Ossianknits

Burns Weekend

Burns Night is one of those weird British holidays I've come to love over the years. Not as odd as Guy Fawkes, not as patriotic as St Andew's Day, but - the way me and my friends do it - quiet and lovely. There were two Burns suppers this weekend, and both were fun and yummy. I sadly forgot to take pictures (despite taking the camera to both) - oh, let's face it, I was too busy stuffing my face with fake haggis, neeps and tatties...

Both Burns suppers took place out of town - one in the Badlands, one out towards Strathkinness - a good 20 minute walk! It was one of the coldest weekends ever - ice-covered roads and pavements, slippery slopes and glittering trees:

This is the top of Paul's car Saturday night/Sunday morning. We had to scrape the ice off the windows!

I co-hosted the second supper, and about three hours before it was due to start - while I was at work in the library, I was informed via facebook that I'd be doing the speech. Yeah, right, I thought. And then I got on with it, and this is what I came up with:

Burns – the dude

A long long time ago today
Rob Burns was born in Alloway.
A humble farmer’s son he was
No man of letters, though the mass
Of poems that he left us, now
Does make you wonder, sometimes, how
He found the time to do all this,
As well as frolick with the miss-
Tresses of old Dumfries town,
Where late in life he was renown-
Ed as a tax collector,
And exciseman, and the inspector
Of poetry, and neeps and tatties,
And ladies – jeans, and simple Bettys.

The haggis, as we’ve seen tonight,
Put on a brave and valiant fight,
But, let’s be frank, the poor wee beastie
Did not protest when it was seized –eeh!
For it was proud to die for Burns,
And as the hunting season turns
From bear and deer and stag and bunny
To Haggis, small and big and funny,
Then Burns out of the closet comes,
Off of the bookshelf, and that sums
Up this dreadful little poem,
That I composed today to show ‘em
That Burns is quite an awesome dude,
Though dead a while, he gave us food
For thought and drink, and some
Fantastic haggis – oh what fun!

Hope you had a fun Burns weekend!

Hoot hoot - squee!

The owls are done. And they are most lovely. And totally wonderful. And fantastic. And all sorts of wonderful things. Well done, Kate - the pattern is awesome!

I (re)cast on for the jumper on Friday, and cast off yesterday morning, and then spent the afternoon sewing on wee owl eyes. Then the owls and I went to the pub for Monday night pub night, and they were much admired, even (especially?) by the non-knitters present!

 
(Excuse the quality of the pictures. It's continually dark in the frozen north at this time of year. I'll attempt to get some daylight ones as soon as it... well... appears).

The jumper is much more blue in real life. More like this blue, or possibly this blue. But very very lovely. And everyone is right - the owls totally become little characters when the eyes are in place! I found the green slitty buttons (that aren't very owl-like, I know. Owls really have round eyes, but these were too cute to resist) at the local sewing shop (there's only one in town). I purposefully sewed them up at different angles so the owls would scowl, and squint, and doze off, and all sorts of other expressionally thingies.

I really like the owl on the right in this picture. I think it might be my favourite one. But don't tell the others - especially those sly ones!

So yes, owls. Lots and lots of owls!

Owls, again

Sally asked how the owls are going - I was sort of avoiding the blog a little until I had success to report. Well, I do - in so far that the pattern is now published over on Kate's blog, and in that I concede defeat in making up the jumper myself.

You see, I finished the whole thing. And then I frogged it because the shoulders and the back shaping wasn't quite right. And then I knit the body again, and parts of the yoke, and then I frogged it because the shoulders and the back shaping wasn't quite right. And then this morning, just as I was about to go back to the drawing board to work out what is wrong (I cast on way too many stitches and didn't figure in how stretchy the fabric is), Kate published the pattern. My yarn is thinner than her's, but my gauge isn't far off, so I'm knitting one size bigger than I need - I think this will work out. Hopefully. So now I have two sleeves (with the wrong number of stitches - I'll sort that when I get to the yoke) and 13.5 inches of the body, which I knit today. 2.5 inches left to go - do you think I can finish the body before bed tonight, bearing in mind it's 9pm already? Yes, I think so too.

