The Gansey Talk (or, there was a microphone, but it was okay)

In which I talk about ganseys, and try not to make weird noises into the microphone - thank you to Sarah H for the photo

A huge thank you to everyone who came out to the Third Annual Boston Farm and Fiber Festival, and an equally huge thank you to those who paused in their day to listen to me speak with great enthusiasm about ganseys. It is always wonderful to meet other people who share an interest in and love for historically important but currently obscure forms of knitting.

When I imagined the talk, there was a table to share books and ganseys on. Sadly that existed only in my head. So thank you to the folks who were willing to join me on the floor to share their work and thoughts. (Also thanks to Sarah H. for driving to Boston and taking photos).

And a special thank you to the folks who stayed after to share their own gansey related show and tell, and poke through the books I brought, and generally geek out over the very unexpected and unique garment that is the gansey.

And of course a thank you to New England Farm to Fiber and the sponsors, Harrisville Designs and Taproot magazine! Every year the Festival is a little more amazing, with more vendors, more talks, and more enthusiastic fiber folk dressed in their finest.

I will admit that between the stage fright, the strangeness of talking into a microphone, and the general muddle that is my head, I don’t remember much of the actual talk itself, but I did spend the drive home wishing that I had touched on more than I did. Because the history of ganseys encompasses so many elements important to the history of knitting in the UK, and the social history of people who worked on the water, and the differing concepts of geography encoded by one’s relationship to the water and vessel type, and really it is too broad a subject to possibly do justing to in twenty minutes. And that is before one starts talking about the actual garment itself.

And personally it’s a bit weird to talk about any of those things because I am not British, and there is a feeling of cultural appropriation and overlooked nuance. But I am a mariner, and from the perspective of a mariner I can see that previous writers, though British themselves, have missed quite a bit more than nuance in their discussion of ganseys.

Perhaps the paragraph above is really the introduction to a book. We’ll see.

On a more personal note, one thing I also meant to share, and completely overlooked, was the personal history of the working gansey I knit for myself and my husband (who had his own maritime life). Each gansey really deserves it’s own post. Stay tuned.

My ganseys at rest (two of them were knit for my husband). Collectively they have more sea miles than I can count, and more days in shipyard than I care to remember.

Gansey Links

Recommended gansey books and links of interest relating to ganseys, gansey knitting, and gansey related maritime history. This list has grown out of research for a talk about gansey history at the 3rd Annual Boston Farm & Fiber Festival. Beware, my sense of “related to” is broad. Will be updated from time to time.

Books

(in the order I happen to have stacked them on my deck)

Gladys Thompson, Patterns for Guersnseys, Jerseys and Arans The original version of this book was published in 1955. She was perhaps the first person to “collect” and transcribe ganseys into written patterns for the wider knitting audience. Suggest using in conjunction with Beth’s book.

Beth Brown Reinsel, Knitting Ganseys (Revised and Updated) Contains a version of Elizabeth Zimmerman’s percentage method adapted for gansey design, along with a thorough explanation of how to use her method to design your own. Her book also includes a good history, an easy to follow collection of motifs, and several full patterns. The most user friendly of the gansey books. If I was to buy only one gansey book, I would buy this one.

Penelope Lister Hemingway, River Ganseys A very interesting survey of the history of a lesser known tradition of gansey knitting, combined with a good history of knitting in the British Isles generally. She does give a few gansey patterns, but I enjoy this book more for the broader research she does into the history, context, and technical background of gansey knitting.

Michael Pearson Traditional Knitting new and expanded Holy heck this book is worth it for the photos alone! Extensive history. Another “collector” of gansey patterns. Many written patterns given, but not necessarily in a format useable to first time gansey knitters. Would use in conjunction with Beth’s book for actual knitting.

Mary Wright, Cornish Guernseys & Knit-frocks Another of the “early collectors”, originally published in 1979. As the name suggests she focussed mainly on the tradition of knitting ganseys in Cornwall. Fascinating history, but from a knitting standpoint I would use this book in conjunction with Beth’s book if I was designing or knitting a gansey for the first time.

