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lwoodThis day's class was another model shawl, this one from the Faroe Islands, which sit exactly between Iceland, Scotland, and Norway.
So, obviously, it's now part of Denmark, except not really because the Danes are allowing the Faroese a lot of home rule. Also, they have their very own Disturbing Local Delicacy--except instead of air-dried, lye-soaked whitefish or shark buried for a season on a rocky beach before being hung to dry for another season or sheep organs boiled interminably in the stomach whereof, the Faroese have wind-dried lamb.
Not jerky as such--that implies having sliced meat into bits, soaking the bits in some useful cure, then hanging the bits. Noooo, them (and, to be fair, the Shelanders also), hung rather larger pieces up to dry in sheds.
We know this because during the Icelandic shawl class, I got this same to talk about weird food. Hákarl, as all men know, comes with hefty shots of Black Death, and really, with enough strong liquor, even rotted shark can be Not So Bad (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dpaxson asserts that it's not so bad even before the brennivín comes around).
Marilyn van Keppel, who stepped off the plane onto the Faroe Islands her first time feeling she'd been there somehow before--and has eaten each of those delights listed above--turned down seconds on the wind-dried lamb.
But, as we discovered today, the Faroes are the real home of her heart.
Also, they are the home of something I, in my infinite something-or-other, have dubbed the Shawl of Existential Angst.
But wouldn't that make a good D&D item?
Whatever did a simple garter-stitch shawl do to earn such a daunting name? I'm getting there, but I have to do the rest of the report first.
The Faroese shawl shares a couple key construction details with the Icelandic shawl: both are roughly triangular, both are cast on from a long edge that works toward top-center-back in ever-decreasing rows.
Unlike the Icelandic shawl, however, the Faroese shawl is knit in distinct regions: an edge strip, the swooping wings, and a center gusset that narrows as it goes up. More notably, while the Icelandic shawl must be tied or pinned to keep it from falling off, as is the fate or any triangular shawl, the Faroese shawl has had several cunning decreases throughout its body that cling to the contour of the shoulder--and thus need no assistance to stay on.
In other books, e.g. Folk Shawls, one may find ever-increasing patterns that basically do all of this in reverse. These are adaptations, not taken from The Book--and here there is exactly one, a slender red-bound volume titled Føroysk Bindingarmynstur--or, in English, Faroese Knitted Shawls.
(Faroese is its own language. The people of the Faroes, as those of Iceland, claim that their language is the closest to Old Norse.)
Føroysk Bindingarmynstur, like the Icelandic Þríhyrnur og Lansjöl, is only available as a crippleware English translation packaged with the original-language text through Schoolhouse Press. However, unlike the Icelandic book, Marilyn has translated rather more of the volume, and has actually learned some of the language (she never learned Icelandic).
One would order this from here, but it's on back-order: the original distributor has become unavailable, and the replacement swears the books exist and are published but is having trouble finding them. Or they're already on their way; it was unclear, so really all I can say here is that I Have One and You Don't, neener neener neener.
You might not want these, though, not without the six-hour workshop telling you how to read the patterns, which even with the translation to hand can be daunting. (we're very near the existential angst, watch out or you'll step in it)
The cunning folk of the Bundnaturriklæðið (Home Industries Council) have found a way to get a whole lace chart into a fairly narrow band on a page. What's more, on that same page, there's room for a schematic that tells one, in general terms, where things like decreases ought to go. It's all the key bits of the pattern on one small page, or a spread at most, and it's terribly efficient.
However...
...the way they made the lace chart fit is that they only tell you where to put the yarn-overs--for any non-knitter, that's "the pretty hole". The pretty hole adds a stitch to the needle, and must be countered by something that removes a stitch, lest one wind up with unbalance and wedding trains instead of a nice, shoulder-hugging garment to withstand a wind that's had a few thousand miles to grow teeth.
The Faroese do not tell you where to put these decreases, nor which decreases to use.
When the pattern, elsewhere, may say to decrease every fifth stitch, the round will almost certainly not be neatly divisible by five. You will have four left over. Cope.
The edge strip will go from, say, three stitches to two. The schematic will say that at some point, as it strikes you, you should do so. The schematic will suggest, but not direct, a place to do so, and it will be "oh, somewhere between these two body decreases".
These, dear reader, are all left as Knitter's Choice.
