The Domestic Soundscape

I have finally finished knitting, seaming, zippering and weaving in the ends of, the twice-frogged mansweater. I am in a malaise so am not taking my uncharacteristically critical observations of this completed garment too seriously; I will review the situation in a week or so, since the Man is wanting to wear this today rather than allow me to obsessively re-block it. This is probably a good sign. I mean him wanting to wear it. Here he is in said sweater, mucking around in the autumn leaves.

I love love LOVED knitting with this wool. It is incredibly soft and warm, puffs up with a beautiful bloom when blocked, and is extremely forgiving when seamed and sewn in a perhaps less-than-perfect fashion. Its rich colour – which is the natural colour of the sheep that it came from – is pleasingly rich and bearlike, and I think it will wear in very nicely. It is 100% shetland wool purchased from Blacker Designs, and I used about 11 balls of it to knit the mansweater.

My favourite thing about it is the nice way that it sits around Mark’s back and hips. I like that it follows his actual shape and is not made in the normal man-is-rectangle mode of masculine knitwear. I am also proud of the neatness of my stitching around the shoulder-seams, and the clever way that I have concealed the zipper between two layers of knitting so that the scratchy, nylonic nightmare that is the zipper-fabric is not scratching against Mark’s neck.

My least favourite thing has been installing said zipper (really, wool and zippers never should meet in my opinion) and trying to work from an existing garment, rather than knitting from scratch a design more suited to the specific personality of this wool. The template for this sweater was made in a cotton/acrylic blend. It was heavy and massive and had been machine knit in flat pieces and then seamed together on industrial sewing machines. It was, in retrospect, foolhardy of me to think that its shape and construction could be easily translated to the makings of a handknit garment, and reorganised to accommodate an in-the-round construction, and a 100% wool composition. This is a valuable lesson, and I have now got the perfect gauge-swatch, should I ever decide I want to revisit this idea and construct something for the man again, starting this time with the wool…in fairness, if I hadn’t ripped out the whole body once and redone the shoulder section twice, this wouldn’t have been such an immense knit! I would like very much to sit down and write the story of this sweater soon, so that I immortalise all the knowledge I have gathered in the creating of this jumper.

The neckband and placket have been done twice; the first time involved steeking the placket and continuing the fabric of the body up much further than in this final design. It wouldn’t close around Mark’s neck and looked extremely foolish. In spite of Mark’s loyal defense of my efforts he eventually conceded that it was almost unwearable. So I ripped back the design, effected fewer raglan decreases in the round before switching to flat knitting for the top shoulder section, and grafted the shoulders together at the top to create a stretchy join, allowing for his manly shoulders to fill out the design without strain.

I then picked up around the top and knit a double-layered collar with a ribbed outer layer, and a stocking stitch inner layer. Then began the evil zippering of the garment. I found the entire process of putting the zipper into the garment to be a nightmare from start to finish and in spite of undoing and redoing things several times it still doesn’t lie flat, because wool and zipper are the material enemies of one another. In fact I find it hard to imagine any two such materials with less affinity for one another than the unyielding plasticky ick of zipper, vs the forgiving, stretchy loveliness that is wool.

Bah to zipper, Mmm to wool. I am confident that blocking it will help… Mark seems less bothered about it than I, which is encouraging. And he is not eager to relinquish his toasty sweater so soon after getting it, for a second round of blocking!

In spite of my gripings, the sweater does look good on the man as he is going about his Sunday, and I am assured that it is warm and comfortable. I am very happy to have made a jumper for my beloved bear and I have realised that when you make something for someone you really love, it just can’t be perfect enough. The knitting in the round of the body and sleeves was joyous and pleasant, with wafts of delicate sheep-smell rising periodically from the growing tubes on my needles, and the warmth in my lap shall be missed now that the Winter is commencing in earnest. Luckily I have another enormous, 100% wool garment to be getting on with.