Sabine Domnick, Cables, Diamonds, Herringbone Great selection of motifs displayed both as samples and charted out. History a bit thin.

Websites - Gansey focussed

Gansey Nation - gansey.com Really the go-to site for all things gansey and the wonkiest of gansey discussions.

Propagansey - A festival of ganseys held annually

The Moray Firth Gansey Project “To find, record and conserve gansey patterns from around the Moray Firth coast.”

The Cordova Gansey Project Inspired by the Moray Firth Gansey Project, bringing the tradition of gansey knitting to the Alaskan Salmon Fishery and beyond.

Of Maritime Interest

Because this was a maritime tradition

Humber Keel and Sloop Preservation Society

video of the Humber Keel

lovely video about sailing a Thames River Barge with brief mention of the sort of regular voyages made up to places like Yorkshire

Shetland Museum and Archives

Of Linguistic Interest

Getting into the weeds of “Guernsey” vs “Gansey” vs “Ganzee” vs “Geansaigh” and “Geansaigh snåth” and remembering that there are three languages and many dialects of each spoken in the British Isles (not counting Cornish which went extinct as a first language at the end of the 18th century, though attempts at reconstruction began in the early 20th century). Yup, it’s a fascinating linguistic soup.

Highlighting this post from Gansey Nation for the fascinating discussion in the comments.

Doric

North East Scots (Doric) History Present and Future : of specific interest, the comment that farmers and sailors in Buchie spoke slightly different Doric

A longer Ted Talk about Doric (and also neurolinguistics and the importance of the language you speak)

Of General Knitterly Interest

How to knit faster (using a knitting belt) - I am a process knitter and don’t for a moment believe that knitting skill and knitting speed are the same thing; but knitting speed is a knitting skill, and contract knitters could attain amazing speeds using knitting belts, knitting sticks, or sometimes twists of straw.

The Start of a New Gansey

(Or rather, the start of blogging about the new gansey; the actual gansey has been in production for about a year now. As of this writing I’ve divided for the upper front and back. As always, I would rather do the thing than write about the thing).

The release of Beth Brown Reisnel’s updated Knitting Ganseys made my fingers itch to knit another. One day, when I can better concentrate on crossing cables, I will knit Beth’s Snakes and Ladders (designed with Upton Yarns Coopworth 5-Ply Gansey yarn) for myself, but at the moment much of my knitting takes place in cars, or in a dimly lit room while the toddler sleeps, or when the toddler was still small enough to fit in a baby wrap, around the bump of sleeping baby in front of me. In these circumstances horizontal motifs of seed and moss stitch are soothing and occasion fewer dropped stitches and muttered bad language.

Sam has been the beneficiary of my gansey knitting impulses twice before, but both instances predate Upton Yarns. When he fell in love with the steely like blue gray gansey yarn on my drying rack it seemed time to remedy the Upton Yarns shaped hole in his gansey wardrobe.

This colorway has been christened “Falling Waters” after my favorite hiking trail in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I have spent years at sea knitting ganseys meant for service in a maritime environment, but with this gansey (now that I have walked inland with my metaphorical oar) I am setting out our intentions to relearn the New England mountains we grew up in. While a little heavy to carry on long hikes, ganseys are great for shoulder season day hikes.

The Swatch

I am an impatient knitter, or rather, I am a knitter who is impatient to start working on the actual piece. I do not swatch as much as I know that I should. Upton Yarns has actually helped me with this; previously I could never really figure out what to do with the swatches after their initial use in garment planning was complete. I am a process knitter and generally knit for the love of feeling yarn move between needles, but even so swatching felt like a speed bump on the way toward the really satisfying work of creating a garment. Now, swatching has become a way of creating little inspirational pieces that fit on my display table when I go to yarn events. Swatches help other people imagine their own creations, and as such I have discovered that I love the pressure-free act of creating them. When I swatch I’m not trying to “get gauge” or concerned about trying to fit the yarn to a pre-existing design, I’m just moving the yarn from one needle to the next and seeing what it wants to be, experimenting with different motifs to see how they fit the yarn, and how the yarn fits them. Freed from expectations, swatching has become one of my favorite ways of knitting.