Friends...I was suddenly very happy to have spent quite so much time plowing through Elizabeth Zimmerman, who strongly encourages independent thought in one's pursuit of knitting. One needn't (and didn't used to) start a sweater by casting on 190 stitches, one started by measuring a favorite sweater's diameter, multiplying it by one's stitch gauge (you remembered that swatch, right?), fudging it so it looks right with whatever's going to make it pretty, then casts on 90% of that.
It helped.
I still saw the player piano roll of the lace chart and went a mite spare before steeling my nerve. I regarded the handout, pencil in hand, and began to sketch these things in.
Well, okay.
Marilyn suggested some places.
But I didn't have to use them, binky--I didn't have to.
See, those decreases went would affect the whole hang of the shawl. Should I pair them with a hole? Should I relegate them to the sidelines? These would all have an effect--and the only way to know what that might be was to mark it, knit it, and find out.
In that moment, I finally knew Sartre's nausée and Kirkegaard's angest. Clearly, what the knitters of the Faroes had done was create the Shawl of Existential Angst.
Can't you imagine the write-up on that one?erynn999, alfrecht, faeryl and I kicked around and came up with:
The product of secretive Drow craftsmen, knit from the finest drider silk, the Shawl of Existential Angst is of negligible bulk and encumberance. While it renders the wearer immune to all illusion and grants a hefty bonus to save versus compulsion, it also gives d4 turns of crippling nausea, anguish, and/or vertigo every d6 days, and every winter, a hefty chance of suicide.
(behold, ye geeks of gaming, feel free to translate that into actual mechanics)
But more seriously:
Once (in the existential mindset as I understand it) one is stripped of illusions and takes conscious responsibility for the consequences of one's actions, the world is suddenly a lot larger--and scarier--place.
But allow me to spin in a far older ply, dear gentles: that one exists within certain pre-ordained conditions, such as the inevitability of death. Essence, however, is a thing to be determined and wrought as a life is lived.
Is doing being, or is being doing?
Or is it just doo bee doo bee doo all the way down?
Some day, I will break down and write that paper why I think existentialism and heathenry are like chocolate and peanut butter, and it will look like this (with less of your 2 AM loopy), and probably reference the Faroese shawl. This paper will require Kirkegaard and, likely, akavit of some quantity.
I took up my needles, and began the cast-on for the sample in the handout. I started in black, but dropped a stitch in the narrow lace panel, and it ran all the way to the hem.
Well, at least in knitting, it's possible to undo, and redo, poor choices! I was enjoying this class most of all--it was the one that did the most to engage me intellectually, and I relished that.
I started over in the grey-white ombre. It matched the mood of shawl and sky alike far, far better. I would finish it tomorrow, on the plane ride home, but for now I had barely re-begun when it was time for lunch.
Also, although MvK (no, not Mark Vorkosigan, Marilyn van Keppel) said that Faroese yarn as such is not available in the United States, these folks would beg to differ. Note, however, that that's not a US distributor, but the actual people on the actual Faroes, with their actual Faroese yarn from actual Faroese sheep.
Still, $7 US for six kilometers of laceweight seems a goodly deal--one would have to get a lot to justify the shipping cost, though!
Also, the finished shawl drapes perfectly across the shoulders ofwolfs_daugher's Frigga doll--but can Sparrow handle The Shawl of Existential Angst!?
*grin* Anyway, the afternoon was just the continuation of the class, so let's move on:
faeryl (her class: Magic Knitting with Annemor Sundbø) and I got into the car and started driving without a real plan, but decidedly toward the more commercial parts of Ballard. We almost had lunch at the, ah...Totem Hut.
Well, it was close to the museum!
Except their cuisine seemed to be "deep-fried everything", including ominously-named "salmon nuggets", which, given a choice between those and hákarl...I would have been really, really torn.
Instead, we kept on and found a reasonable Italian place in the middle of a Garlic Fest, the whole not far from the Odd Fellows' Hall in which we'd held the seiðr workshop that met us up witherynn999 only a couple years ago.
Also, we found a branch of the Viking Bank. We had to take a picture because, well...here's their logo:
After class was over, we scooped uperynn999 and alfrecht, then turned back to Seattle to have dinner with a nice local fellow. He's actually a Celtic Recon, but joined the Troth recently to figure out how we manage to keep an organization chugging along despite the clearly disparate differences between our several camps. We had a nice dinner at a German brewpub, then adjourned to another nearby eatery for dessert before heading back to erynn999's house for an evening of laundry and packing.
Tomorrow, before our plane left, there were several Seattle things I wanted to squeeze intofaeryl's last day, and hardly enough time to do it in.
More in the next entry--I'm going to bed!
