum up Shetland. Seabirds, cliffs, sea and a foureen. At least I think the boat is a foureen: I’m sure someone will correct me if it’s a yoal.

It was taken one evening, at St Ninian’s Isle, turning away from the famous sand tombolo that appears in anything about Shetland. Low sun, so I had to turn in the other direction, and I’m glad I did because I’d have missed this otherwise. Maybe I am tending towards monochrome (though there’s a hintette of turquoise in that hull). May need to do two…

 

 

Shetland highlights, 3: taatit rugs

We were very lucky to fetch up in Lerwick just as an woolly exhibition had opened at the Shetland Museum, and it was fascinating. A post ago I mentioned taatit rugs very briefly, so now for a bit more….

Taatit rugs are pile bedcovers, and follow a very northern tradition. Making them died out in Shetland during the last century, but they were relatively common in the nineteenth century and the Museum has some from the mid-eighteenth century too. They didn’t belong in the smarter homes; they belonged to ordinary people and were used, often heavily.

I’d heard of them, but I’d not seen one except briefly at the Crofthouse museum four years ago, and I was intrigued. They’ve got a woven base (a muckle wheel / great wheel was used for spinning the wool for taatit rugs; the wool is thick and usually 2-ply throughout),

and the ones in the exhibition were in a mixture of natural colours, not just white. I think I fell just as much in love with the grounds as I did with the rugs themselves!

One intriguing thing – they needed to be wide, but a big loom was impossible in the average Shetland establishment at the time. So the grounds were woven to double the length needed, then cut in half (I think this is how it went – one large piece of cloth rather than two shorter ones), and the rugs were actually worked in two halves which were then sewn together down the middle. They could then be unstitched for washing and restitched once dry, as well.

The pile is a bit different:

and generally looked to me as though it had been slightly more finely spun, but I may be wrong.

They were put together rather like a rag rug, with the yarns doubled up and sewn into the backing fabric, going round  a couple of yarns in the base – difficult to describe, but if you turned one over (which I did, discreetly), you see something that looks like a hyphen on the back. Apparently when they were new the pile could be as long as 4cm. Then the rug was then hemmed and the two halves sewn together along the selvedge. Some were hemmed as a whole, but that must have made the dismembering / reassembly process very awkward and it doesn’t seem to have been common. They differ from rag rugs or clootie rugs, of course, in that the pile is spun wool, not woven cloth.

Origins? Much speculation, but they seem to derive from shaggy rugs and cloaks present in Scandinavia and Iceland, and there was a recreation on display to illustrate the point.

(I remember a Celt wearing one like this in Asterix Legionnaire, hee hee, though there’s no evidence of them ever being worn in Shetland, er, sorry about that diversion!)

They were real family pieces. As you walk into the foyer at the Museum you are greeted by one taatit rug which went to New Zealand with its family when they emigrated in the nineteenth century; it has been sent back to its homeland by the descendant of its original owners. They were used as bedcovers, generally in rural families, and often in a box bed – and there is considerable speculation (though no concrete evidence) that they were used upside-down: pile side innermost, for extra warmth and comfort. Certainly that’s so in Norway, and the grounds there often have designs on the ‘back’ as well so they would show up. They were also used there as warm covers for sailors in open boats; in Sweden they might keep you warm on a sledge.

The dyes are natural ones, often local or at least locally grown. In later, early twentieth-century rugs, there are some synthetic dyes, but straight fleece colours are also comparatively common. The exhibition has samples of the lichens and plants that would have been used to create colours like these, and research has shown that a huge range of dye sources were used – many more than had been assumed to be present.

Some are marriage rugs, with the couple’s initials in the design; others have design elements designed to protect the sleepers from all sorts of nightly horrors, like the mara – the hag – who would sit on your chest and crush the breath out of you, but who could be easily be fooled due to her inability to count to more than three (so you put more than three elements in a design, presumably, and she counted again and again rather than suffocating you).

That should do it (this is the oldest rug in the exhibition, from about 1760).

I love things like this. They are so ephemeral, the sort of things that disappear into the background and simply do not survive in any great numbers. And yet they are so evocative of a time and place and – ergh – lifestyle. It’s lovely to see such an excellent exhibition celebrating the ordinary – and also the extraordinary, for their very survival.

Time for a revival?

If you’re in Shetland before 19 July, do go along. It’s fascinating – more information can be found on the Museum’s website, here.

 

Shetland highlights, 2 – the sea

Sorry about the delay. Root canal part 2 followed by hefty antibiotics and an asthma flare-up left me feeling a bit crappy. That’s what you get for travelling. Should have stayed at home. Hm. I don’t think so.

This is why: OK, the view from my house is pretty good and I can see the sea, but not like this, not this sea. The island is Mousa, famous for its Iron Age broch, which can just be seen at the extreme(ish) right. It’s that thing that looks like a cooling tower. The only intact broch, it’s also famous for the Manx Shearwaters who use it as a roost.

(I’m not going to drone on about brochs; the Wikipedia entry is quite good and I can – and do – go on and on and on about what their function might have been. I’ve been broch hunting since I was about 12, a pastime which led to several family rows, lots of falling in interesting bogs, and an early encounter with someone who much later became a very good friend.)