When I started thinking about this gansey last year, I was usually knitting around a sleeping baby in the baby wrap. It turns out that swatches are perfect for this kind of knitting. So I got carried away.

I swatched until I ran out of yarn. This is what one 240 yard skeins looks like when knit, or rather as much of it as will fit in frame. There is an additional six or so inches of stockinette with the wearer’s initials, and a garter stitch welt with channel island cast-on just below the bottom edge of the photo. The whole thing is about as long as my arm, and if seamed would be a reasonably fitting sleeve. I cast on a bunch of stitches (66? I did not keep good notes on the swatch) knit the welt I knew I wanted to use, the stockinette and monogram that I also knew I wanted to use, and then turned to pages 42-3 in the updated edition of Knitting Ganseys. I knew that I wanted to make a relatively simple gansey full of horizontal motifs, possibly with a large definition motif at the top of the plain stockinette, or possibly not.

Pages 42 and 43 are a joy. (Actually, the whole chapter on pattern motifs is a joy, but the motifs on pages 42 and 43 are the ones that were most relevant to my design interests for this gansey).

Beth doesn’t include any photos of the motifs knit up on these pages, only the graphs, which makes knitting the motifs an act of discovery. I moved from knitting one to the next, knitting each for as long as I wanted to until I felt like I had a sense of what it would look like knit full size.

And when I finally ran out of yarn, I cast off my swatch and cast on for the full size gansey.

Ganseys and Gansey Yarn

I have fallen right back under the metaphorical rock thanks to spending last week in a class necessary to maintain my Coast Guard License (long boring story, also a long boring class, but my fellow participants worked on drill rigs and tug boats and that bit was fascinating) but now I get to spend the morning sipping my first cup of coffee and catching up with my favorite blogs. 

I was thrilled to discover that The Fringe Association published a really lovely interview with Dotty Widman of the Netloft in Cordova, Alaska about the Cordova Gansey Project.   Dotty's series of posts on her own blog have become some of my favorite writing about knitting generally and ganseys specifically.

(You can find the yarn I created for the #cordovaganseyproject listed here at the Netloft's website).

Now that I am finally done with the Coast Guard class I will have time to work with the 2016 Coopworth gansey yarn that arrived while I was away (I could not be happier with how it turned out!).  For those of you on the wait list for 2016 Coopworth gansey yarn, I am trying to put together a newsletter to inform you that it is finally here, and that I am beginning to work with it.  I would rather spend time working with yarn than trying to create a pretty newsletter about yarn, so I may just give up on the newsletter and send a quick email.  If you are on the wait list and you read this, feel free to send me a quick email about your order.  

The two natural colors of my 2016 Coopworth Gansey yarn - lovely undyed, and gorgeous after a few dips in the indigo vat.

I Wish I Was in Cordova, Alaska.

We are alongside in Petersburg, Alaska today and I have taken advantage of my morning off to run to a coffee shop and catch up a bit on all the Instagram postings from participants in the Net Loft's Fiber & Friends: Fisherfolk 2016 gathering . Much as I love Petersburg, and my job, I am so very bummed that I am not in Cordova this week sharing in all the gansey knitting, indigo dyeing, and general crafting. 

So, hello to all of you in Cordova at the moment.  For those of you on Instagram #cordovaganseyproject is full of gorgeous ganseys, and #fiberandfriends2016fisherfolk is likewise a tag to check out. 

The Net Loft commissioned a run of my Straw's Farm Island Sheep Gansey yarn.  If you are interested in working with gansey yarn spun from Maine island sheep, please buy through the Net Loft first, but if you have a color way in mind, or the color you want is sold through, please get in touch - I have a bit more of undyed yarn at home, which I will begin working with again during the middle of July. 

A Very Overdue Craft Roundup

In amongst all the farm visits I actually managed to get a fair bit of crafting done, though as usual I let myself be lazy about blogging. 