Happy belated birthday, Mark, I hope you are warm all Winter. XxX

Happy Halloween! I know that technically it’s tomorrow, but there is to be a small party over at Ruth’s tonight and since I love Autumn more than any other season – and Halloween more than any other holiday – I thought I’d make a whole weekend of it, starting today.

Celebrations require music, so I made a seasonal Imix which can be viewed and purchased from the iTunes store here. I also made a Spotify mix which is slightly different, since iTunes and Spotify don’t have all the same tunes in their database. Both mixes contain many tunes that I consider to be especially witchy and magical because it’s that time of year.

I am especially enjoying the topical ‘Autumn Sweater’ by Yo La Tengo, and the very rustic ‘Bundles’ by Mariee Sioux. Mariee Sioux is one of my favourite female vocalists; I love the slightly unhinged banshee quality of her voice and the lyrics with their evocations of plant medicine and magic. At this time of year when the berries are all over the bushes in such an abundance, songs containing references to fruits seem all the more topical. Bundles reminds me slightly of Yoko Ono and ‘Yes, I’m a witch,’ which I love as a feminist title for an album. My favourite track on that album is the very atmospheric and reflective ‘Death of Samantha.’ I am reading a book about Yoko Ono at the moment and loving her very material use of sounds. Consider ‘Secret piece,’ which is a score. It reads like this:

Secret Piece

Decide on one note that you want to play. Play it with the following accompaniment:

The woods from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. in summer.

- Yoko Ono

I love this material use of the soundscape of the forest; this idea that in the same way that you can decide to use a piano as an instrument in a piece of music, you can use the soundscape of the forest. To me this is a sort of transformational magic, to turn the woods into an instrument. I have been slow to embrace Ono in my studies but when I was working on the Cut & Splice podcast series for Sound and Music I came across some of her early recordings and realised that her work represents a crucial link between feminism and the ideas of John Cage – two key ideas for me in my PhD. I love that she made a whole recording of herself coughing and a recording of her toilet flushing, and that she took these recordings of very everyday things into the (almost entirely male-dominated) world of experimental art and insisted on the importance of looking at domestic spaces and our bodies, in culture. I love her bravery and the risks she takes in Art. I think she works with sound in a really playful way, taking the whole soundscape as a material and making works that explore and celebrate our relationship to it.

Speaking of the woods and the soundscape, I am loving the crunchy walking on leaves everywhere and the dramatic scatterings of leaves that currently lie in drifts all over town.

I found a secret of my own today, walking home from Mark’s house; a narrow road lined on either side by houses made of the good red bricks that are so characteristic of Reading’s architecture.

I love the red bricks of Reading; like bread and wool, they evoke a sense of solidity, certainty, material comfort and shelter.

Finally in my Autumn Blisses post, I want to share the joy of the True Food Co-op which I have recently discovered. My bedsit is miniscule with very little cupboard space, so the ability to take all my little store jars and fill them with the exact ammount of stuff that my cupboards can hold is something of a blessing. I present goodness in jars, which fits in my cupboards perfectly and involves no packaging waste at all.

There is something most satisfying about taking a load of empty jars along to the Co-op of a Thursday evening and filling them up with pulses and grains and as I write this I am enjoying the earthy smell of haricot beans cooking on the stove. I love the little ticking sound the little electric cooker makes, too; it is a staple sound of days spent indoors.

Yesterday I also purchased peppers and green tomatoes to go in this evening’s soup. As well as enjoying this culinary combination later tonight I shall also be finally finishing off the previously frogged Mansweater. Wool, Soup, Bricks, Crunchy Leaves, Pumpkins and Beans.

I hope your Autumn is also full of such good, strong things. x

About a year ago, I was either organising or packing for a stay at Julia Desch’s farm in Sussex. During my time there I met up with Kate, researched this and learned about Tupping – or, less prosaically put – the art of putting the rams to the ewes for breeding.

