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

by Sarah Lake Upton in ,


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

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 …

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.

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 Talk at the Third Annual Boston Farm and Fiber Festival at the Boston Public Market

by Sarah Lake Upton in


 
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I am both excited and nervous to announce that I will be giving my first ever talk about ganseys, their history, a few myths, and my experiences as a working sailor of traditionally rigged schooners (whilst wearing ganseys) on February 9, time TBA, at the Third Annual Boston Farm and Fiber Festival at the Boston Public Market (because go big or go home).   I am trying to organize my thoughts on a type of traditional knitting that has had an enormous impact on my life, and finding that it is incredibly difficult to narrow down my thoughts on the subject. Perhaps there will be a book someday? In the meantime, if you are heading to the Boston Public Market for the Fiber Festival and want to learn a little bit about ganseys, please come to my talk. I’m bringing my favorite gansey books and a stack of work-worn ganseys for show and tell.  I’ll be in the knitting lounge for a bit after the talk, and would love to continue to chat about ganseys, or traditional boats, or knitting in general.


June, July, and Apparently now a bit of August

by Sarah Lake Upton in ,


Against my best plans, I may have let the blogging/social media slip a bit in June and July.  

 

Before the excuses, a quick and very exciting note:  I will be vending at the Squam Art Fair on September 15, from 7:30 to 10:00.   I am so excited to be included in such an amazing group of vendors!  (And I really hope that I’ll be able to pull together a few new kits I’ve been planning in time, which brings me back to the excuses). 

 

Back to the excuses:

Unexpected pregnancy induced exhaustion limited my work time this summer and what energy I had often went to baby centric things - baby shower, painting baby things, and the part time job that is meeting all the doctors appointments scheduled as part of a “geriatric pregnancy” (and aside from being “elderly”, both I and the as-yet-unborn-baby are thankfully in perfect health - I cannot imagine how much more medically intense things must become if there are issues).  

Pregnancy induced exhaustion recently morphed into pregnancy induced insomnia, which has at least given me the time to sew crib sheets for the fancy oval crib inherited from my sister-in-law.  When passing along the crib she mentioned the difficulty of getting a new sheet in the correct orientation on the oval mattress during the inevitable three AM  accident clean-ups, to which I sensibly thought “oh-ho, I shall just embroider a french knot or something so that I can line the sheet up along the long ends by feel”.   And then somehow I decided a french knot was boring, and given that I wasn’t sleeping and it was too hot to knit…  

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I can now sew fitted sheets and embroider sheets but I still cannot fold fitted sheets.

I can now sew fitted sheets and embroider sheets but I still cannot fold fitted sheets.

 

So now I have four home sewn sheets with hand-embroidered whales. 

 A few days ago we discovered that my sister-in-law had also given us several crib sheets, which somehow got mixed in with a box of baby clothes.  So the home sewn sheet part was probably completely unnecessary.  Still, it was a fun project. 

 Not being able to carry the buckets and pots of water necessary for dyeing has led me to catching up on other projects, most too boring and administrative to bother describing, but amongst the other chores I finally downloaded the photos that have been accruing on my working SSD card, and came across this gem of an outtake from a mid-February photo session.  Note my hand settled gently and proudly atop my (invisible) belly.  I am fairly sure the impetus for this photo session, aside from the desire to document the progress of my heavily modified Solbien cardigan turned dress, was the discovery that my vague feelings of becoming a little thick around the middle had solidified into an actual baby bump (which again, I cannot see in this photo, though I remember running downstairs to show Sam the moment I noticed it, who was equally excited). 

Also the Socialist Realist pose - I look like I’m about to do something epic for the glory of the fatherland.  

Also the Socialist Realist pose - I look like I’m about to do something epic for the glory of the fatherland.  

Yup, at 40 weeks, 6 days pregnant I have settled into the game familiar to every person who has ever been pregnant - “remember when I thought that was a belly?” 

To be fair, this Alabama Chanin A-Line dress is somehow magically also minimizing my belly, or maybe I just feel like I should be a foot or two wider.  

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Back to a semi-business related note:  Any moment now (really, any moment now kiddo, but hopefully soon - I get that you are comfy in there, but you’ve had your full run and it’s time to come out and start exploring the world) we will be heading off to the Birth Center for a hopefully short stay.  There may be some delay in shipping orders and responding to emails as we all adjust to our new life.   Thank you for understanding. 


Boston Farm & Fiber Festival (also, a new work space!)

by Sarah Lake Upton in ,


Many big changes afoot here at Upton Yarns HQ, but first:

This Sunday I will be vending at the first (annual, I have been assured) Boston Farm & Fiber Festival held at the Boston Public Market (!!!!!!! I am very excited about this).  The show is being hosted by the good folks of New England Farm to Fiber, on Sunday, February 11, from 10am to 5 pm. 

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For those of you who may not be familiar with it, the Boston Public Market hosts a collection of local artisan producers of everything from pasta to honey, and of course New England sourced yarns.  It has long been a favorite stop of mine on our "civilized" weekend strolls through Boston.  I'm already plotting my (non yarn related) buy list. 

But back to the fiber event: the vendor list, available here, is full of people I can't wait to meet in person. (The fiber related buy list may very quickly overwhelm the non-fiber related buy list...)

In other news, late this fall we officially became first time home buyers, and as of last week we have moved in (sort of, everything is still in boxes and we have not yet sorted out a reasonable internet connection, but all of our stuff is here, and things are mostly set up enough that it doesn't quite feel like we're camping anymore, which I'll take).  One of the many things that I love about our new house is the workspace off the kitchen that will soon become the new Upton Yarns HQ. 

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(Yes, that is an industrial sewing machine under the dust cover in the corner). 

But then the movers came and very efficiently moved everything from the old Upton Yarns HQ to the new space. 

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Dyeing may be a bit delayed while I make sense of all of this chaos......