First up, I worked up a few more dye lots of my Straws Farm Island Sheep gansey yarn for the Netloft’s Cordova Gansey Project.  For this batch I experimented with larger skeins, and found that I actually quite enjoy working with them.  Anyone interested in this yarn should contact Dotty at the Netloft (and anyone interested in knitting ganseys should check out her site and the Cordova Gansey Project on principle).  

I let myself play with the darker blue end of the spectrum

While my indigo vat was in use anyway I decided to start messing around a bit with shibori.  I’ve only dyed the one piece so far, but I am very pleased with the result.  I will definitely be exploring this a bit more. 

 Next, for Christmas this year we received a generous Amazon gift certificate from a family member and with that in hand we decided to finally buy the sewing machine that we had been eyeing for months.  It arrived somewhere around the middle of my break, when the piles of indigo dyed gansey yarn were taking over every available craft space (and crafting moment) so it sat in its box, abandoned, until I returned home in April, at which point I very bravely opened it up and set to re-learning how to use a sewing machine.  

I have can’t explain why exactly, given that I was a fairly competent user of sewing machines in high school, but for some reason I find myself intimidated by sewing and sewing machines.  It may have something to do with all the beautiful handmade clothes on my Instagram feed: something that I used to do for a lark now comes with Standards, and The Right Way to Do Things, which always piques the interest of my internal, merciless, Editor of All Things Craft.  Once she starts paying attention, seemingly simple tasks become fraught with Great Import and I find myself ripping back rows and rows to address mistakes that only I can see.  My internal editor does make me better at craft generally, but she also kind of sucks the fun out of doing them.  I am working at achieving a balance, wherein I let her know that I appreciate her critical eye, but could she please just shut up sometimes and let me have fun.  We’ll see how that goes…. 

Anyway, I began to reacquaint myself with the sewing arts by tackling Grainline Studio’s Stow Bag.   My internal editor would like to point out a few wonky seams and some less than skillful use of bias tape, but I am overall quite pleased by the results. (I’ve also never sewn with bias tape before, so yay new skill!).  As a project bag the Stow Bag is everything I could want - simple, easy to knit out of, with just enough pockets to hide the fiddly little notions that tend to collect in the bottom of my project bags.  I am planning to make quite a few more when I get home this time, to keep practicing those new skills before I move on to clothing (gulp! maybe even involving fabric that I have dyed!). 

And then, as noted in my last post, I finally made my peace with the slightly rumpled ribbon on the button band of my Epistrophy by Kate Davies, which I then wore quite proudly to the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool Festival.

As always my rotation home went waaayy too quickly.  I am already plotting all the crafty things I want to try when I get home in July.  

What I Got Up To Whilst Home Part 2: scads of gansey yarn

I have been looking forward to this project all year.  First, if you haven’t yet read Dotty’s amazing posts about her Cordova Gansey Project and all that inspired it, you should go to her blog post haste.    Cordova, Alaska,  is a fishing town, and Dotty and her family are fisherfolk.  To very briefly summarize her wonderful eleven part series of posts; while attending Shetland Wool Week she was drawn to the knitting traditions of a culture of fishermen and inspired to bring them to her modern day (though not that different) fishing village in Alaska.  To that end she has created the Cordova Gansey Project, bringing together people interested in all aspects of gansey study, design, creation, and wear.  This June (date) she will be hosting a week of classes and yarn adventure in Cordova in celebration of ganseys and fisherfolk.  The list of teachers reads like a who’s who of the knitters and dyers I am in awe of.

I love everything about this project (history! boats! complicated forms of traditional knitting!) but the bit that I am personally honored by is that a special batch of my gansey yarn will be at the Netloft for this event.  The fleece for this gansey yarn comes from Straw’s Farm, in Newcastle, Maine.  Or rather, the farm is in Newcastle, but the sheep themselves live year round on an Island in Penobscot Bay.  The island has been occupied by sheep for the last two hundred years or so; whatever breed they started as has been lost to time (hence the unwieldy yarn name, “Straw’s Farm Island Sheep”).  The moment I learned about this flock I knew that I had to use their fleece in some project, and when Dotty got in touch about her Gansey Project I knew that it was the perfect match - heritage island wool from Maine going to a gansey project in Alaska.