-- Lorrie
So, obviously, it's now part of Denmark, except not really because the Danes are allowing the Faroese a lot of home rule. Also, they have their very own Disturbing Local Delicacy--except instead of air-dried, lye-soaked whitefish or shark buried for a season on a rocky beach before being hung to dry for another season or sheep organs boiled interminably in the stomach whereof, the Faroese have wind-dried lamb.
Not jerky as such--that implies having sliced meat into bits, soaking the bits in some useful cure, then hanging the bits. Noooo, them (and, to be fair, the Shelanders also), hung rather larger pieces up to dry in sheds.
We know this because during the Icelandic shawl class, I got this same to talk about weird food. Hákarl, as all men know, comes with hefty shots of Black Death, and really, with enough strong liquor, even rotted shark can be Not So Bad (
dpaxson asserts that it's not so bad even before the brennivín comes around).Marilyn van Keppel, who stepped off the plane onto the Faroe Islands her first time feeling she'd been there somehow before--and has eaten each of those delights listed above--turned down seconds on the wind-dried lamb.
But, as we discovered today, the Faroes are the real home of her heart.
Also, they are the home of something I, in my infinite something-or-other, have dubbed the Shawl of Existential Angst.
But wouldn't that make a good D&D item?
Whatever did a simple garter-stitch shawl do to earn such a daunting name? I'm getting there, but I have to do the rest of the report first.
The Faroese shawl shares a couple key construction details with the Icelandic shawl: both are roughly triangular, both are cast on from a long edge that works toward top-center-back in ever-decreasing rows.
Unlike the Icelandic shawl, however, the Faroese shawl is knit in distinct regions: an edge strip, the swooping wings, and a center gusset that narrows as it goes up. More notably, while the Icelandic shawl must be tied or pinned to keep it from falling off, as is the fate or any triangular shawl, the Faroese shawl has had several cunning decreases throughout its body that cling to the contour of the shoulder--and thus need no assistance to stay on.
In other books, e.g. Folk Shawls, one may find ever-increasing patterns that basically do all of this in reverse. These are adaptations, not taken from The Book--and here there is exactly one, a slender red-bound volume titled Føroysk Bindingarmynstur--or, in English, Faroese Knitted Shawls.
(Faroese is its own language. The people of the Faroes, as those of Iceland, claim that their language is the closest to Old Norse.)
Føroysk Bindingarmynstur, like the Icelandic Þríhyrnur og Lansjöl, is only available as a crippleware English translation packaged with the original-language text through Schoolhouse Press. However, unlike the Icelandic book, Marilyn has translated rather more of the volume, and has actually learned some of the language (she never learned Icelandic).
One would order this from here, but it's on back-order: the original distributor has become unavailable, and the replacement swears the books exist and are published but is having trouble finding them. Or they're already on their way; it was unclear, so really all I can say here is that I Have One and You Don't, neener neener neener.
You might not want these, though, not without the six-hour workshop telling you how to read the patterns, which even with the translation to hand can be daunting. (we're very near the existential angst, watch out or you'll step in it)
The cunning folk of the Bundnaturriklæðið (Home Industries Council) have found a way to get a whole lace chart into a fairly narrow band on a page. What's more, on that same page, there's room for a schematic that tells one, in general terms, where things like decreases ought to go. It's all the key bits of the pattern on one small page, or a spread at most, and it's terribly efficient.
However...
...the way they made the lace chart fit is that they only tell you where to put the yarn-overs--for any non-knitter, that's "the pretty hole". The pretty hole adds a stitch to the needle, and must be countered by something that removes a stitch, lest one wind up with unbalance and wedding trains instead of a nice, shoulder-hugging garment to withstand a wind that's had a few thousand miles to grow teeth.
The Faroese do not tell you where to put these decreases, nor which decreases to use.
When the pattern, elsewhere, may say to decrease every fifth stitch, the round will almost certainly not be neatly divisible by five. You will have four left over. Cope.
The edge strip will go from, say, three stitches to two. The schematic will say that at some point, as it strikes you, you should do so. The schematic will suggest, but not direct, a place to do so, and it will be "oh, somewhere between these two body decreases".
These, dear reader, are all left as Knitter's Choice.
Friends...I was suddenly very happy to have spent quite so much time plowing through Elizabeth Zimmerman, who strongly encourages independent thought in one's pursuit of knitting. One needn't (and didn't used to) start a sweater by casting on 190 stitches, one started by measuring a favorite sweater's diameter, multiplying it by one's stitch gauge (you remembered that swatch, right?), fudging it so it looks right with whatever's going to make it pretty, then casts on 90% of that.