I have an interview of Julia talking about her rams and their different characteristics, and she talks about how they are masterful and pushy and dominant and how Wensleydale rams will actually fight to the death if they are left too close together. I watched her attaching paint blocks to the bellies of a couple of rams before putting them to the ewes so she could see who had been with whom. And I learned that 4 fences must be between a ram and a ewe that a shepherd DOESN’T want him to mate with, as if there are fewer fences, he will find a way through them! Julia has a lovely silver-grey ram called grey owl, who you can see on her flickr site here.

Julia also told me of Robert Bakewell and his role in changing our approach to sheep-breeding in the 1700s. Bakewell is of particular interest to Julia, because his breeding methods dramatically altered the way in which sheep breeds were developed and resulted in the Dishley Ram, who in later generations passed his genes on to Bluecap, the sire of the Wensleydale Sheep Breed.

Robert Bakewell was around from 1725 – 1795 and improved the quality of sheep through selective breeding. Separating ewes from rams and organising mating according to desired characteristics, he was able to improve both the meat and wool on several breeds. He also hired out his rams to farmers who wished to improve the quality of their flocks and kept detailed records of which combinations had resulted in the best quality animals being produced. His most famous ram is probably the Dishley Ram, pictured over at The New Dishley Society website, here.

The Dishley Ram was a type of Leicester (known as Dishley Leicester.) In 1839, many generations after this breed was developed, it was crossed with a (now extinct) Teeswater Muggs, resulting in the birth of Bluecap, (named for his extremely dark skin) the sire of the entire Wensleydale breed. You can read more about this, if interested, on the Wikibreedia website.

I was reminded of Robert Dishley, the famed Dishley Ram and Bluecap when it came up in the news this year that a ram-lamb named Deveronvale Perfection sold at auction for £231,000. The sheep sold for this staggering sum was a Texel breed and the previous most expensive sheep sold in the UK was also a Texel, known as Tophill Joe. This kind of money can only be spent on sheep when the expense can be recouped via stud fees. Tophill Joe sired over a £1,000,000 worth of lambs and the hopes for Deveronvale Perfection are equally high. Texels were introduced to the UK in the 1970s for their lean meat carcass, but the system of hiring and siring really goes back to Bakewell I think and his approach to improving stock through selective breeding methods. I do not know very much about the Texel breed but I think that it is mainly farmed for the meat market; it would be great to learn from any handspinners or people in the know whether or not the fleeces of these predicted £1,000,000 worth of future lambs will be used for anything. It is my suspicion that they will most likely not be making it to a yarn store near you at any point in the future and I think I am right in saying that the quality of fleece was a much more pertinent and lucrative concern in Bakewell’s day than it is for today’s commercial sheep-breeders.

But there are several fantastic sheep breeders around for whom fibre quality is definitely still a very high priority. Julia is a sheep-breeder whose attention during tupping season seems to be firmly focussed around the health of her animals and the quality of their fleeces. And my favourite article in the Twist Collective magazine was Barbara Parry’s beautiful piece entitled The Ram is Half the Sweater. Unlike the non-endangered Texel breed, the Wensleydale is a rare breed and the sheep that Tom Davies breeds in London’s city farms – notably the Whitefaced Woodlands and the Oxford Downs – are even rarer. The Vauxhall City Spinners who reside on Vauxhall City Farm work with the fleeces of these animals to get the best effects from the wool they are producing.

Here are two very handsome whitefaced woodland rams behaving in a surprisingly companiable way. I saw these at Mudchute Farm.

…and here are two Oxford Downs, also at Mudchute city farm.

Another Ram who I have met in the last year and admired for his handsome face and lovely, dark, open fleece is this one. This ram is a badger-faced Romney and he lives on Roger’s Farm, beside the yarn-spinning operation that is Diamond Fibres.