Books and things

I'm still obsessed with the owls. I think it as 'owls' in my head - not 'the jumper', or 'the blue jumper', or 'current knitting project'. No. Owls. Sometimes, when I'm being silly, I think of it as 'owls - squee'. But always 'owls'.

The New Lanark yarn didn't want to be owls. I tried. It resisted. I tried again. It still resisted. I tried again. It just wouldn't budge. No owls for Blue John. So I picked up some bright blue Drops Alaska I had sitting around (a sweater's worth!), and it so wanted to be owls. It felt totally right - I could practically hear it hooting! There was a lot of knitting yesterday, and I now have a body and a third of a sleeve - how exciting is that? Very, I know. And the best part? My maths still made sense. I'm knitting this on smallish 4.5 needles, at a tight gauge, and the measurements were the same as the original design plan. Excellent I thought. Most excellent.

In between the knitting I read a chapter of the book I'm currently reading for work, Matthew Wickman's The Ruins of Experience. Scotland's "Romantick" Highlands and the Birth of the Modern Witness. I've had it for a while but haven't read it before. I'm not quite sure if I like it - it's got some very interesting ideas, and most of the sections on the 18th century are very interesting, but I've spotted a few sketchy bits (particularly in the Macpherson section), and I'm generally not too keen on the modern parts. I think it's an Americanism - the need to theorise, to put things in a modern context, to evoke modern philosophers and thinkers in a book on the 18th century (and I don't mean other critics). Often, it seems, American scholars come up with a theory and then find examples to back them up. Or they start with modern thinkers and then work their way backwards. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that's bad, just that it isn't the way I do things. I work the other way round - I look at 18th-century texts, then work out their links and common points, and then use modern critics. Critics, but rarely philosophers. I would never, for example, compare Macpherson's and fake Holocaust memoirs, which Wickman does. It works - it just doesn't do anything for me. I must admit I find myself skimming most of his modern bits. However, and this is why I brought this up, Wickman's main point is a very interesting one: there was a shift in the legal system in the 18th century - it went from being mainly witness-based to being based on circumstantial evidence. He links this to a number of texts, including Ossian, where he applies it both to the authenticity debate and to the poems themselves.

This, in turn, is linked to the 'fun' book I'm reading at the moment (or rather, the 'fun' book I finished this morning), Robert Loehr's Der Schachautomat (The Secrets of the Chess Machine, Penguin 2007)). I was given Loehr's other book, Das Erlkoenig-Manoever, for Christmas, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It's an adventure story that involves Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Bettine  Bretano, Alexander von Humboldt and Achim von Arnim and their quest to rescue the French king from Napoleon's men. Very exciting indeed. I thorougly enjoyed that book, so I bought Loehr's other one as well. Der Schachautomat is about Wolfgang von Kempelen, the inventor of the 'chess turk' chess automaton (Wikipedia is your friend) and Tibor, the brain of the machine - he operated it from inside. Unlike some of my other fun reading, this has an obvious connection to my work: fakes and hoaxes. While my PhD is not focussed on the Ossianic collections, any study of Macpherson and his works cannot escape these issues - and I must say I'm thoroughly enjoying reading about all sorts of practical jokes, forgeries and deceptions - and about the fraudsters that perpetrated them. (Of course,  Der Schachautomat is also set in my period - the mid to late 18th century). I love it when my readings overlap - sometimes the connections is obvious, sometimes it only appears in retrospect. But there usually is one. I'm intrigued by this - does this happen to everyone? Sometimes I consciously pick books set in my period, or classics, but sometimes I just pick up something fun - a Neil Gaiman, for example, or a Walter Moers - and halfway through I realise they're totally connected to what I've been reading all day long. I'm fascinated by this.

I'll therefore leave you with a challenge: can you predict the connection between my work interests and my unread Christmas books?