It helped.
I still saw the player piano roll of the lace chart and went a mite spare before steeling my nerve. I regarded the handout, pencil in hand, and began to sketch these things in.
Well, okay.
Marilyn suggested some places.
But I didn't have to use them, binky--I didn't have to.
See, those decreases went would affect the whole hang of the shawl. Should I pair them with a hole? Should I relegate them to the sidelines? These would all have an effect--and the only way to know what that might be was to mark it, knit it, and find out.
In that moment, I finally knew Sartre's nausée and Kirkegaard's angest. Clearly, what the knitters of the Faroes had done was create the Shawl of Existential Angst.
Can't you imagine the write-up on that one?
erynn999, alfrecht, faeryl and I kicked around and came up with:The product of secretive Drow craftsmen, knit from the finest drider silk, the Shawl of Existential Angst is of negligible bulk and encumberance. While it renders the wearer immune to all illusion and grants a hefty bonus to save versus compulsion, it also gives d4 turns of crippling nausea, anguish, and/or vertigo every d6 days, and every winter, a hefty chance of suicide.
(behold, ye geeks of gaming, feel free to translate that into actual mechanics)
But more seriously:
Once (in the existential mindset as I understand it) one is stripped of illusions and takes conscious responsibility for the consequences of one's actions, the world is suddenly a lot larger--and scarier--place.
But allow me to spin in a far older ply, dear gentles: that one exists within certain pre-ordained conditions, such as the inevitability of death. Essence, however, is a thing to be determined and wrought as a life is lived.
Is doing being, or is being doing?
Or is it just doo bee doo bee doo all the way down?
Some day, I will break down and write that paper why I think existentialism and heathenry are like chocolate and peanut butter, and it will look like this (with less of your 2 AM loopy), and probably reference the Faroese shawl. This paper will require Kirkegaard and, likely, akavit of some quantity.
I took up my needles, and began the cast-on for the sample in the handout. I started in black, but dropped a stitch in the narrow lace panel, and it ran all the way to the hem.
Well, at least in knitting, it's possible to undo, and redo, poor choices! I was enjoying this class most of all--it was the one that did the most to engage me intellectually, and I relished that.
I started over in the grey-white ombre. It matched the mood of shawl and sky alike far, far better. I would finish it tomorrow, on the plane ride home, but for now I had barely re-begun when it was time for lunch.
Also, although MvK (no, not Mark Vorkosigan, Marilyn van Keppel) said that Faroese yarn as such is not available in the United States, these folks would beg to differ. Note, however, that that's not a US distributor, but the actual people on the actual Faroes, with their actual Faroese yarn from actual Faroese sheep.
Still, $7 US for six kilometers of laceweight seems a goodly deal--one would have to get a lot to justify the shipping cost, though!
Also, the finished shawl drapes perfectly across the shoulders of
wolfs_daugher's Frigga doll--but can Sparrow handle The Shawl of Existential Angst!?*grin* Anyway, the afternoon was just the continuation of the class, so let's move on:
faeryl (her class: Magic Knitting with Annemor Sundbø) and I got into the car and started driving without a real plan, but decidedly toward the more commercial parts of Ballard. We almost had lunch at the, ah...Totem Hut. Well, it was close to the museum!
Except their cuisine seemed to be "deep-fried everything", including ominously-named "salmon nuggets", which, given a choice between those and hákarl...I would have been really, really torn.
Instead, we kept on and found a reasonable Italian place in the middle of a Garlic Fest, the whole not far from the Odd Fellows' Hall in which we'd held the seiðr workshop that met us up with
erynn999 only a couple years ago.Also, we found a branch of the Viking Bank. We had to take a picture because, well...here's their logo:
After class was over, we scooped up
erynn999 and alfrecht, then turned back to Seattle to have dinner with a nice local fellow. He's actually a Celtic Recon, but joined the Troth recently to figure out how we manage to keep an organization chugging along despite the clearly disparate differences between our several camps. We had a nice dinner at a German brewpub, then adjourned to another nearby eatery for dessert before heading back to erynn999's house for an evening of laundry and packing.Tomorrow, before our plane left, there were several Seattle things I wanted to squeeze into
faeryl's last day, and hardly enough time to do it in.More in the next entry--I'm going to bed!
-- Lorrie
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-13 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 06:09 am (UTC)Well, I don't know about "a whole different class of person"--I am pursuing knitting in a way little different than I would pursue any other interest, e.g. Germanic Reconstructionist paganism: gather sources, research data, explore findings, apply results, keep what works, repeat.