These are all very handsome animals, however it wasn’t until I was reading Tim Clutton-Brock’s book on Meerkats that I remembered that I was indeed struck when I met them all by the impressive size of their manparts. According to Clutton-Brock, ‘the relative size of the balls of males in different mammals is related to the risk that females will mate with several males within the same day or two.’ To emphasise his point, he rhetorically asks in the next paragraph ‘why do rams have such enormous balls?’ and answers, ‘because ewes commonly mate with multiple partners.’ Apparently large balls make more sperm, and a longer penis will obviously go further up the ‘reproductive tract’ of the female. He is quick to point out, however, that his study-animal of choice, the Meerkat, is most definitely not ‘poorly endowed.’ I am glad for this explanation of manly parts in animals and have a newfound respect for the masculine prowess of rams.

Also, that four-fences rule is now starting to make a lot more sense.

Finally, there is a great song called ‘The Derby Ram’ which you can hear on Youtube here and which testifies to the great folk hero status of legendary stud rams!

There has been a lot of knitting going on around here lately, though you wouldn’t know it from reading this. However today I bring you the story of some sweater FAIL. It’s not quite as tragic as poor Brenda’s story concerning two failed sweaters, but it is a little bit sad.

See that beautiful hem worked in organic cornish wool and a sweet, oatmeal shetland and UK alpaca blend? Yes, that must be ripped out. All of it. Witness the peaty, soft LOVE that is the dark shetland wool – all 16 1/2″ of it. Yes, that must go too. The reason for this is that there is no way that Mark – the recipient of this sweater – has a 54″ chest.

This is totally my own fault. I based the whole design for it on an existing sweater. I *thought* I had gotten gauge, I *thought* I had measured everything properly… but I was basing this sweater on measurements of the SWEATER and not measurements of its wearer. So the man is going to be measured this weekend, exhaustively. Measurements you didn’t even think were possible to calculate on a human body will now be made because I’m taking no chances on the second version of this sweater! At least now I will definitely get gauge; afterall, I have a 16 1/2″ swatch to work from!

I think for the reknit I will invest in some addi turbos. The square needles I was trying to use are the worst thing I have ever knit with. I know other people find them amazing and that they are supposed to help people with arthritis or tennis elbow or whatever, but in my experience they were truly awful because the knitting doesn’t glide along the circulars at all. In fact, the only way to increase the traction on them would be to add spray adhesive. Any benefits to the hands provided by these needles in their nice, square shape are lost on the hours you have to spend trying to coax your knitting along the circular bit. My cheapo bamboo needles break at the part where the plastic joins the needle so often that I have taken to keeping superglue in my needlework bag, and on a reknit, you just don’t need these kinds of barriers to the task in hand.

However there has also been some knitting WIN to counterbalance the FAIL, so I will give you glimpses of two other things currently on my needles.

A sepia-toned something.

Mmmm… Corrugated ribbing…

There is also an Ulmus lying around here somewhere that I must resume work on. Happy days!

Today I personally delivered the completed Gansey/Guernsey of Carolyn Rawlinson to Prick Your Finger, in order that it get to The Jerwood Space in time for the Contemporary Makers Exhibition that Rachael’s UFO Project Administration Service is going to be shown in.

Rachael made me take a photo of the rough bit on my finger where knitting all this tough wool has worn a little dent:

Then I made Rachael take a photo of me waggling my arms about in the finished sweater looking pleased with myself for having steeked and completed the two large sleeves:

Then the Art Van and the Art Van Men came and packed up all the FOs that are going to be part of the exhibition. Here are some FOs – formerly UFOs – being taken off by one of The Art Van Men.

Rachael was worried they wouldn’t be able to fit the giant map showing all the UFOs and FOs on it on tiny pins into their van, but the Art Van Men were more than able to deal with this tricky task and the map went in, and we were assured it would be fine. If you look carefully, you can see the Sweater on a pin in Reading!

I have loved working on this piece and all the things I have learned about knitting – and about Carolyn – whilst making it.

Rachael has put together a large book with information in it on all the knitters and their projects involved in the show. I’m not sure how this is going to be displayed yet, but I was really touched to see that my entire write-up of the sweater will be presented along with the work, so that everyone will know the background of this piece.

Thanks to Rachael for organising a project like this where we can all share our stories and work on each others’ projects!