Ahem.

Back to inspiration, particularly colour inspiration. I knew I wanted to knit a Fair Isle, something which I haven’t done for ages and ages and ages. But I’ve done lots of traditional ones and, quite frankly, I think I’m trad-Fair-Isled out, even still. So I wanted to do something a bit different. I decided to let the landscape work on me. And after about a day in Shetland, I began to feel the need to knit something in blues: Can’t think why, really. That, by the way, is Dore Holm. Well, the island with the arch is; the foreground is part of Eshaness. That’s as far north as we got on this trip; Yell and Unst will have to wait for next time. But we did do a fair bit of exploring.

And as I did more and more, I became more and more convinced that a fundamentally blue Fair Isle would just have to be knitted. Though perhaps green would have to put in an appearance (the lump is Dore Holm again, from a bit further round at Stenness).

But we had stopped for cake at the wonderful Braewick Cafe, and when I looked at my shots later I began to think about adding silvery greys… So beautiful, and the pointy things at the right are the Drongs. Oh yes they are. They are spectacular granite stacks – the ‘main Drong’ is 60m high – and they have been climbed. This just confirms my opinion, formed with the help of not a few acquaintances, that almost all climbers are mad (says the woman living in Snowdonia). Heavy weather can cause problems (really?) and they’re surrounded by submerged rocks. Obviously you need to hire a boat as – and I’m quoting here – ‘there’s nothing to tie your kayak to’. Plus the rock is described as ‘quite friable’. They are rated as severe to hard/very severe. Oh, come now, surely not.

Maybe I need a bit more colour, because now I’m feeling slightly ill at the thought of climbing the Drongs. I just know it wouldn’t be so much climbing as hanging off with one fingernail while trying to take scary pictures. Eek. Ok, colour. Colour and knitting possibilities. Maybe I need some licheny yellows in my Fair Isle? And maybe a hint of lobster pot.

Fairly recently somebody said to me that she couldn’t see the point in travelling. I didn’t quite know how to respond, and I’m afraid I just goggled at her instead of leaping to a passionate defence of broadening your whole outlook on the world and counterattacking narrowness and provinciality. I suppose that’s what happens if you never leave your village and have a lot of first-cousin marriage over many generations (six fingers are also a possibility). Maybe my family – seafarers for generations – are unusual. Doubt it. Really, really doubt it. People have always got up and moved about, going right back to the very few (it could have been as few as seven individuals, some researchers have speculated) who left Africa in the deepest prehistory, and to whom we owe our existence. We’re just fidgety. You’ve got to see what’s over the horizon… er, unless it’s the Drongs and a kayaking lunatic hung about with ropes. If it is, run away. There’s another horizon in the opposite direction, that’s what I say….

Shetland highlights, 1 – The Crofthouse Museum

I could go on about Shetland at length, but that would probably not be very exciting – and would probably largely consist of me raving about Fjara, a newish place to eat and have a drink near Tesco in Lerwick; it’s very good. The seals come up around it too – outside Tesco was one of the best places to spot seals, and I was a bit worried that they might have moved on. Nah.

Once you’ve got a good rock, you’ve got a good rock.

Ahem!

I’ve decided to highlight a few aspects over the next few posts, often photographically, and end with a slightly hysterical look at what I bought. (One of the bags was quite overweight, cough, cough, can’t think why that should have been.) For anyone who knows Shetland, I hope they’re evocative; for anyone who has not yet been…

My first short focus is on the lovely Crofthouse Museum near Boddam, just off the main road between Lerwick and Sumburgh. (Nice link, but it does repeat the ‘no trees’ myth.)

(The ropes are coir, and we were told that it’s getting very difficult to find the real McCoy when they need replacing, as they do.)

I’ve been before, and knew what to expect: a feel for past life in Shetland – albeit a comparatively well-off life, by mid-nineteenth-century-in-Shetland standards.

It is so evocative, from the box beds to the scent of the peat fire, from the mousetrap (ouch) to the deep windows and the earth floor in the ben end – the sleeping part. One of the box beds was away in an exhibition of taatit rugs at the Museum in Lerwick (what’s a taatit rug? watch this space). This gave an almost sculptural prominence to a wheel:

I’m not quite sure it was ready for action; I tried it tentatively, but…

Spinning and knitting, of course, were a vital part of the economy (check out this post on knitting to ‘pay’ for basic commodities from my last visit), and there is a hap shawl on a stretcher in the but end (the main room) to emphasise the point.

There are baskets (kishies and others) on top of the box beds and rivlins (sealskin or hide wrap-over home-made shoes) hang from the ceiling. There’s a big black kettle and a cruisie lamp. And there’s usually someone on duty who can enlighten you about the mousetrap, talk to you about peat cutting, and bring the reality of the past to life (and reveal, to our mutual surprise, common links to a small village in Sutherland).

Outside, quite apart from being very cold, it was blowing a hooley. As a result we didn’t walk down to the little mill or explore the stone-built shed with a roof formed from a boat’s hull, but we couldn’t escape the fish drying outside. Almost ready, apparently.

Personally, I think I’ll stick to the Fjara version. What softies we are now!