I think the long-term fling with fiber arts stems, in part, from a lament I had awhile ago: as a system administrator for a living, my task was rarely to create, always to maintain--and I wanted to be part of the beginning and end as much as the middle.
So here we are.
With the current project of exploring knitting as she is spoke in Nordic countries, I get to cross two interests at once--hooray! Moreover, with Seattle these two interests get to cross-breed in a part of the country that my internal Peanut Gallery finds most appealing. You pointed out only the day after this that Puget Sound was a fjord, to which there was a resounding internal chorus of assent, all infernally smug.
The above explanation of the existential angst associated with the process makes greater sense to me now in relation to the movements of the yarn and needles I observed you doing.
Well, right, which is why I threw down metaphors that would make more sense in the subcultures shared among Garuda's passengers: D&D item descriptions make sense when "sticks that twiddle string" don't. ;)
Thanks for replying!
-- Lorrie
no subject
Date: 2007-10-13 05:16 pm (UTC)That's cool about the Celtic guy who joined your org for that reason; sensible of him. While I have occasionally-to-often bemoaned the vexatious contentiousness of most Celts and its inevitable and well-attested effects on any type of organization, it's refreshing and pleasant to see someone trying to do something productive about it rather than my default response of "argh I'm not your mother".
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 06:15 am (UTC)The day after this, we took a ferry out to Bainbridge Island and visited Blackbird Bakery--of which, more soon, but we all had happily corvish thoughts while eating our muffins. 8-)
Also, there's lots of good Ethiopian food in Oakland.
Some near to my house, including one place that does that lovely raw beef dish. I will gather the right people, we will all make cute little raven noises. It'll be a thing.
While I have occasionally-to-often bemoaned the vexatious contentiousness of most Celts and its inevitable and well-attested effects on any type of organization,
Well, when I hear one time too many that of course Celtic Recons can't organize, wtf do you expect they're Celts!...
...I seem to recall that the stereotypes of the several Germanic tribes used to be the same way.
It takes a lot to organize--and do so in such a way that doesn't depend wholly on one person's force of personality to provide cohesion. Moreover, it takes a lot of restraint to realize that you're going to have to not just put up with, but actively work with, people one might otherwise actively dislike.
And this, really, is probably what I ought to have told Kent, but didn't. We had a lot of light chat, then split up--Erynn didn't have the spoons for me to really schmooze and network as well as I might have done, and it would have been poor of me to force that on her, so I didn't.
-- Lorrie
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 05:31 pm (UTC)Regarding organization... the problem has almost never been that I can't put up with other people, it's been that Other Party A decides that they hate Other Party B, and my peacemaking efforts only work for so long. So it seems like everyone involved needs that level of restraint, and I can only control myself. I can encourage tolerance and civility in others, but it doesn't often work if they are determined to be contentious. That's the obstacle I can't seem to get past.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-15 06:44 pm (UTC)It's in Bainbridge, so you have to take a ferry--however, those go like three times an hour, and the trip is short. Fun!
Regarding organization... the problem has almost never been that I can't put up with other people, it's been that Other Party A decides that they hate Other Party B, and my peacemaking efforts only work for so long. So it seems like everyone involved needs that level of restraint, and I can only control myself. I can encourage tolerance and civility in others, but it doesn't often work if they are determined to be contentious. That's the obstacle I can't seem to get past.
The leadership has to be able to grit its teeth about the rest of the leadership, and the membership...pretty much all the time.
The membership has to be able to not just tolerate, but have reason to respect, the leadership. A leadership that can manage to cash checks and perform minimal functions in a timely fashion will fulfill this requirement without much need for interpersonal interaction.
Or, at least, that's been my experience watching pan-pagan and heathen organizations toddle along for the past few years.
-- Lorrie
no subject
Date: 2007-10-13 07:31 pm (UTC)Of course, once you get three or four people who'd like 14-21 km of that sort of thing, the shipping sucks ever so much less.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 06:24 am (UTC)However, MvK says the Faroese laceweight is quite like the Icelandic laceweight, and I have a couple skeins of that from Schoolhouse. It's fairly scratchy stuff--sure, it's the cast iron of wool and will wear forever, but it's never going to be, how you say, cuddly...
-- Lorrie
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 06:48 am (UTC)Nordic yarns cause eczema?!
(I should probably mention the existence of a Stable US Mail Drop at some point.)
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 07:19 am (UTC)-- Lorrie (yikes!)