There are a variety of different fleece and yarn buying models for small yarn producers. Some have their own flocks and sell yarn only derived from that flock, some buy fleece from wool brokers or wool pools, some buy base yarns from a third party, and some, like me, buy fleeces directly from small farmers.  The time needed to get from fleece to yarn to finished yarn varies, as one might imagine, depending on the source of the fleece and the mill that does the spinning.  I tend to start planning my fleece buy in February, buying fleece as the sheep are sheared (the timing of which depends on the farm in question).  Then it’s a matter of getting fleece to the mill, and the mill getting the yarn back to me.  If I send fleece in June I sometimes get it back in August, or sometimes I get it back in January: a lot depends on the size of the job and complexity of the yarn.  This is a long way of saying that I have been planning my part of this project since last February, and finally during my last rotation home I got to work with the yarn.  

Last June Sarah of FiberTrek was good enough to help me pick up 172 lbs of island wool from Straw’s Farm (contributing her Subaru to the cause).

(For anyone who has ever been curious about what 172 lbs of fleece packed into the back of a station wagon looks like.)

Shortly thereafter it was off to the mill, and then all I could do was wait. And wait. And wonder. And plot.

And then in January the boxes started arriving back from the mill.

And I started turning coned yarn into skeins for scouring and dyeing.  And once I had enough yarn ready, my world become all indigo all the time.

(The pot on the left is for scouring. The shorter pot on the right is my indigo pot.)

For all of my plotting and planning, once I started dyeing I left a lot of room for serendipity.  Natural indigo is a funny thing.  Sometimes a certain batch is just a little more gray or a little more blue than the preceding batch, and sometimes really amazing colors just appear for no predictable reason.  So when I was lucky enough to get a really unique batch I let it stand rather than continuing to dye it to a dark blue.

I let the batch on the left stay as it was.  Ultimately I ended up with a few more lots this color - Child’s Glacier

And the finished yarn started piling up;

And piling up;

And eventually I had five colors.

And then it all went out to the Netloft.  Anyone interested in this yarn, or in the Cordova Gansey Project, should get in touch with Dotty.  

And then waaaaay too quickly my rotation home was over and it was back to the Sea Lion for me, but I took a bit of my gansey yarn with me to swatch.  

I swatched without any project in mind, just trying out motifs that I’ve been curious to see in person. I need to tuck ends and block it a bit harder (this yarn has spirit!) but already I am in love with the result.

I have always thought of my ganseys as armor against bad weather and the world; portable, fitted, security blankets for adventure (because in my experience Adventure! is generally cold and wet).  My ganseys are not for wearing indoors when the heat could be turned up a few degrees; I bring them out when I am working outdoors or doing slightly scary things in cold weather.  In my earlier life that meant sanding and painting small boats in a barn heated just enough so the paint would kick, or sailing a schooner in bad weather, or parking cars on the deck of a ferry in a Maine winter, or chopping firewood; now that I am a bit more domesticated these days they come out for cold mornings on deck in Alaska and winter walks with the dog.  The Straw’s Farm Island Sheep gansey yarn is perfect for this sort of gansey, dense and tough, but with a little bit of elasticity.  From an artistic standpoint, the spinning is ever so slightly irregular which combined with the slightly uneven dyeing lends a depth and texture and personality to the stitches.  There are occasional small bits of kemp, which I was at first a little surprised and annoyed by (I didn’t even notice the kemp in the fleece!) but I have come to love, because it is a reminder of island sheep turning their backs to a cold Gulf of Maine wind and just going on about their sheepy business because there’s no point in getting upset about the weather.  Which is exactly how I feel wearing a gansey.
 
And for those on the Coopworth Gansey yarn wait list, the Coopworth sheep of Buckwheat Blossom Farm have been shorn.  As soon as I get home from this rotation on the Sea Lion (middle of April) I will be visiting the farm, catching up with Amy, and selecting fleeces.  

Ganseys! or, reasons why they are even better than you think.