Owls and maths

I'm positively obsessed with the owls. I finished reading half of my not-so-fun 'work' book at quarter past nine and then knit on the owls. I used my ripped Blue John yoke jumper as a swatch and briefly worked out how many stitches to cast on, and got going. Halfway through the Midsummer Murders episode I was watching I realised that my gauge was off - 15/4inch instead of 17/4inch. So back to the drawing board. This time I double-checked everything and worked out the maths for the whole body of the sweater. I think it makes sense. I hope it's going to work out.

So... finally... when my dashboard looked like this:

I had this:

and this:

I just looked at it again and it still makes sense to me - do you sometimes get that? Scribbles (mostly of the number variety) make perfect sense at night, but then in the morning you have no idea why you wrote them down? Not this time. This time it all makes sense!

I cast on the required 142 stitches and worked in 2x2 rib for a couple of inches, and then half an inch of plain stockinette. I'll start decreasing once I get to 3 inches, which should be sometime soon.

Wish me luck that it all works out. It's very cold at the moment (yay for old-fashioned flats without central heating) and I could really do with a warm wooly jumper. Plus, everyone at work seems pretty excited about this one so it'd better work out...

Happy new year, everyone.

Hello! It's nice to be back.

As always Christmas and Hogmanay have flown by - I spent a week at my parents', a week in Berlin, and another couple of days at my parents'. There was knitting, but I didn't take my camera so there aren't any photos. There was a red pair of socks, and a green/blue pair of socks, both made mainly on the long train ride home. I took the train all the way to Germany - from Leuchars to Edinburgh, from Edinburgh to London, from London to Brussels, from Brussels to Cologne, from Cologne to where my parents live. It took all day - I left St Ands at just after 7am, and got to my parents' place at about 10.30pm (which is 9.30 our time). I really enjoyed the journey - except for the elderly couple that talked at me all the way from Darlington to London, despite my brave efforts to resist. I watched a film, listened to music, knit, read a book - but none of that stopped them. Meh. The rest of the journey was lovely - I shared a table with two other PhD students, one of whom got her knitting out as soon as she sat down. It turned out that she was on the way to Aachen, and that we were on the same train from Brussels to Germany, so we had a pint together in Brussels. We didn't sit together on the second train as I was booked in first class (25€ for second class, 36€ for first) on the Thalys. I highly recommend going first class - I got fed (large cheesplate, rolls, nibbles, chocolate) and watered (they came round at least three times on the two hour journey - and there was wine!). Most exciting. The seats were comfortable, and I had a huge single window armchair. There was free wireless and a (sadly continental) socket.

Christmas and New Year's were quiet - I knit a bit, and read lots, and generally just sat about not doing much at all. I bought lots of books with my shiny bookvouchers, and only enough yarn for one project (a green and brown striped scarf, half done). You see, I'm not going to buy any yarn this year, other than for special projects. Well, I'll try anyway. Since I got back home I made a beret and a half out of some stash yarn, and I've cast on for a jumper. I fell in love with Kate's owl jumper - I don't know what it is - maybe it's an eighteenth-century thing? - but the wee creatures made me squeal with delight. I think I might use my dark blue (Blue John, in fact) New Lanark DK for it. I ripped out the jumper I was making with it because I didn't like the way it fit, but because Kate's is made with chunky yarn and my yarn is DK it's going to involve a lot of thinking. And, you know, maths. I think I've worked out the measurements for the body, and I don't think I'll worry about the owl till I get there. (I've also put the second beret on hold for now - although it is really pretty. The yarn, however, isn't much fun to work with. S. below). But - can I say it again? - owls!!! Wise little owls! PhD owls to help me with my research! (Owls that required copious amounts of exlamation marks!).

Oh, the berets. Let me show you before I forget. The first one is stripy:

It's very big, but I like that about it. It's not particuarly warm (due to it's fluffyness) but pretty, methinks.

The brim, as you can see, is icorded, and made from both yarns held together.

The second beret is a fairisle one:

I started decreasing just after the second blue slipped stitch row so it shouldn't take much longer to finish. But I really really really want owls now! The brim is also icorded, with the blue yarn held double.