Monday, August 29, 2016

Gosia and I had a successful day yesterday, much helped by an excited cat as beds were stripped and mattresses turned. I must still do a bit more hoovering – my new, wonderful cordless vacuum cleaner has a relatively short attention span; it gave out on us. And I must iron some towels; buy some flowers; think what to feed them. That can all be managed.

Knitting consisted – again – only of progress with the Whiskey Barrel sock, but that went well. A nurse, seeing me at it, said that the Royal Infirmary always wants baby hats, in all baby sizes, not just for preemies. I suspect that such garments are treated as disposable like almost everything else in the NHS these days. Still, I thought I’d mention it, and might even do it.

The promised update on the Vintage Shetland Project turned up, and, sure enough, the book isn’t ready for the printer. We can wait – we’re used to it, by now.

Susan is worried, as she was well before the diagnosis, about the effort of sending out the books, and I am, again, a bit cross.

“Also from a personal perspective, if I time the publication correctly at the right point between treatments I will:
a)       physically be able to cope with preparing, packing and dispatching of so many books with becoming exhausted.”

She’s had our money for over a year now. Indeed, the long delay is largely our fault – we crowd-funded so much that she was able to delay publication (originally, November, 2015) and go back to Shetland several times and do more work on the book.  There are workarounds for this final problem – help can be recruited, hired, volunteered. Ill or not, she owes us, and grumbles are unseemly.

Something completely different

This fell out of a cupboard the other day, from my Fair Isle Period. I think it’s the one for which I collected bits of grass and heather in Strathardle one summer and then tipped them out on the counter in Art Needlework Industries in Ship Street in Oxford, and said, “I want to knit that”, and the assistant calmly brought me the yarn.



The colours are arranged on a system given as “the second type of Shetland design” in Odham’s Encyclopedia of Knitting, where the “background colours” and the “pattern colours” change regularly in relation to each other, while the stitch pattern marches to its own tune. I wonder if that makes any sense. I have never found evidence for such a system, other than that passage in Odham’s Enclycopedia. With a small stitch pattern, and plenty of colours, as here, it works well.


Such evidence might, of course, turn up in the Vintage Shetland Project. Or (more likely) Kate Davies might know – I trust everybody has seen the message about her and Tom’s new project.

17 comments:

  1. I'm not a crowdfunder so feel free to ignore this comment! Reading Susan's latest blog (and having a friend going through drastic chemotherapy for Hodgkin lymphoma) I suspect that the workaround you suggest would be far too much mentally. The stress of losing control of a project which has been so much a part of her life and under her control would, I suspect, make her present health situation, over which she has no control, very much harder to cope with. Cut her a further bit of slack I say!
    That interesting Shetland jumper is just Perdita's colour. Have a good time with your visitors.

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  2. Oh, Jean! Ironing towels? Will the young people even notice?

    Re Shetland designs. Liz Lovick's Pierowall Vest uses exactly that kind of arrangement with a sequence of background colours and pattern colours, changing one each row. The pattern is a very complex set of Celtic knots which runs on regardless of the colour changes. I knit my version of this using only two colours to simplify it.

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  3. Anonymous9:51 AM

    A friend of ours gave birth in a hospital in Germany and her son's little hat, given to all babies, was treasured so much that she asked me to knit a duplicate in a larger size. They had a normal baby---imagine what a treasured item a little hat would be if something had gone wrong. Sending such a gift into the world is a message of love so necessary in these hard times.

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  4. I see what you mean about the book. If it had been published when it should have been published, illness wouldnt have come into the equation.

    However, continuing to be involved in the book may be giving Susan something to cling onto in all this turmoil.

    I am glad Gosia is still around for you.

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  5. Jean - Like you I am frustrated with the Vintage Shetland Project (a Christmas present to myself last year). My late husband had stage 4 cancer so I know how hard chemo is but he still worked his job, helped with the kids and made beautiful art. If I had realized that Susan was disorganized I probably wouldn't have crowd-funded her.

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  6. Jean - Like you I am frustrated with the Vintage Shetland Project (a Christmas present to myself last year). My late husband had stage 4 cancer so I know how hard chemo is but he still worked his job, helped with the kids and made beautiful art. If I had realized that Susan was disorganized I probably wouldn't have crowd-funded her.

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    1. I dont think Susan is disorganized. I think she got so much more money than she asked for, that she decided to make a much bigger, better book, not taking into account how much more time it would take and not expecting to get ill.

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  7. Beautiful sweater and beautiful cat. My morning is improved just by looking at them.

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  8. I'm trying to imagine ironing a towel. Nope. My mother taught me to iron starting with my father's handkerchiefs, then onto pillow cases and sheets. I swore to her when I had my own house I would never iron sheets. One of the few chlldhood nevers I have stuck to! Glad things went smoothly. Perdita seems pleased with the newly unearthed sweater. It goes with her coloring.

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  9. Continuing the ironing theme, I remember my mother giving up ironing towels with alacrity when I told her the HE teacher said it spoiled the absorbancy.
    Dawn

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  10. Perdita looks gorgeous on that stunning jumper.

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  11. I have never contemplated ironing towels - not of the bathroom type. However I do try to iron the kitchen tea towels - you can get twice as many in the drawer when they have been flattened that way.

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  12. That sweater is wonderful, and it looks like it could still be worn. As for ironing the towels, all I can say is no guest at my house has ever had an ironed towel. No resident either. Washing, folding, and stacking them in the linen closet are my lofty goals. :-)

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  13. It is not that the little hats are treated as disposable, but that they are sent home with the babies - sadly, I don't know where my daughter's went, but we were given it to keep. All newborns, however bouncing and healthy, are given a hat as they are wrapped and handed to their mother. My son didn't have a hospital-issued hat because I knitted him one myself, and gave it to my midwife as soon as I got to the hospital. She admired it greatly and kept it safe until the appropriate moment.

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  14. I have never heard of ironing towels. Are they terrycloth towels or something else? I see jeanfromcornwall's point for tea towels (small house = small drawers), but I probably will continue to not iron those also.

    Regarding the book, in my experience, crowdfunded projects have variable delivery dates. I think it is a good sign that she expanded on the original goal. Maybe, as you suggest, she could enlist help for the shipping, etc., and if she creates detailed instructions, perhaps she won't feel it takes her control away? I kickstarted a device where they were repeatedly delayed and then removed a component so that they wouldn't have to delay much more. The problem was that the component they removed made the device immediately obsolete should their company go out of business. Which it did within a year of shipping the product. Sigh. But that is the risk with crowdfunding.

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    1. =Tamar6:10 PM

      It seems to me that help with the physical work of packaging and shipping would not take away control from her. The packers and shippers would be taking orders from her, after all. Most publishers don't glue the covers onto the books themselves. Accepting help with the shipping would be the equivalent of a promotion.

      Colorwork: the first time I ever heard of Shetland or Fair Isle knitting, it included the idea that every row had a color change, regardless of the overall pattern. I think that was in the 1960s but it may have been the late 1950s.

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  15. Iron? Towels? Seriously?
    I applaud your standards and hard work! I am trying to remember the last time I ironed ANYTHING, and I think it was a seam during my piecing/quilting phase 20 years ago.
    My clothes can have wrinkles, I do not care.
    Oh, and if Susan is anything like most of my family, the loss of control from having to bring in other people (even if they're doing EXACTLY AND ONLY what you say) is incredibly stressful. This would be why we started our Thanksgiving is for other people cooking tradition, as we couldn't keep my grandmother out of the kitchen (even with adorable great-grandbabies).
    Not saying you shouldn't be annoyed, just trying to offer an explanation.

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