For many years I worked on traditionally rigged schooners (mostly the schooners used for experiential education programs, though I've also done tall ship festivals and dock tours) boats which, except for a few differences (electricity, refrigeration, engines, student crews) were constructed, rigged, and operated exactly as they would have been a hundred years ago.  Actually, several of the boats I worked on were build over a hundred years ago, and while they move students and passengers these days rather than fish and sand, the sailing is the same.  I started knitting my gansey (the second gansey I knit, the first was for my husband, knit years before I was to find boats) while living aboard the Ship Wavertree (built in 1885, now docked in the East River at what used to be Pier 15) and working aboard the Schooner Pioneer (also build in 1885, and now taking passengers on two hour sails around New York Harbor – look her up if you find yourself with a spare summer evening in NYC).  I continued to knit my gansey while working on Highlander Sea, ex Pilot (built in 1924 for the Boston Pilots Association) tearing out and re-knitting sleeves now a bit too tight, and I finally finished it while sailing north from Belize on the Harvey Gamage, three months into a four month semester at sea program for high school students.

I have since worn that gansey while doing a thousand things that would be utterly familiar to most men who wore them back in the day, furling sails, hauling lines, flaking out anchor chain, climbing aloft far too early in the morning (swearing all the while) to unfrig a fouled topsail sheet, scraping sanding and painting some bit of the boat for the nth time, carrying heavy things onto the boat, carrying heavy things off of the boat, standing at the helm at two in the morning steering by a star, fixing a bilge pump worn out from overuse for the nth time, and curled up in my bunk fully dressed and soaking wet.  At times schooner life is impossibly, romantically amazing, but more often it is cold and wet and kind of gross.

I am one of what I suspect is a small number of people currently alive who have extensively worn a gansey knit from gansey yarn in the work environment for which they were created (except for the fishing bit) and I have reached a few conclusions that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere.

Firstly, the armpit gusset really is genius: they really do give a lovely freedom of movement.  I can work with my arms above my head (a frequent occurrence on boats, especially given that I am not tall) without my gansey rutching up.  And the gussets also have a practical effect on the longevity of the gansey: every other sweater that I have worn for work ultimately tears at the underarm.  When I reach above my head most of the weight of the sweater rests on the seam where the front and back of the sweater meet the sleeve, and those few stitches will inevitably give way.  A gansey, being constructed in one piece, distributes the weight of itself far more evenly across a far greater number of stitches, and the gusset removed the weak point at the underarm entirely.

Secondly, one of the things that I have seen commonly written about ganseys, that they are “knit so tightly as to be wind and water proof” is just silly.  I knit incredibly tightly, even when I am trying to do the opposite, and my gansey is neither wind nor waterproof, even after I have dipped it in a solution of wool fat, but being wind and waterproof is not all that important: wind and waterproofness is the purview of foully jackets, these day usually coated vinyl (oilskins back in the day) but what they do do is far more important: ganseys hold their shape when wet (which on a boat is most of the time).  They neither sag, nor bag, or impede movement; wearing a sopping wet gansey is not that different from wearing a dry gansey.  Before you dismiss this, think of your favorite sweater or sweatshirt. Now think about how it bags and hangs and sticks to you weirdly and snags on everything once it gets wet. Now imagine climbing a very narrow ladder that is moving erratically, and at the top wriggling yourself through an opening barely larger than yourself, and all this just to get to the place you need to be so you can start your real work (which is generally much scarier than the climb itself).  Even modern fleece is unpleasant in this situation (actually, I’m biased, I dislike modern fleece in any situation) but I’ve done something very similar in my gansey on many occasions, and have never had cause to note that my gansey was in any way making the situation more difficult – which may seem like faint praise, but it really really isn’t.

And finally, knitting the sleeves from the top down is brilliant.  Not only does is prevent the heartbreaking moment when you realize that because of gauge differences the shoulder on your sleeve does not match the shoulder on the body of the sweater, but when the cuffs wear through, which they will, it make the repairs the work of a lazy evening.  I have re-knit the last few inches of both sleeve several times with no fuss or annoyance.