This gansey sampler is sized to fit an 18" doll (my daughter "loans" me her American Girl doll for displays!)  As you work on your first gansey project, you will notice it scrunching up quite a bit, especially if it is fully patterned.  A tiny sweater like this one actually looks totally ridiculous until it is blocked.  You can simply pin it out to its finished size, but the traditional method of using a woolly board gives a much nicer finish.  Since miniature woolly boards aren't made, I use a combination of pinning with a 3/8" diameter, 15"-long dowel and a set of size 6 12"-long double-pointed aluminum knitting needles.

After soaking your gansey and pressing out all remaining water, slide the long 3/8" dowel through the sleeves.  Make sure the dowel is positioned exactly along the shoulder seam.  This gansey has a perpendicular Scottish shoulder strap, with a cable that runs continuously from the neck to the wrist - this makes it easy to see. Pin into the carpet just below the dowel; the pins will allow you to stretch the sleeves while keeping the gansey in place.

Next, slide 2 double-pointed knitting needles into the sleeves so that they extend about an inch into the body on either side.  Firmly stretch the sleeves, especially at the gussets, and pin just above the needles to keep them in place.  If you used traditional gansey yarn you will have to use quite a bit of pressure - don't hesitate, this stuff is called "seaman's iron" for a reason!  Make sure these needles are positioned exactly along the underarm seam from gusset to wrist - this will prevent any twisting of the finished sleeves.

Slide the last 2 double-pointed knitting needles into the body and position them so they cross over the sleeve needles and extend above the gussets.  Stretch the body to its proper dimensions width-wise, making sure the needles are positioned exactly along the side seams.  Pin just inside the needles to keep them in place.

Cat-proofing is optional, but highly recommended!  My cat, Midnight, leaves most of my knitting alone unless it is on the floor, and especially unless I have been focusing on it intently on the floor!  We live cottager-style in a tiny apartment so I don't have the option of blocking in a room I can keep him out of, but fortunately overturning the laundry basket over a small project keeps him away from it.  Most cats might be more determined, so be creative!

This is my first summer as the mother of a public schooler!  The worst moment of the school year was in September, when my 6-year-old came home and told me all about the "bad guy in school" drill they'd had.  All the good experiences Freya had in kindergarten can't quite take away the unease that day caused, but I am still really happy with the school we chose for her.  

Plenty of my home-schooling friends have questioned my choice to send my daughter to public school.  Besides the frank necessity of generating some income, and private schools being beyond my means, I have another and more deliberate reason: I want my daughter to have as many opportunities in life as I can provide.  

This has nothing to do with academic achievement.  I could certainly home-school Freya to a higher academic standard than she is offered in public school.  Any child can (and should!) learn manners, how to wait politely in line, how to share her thoughts without interrupting, and any other aspect of civility, at home.

But if she wants to pursue a higher education in an academically demanding field, requiring a lot of study, discipline, and a familiarity with "the system", I want her to be prepared for it.  I do NOT believe that public school is the only one way to learn this, and I do NOT think that a homeschooled child will always be less prepared than a public schooled child - far from it!  But by attending public school Freya is learning how to be a part of "the system" if she wants to.  

I am deeply concerned about some of the social interactions she has had already.  I am fully aware of how lucky she was to get a really excellent teacher, and how quickly my mind could be changed by the assignment to a really bad teacher.  I absolutely do not want Freya to have to take standardized tests, which start in the second grade.  But I am here to guide her through these things, to explain the behavior of other kids, to describe the purpose of exams, and to teach her how to navigate "the system".  

And believe me, I won't hesitate to pull her out the moment this no longer works!

 I would love to hear how other parents are making your children's education work for them and for your family, or if you don't have kids how your early education experiences affected your adolescence. 

Stornoway (http://www.stornoway-lewis.co.uk) is a port on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, a small group of islands off the west coast of Scotland.  The lives of the women in rural 19th-century fishing and farming communities was incredibly hard.  In addition to gutting and packing fish, maintaining a home and kitchen garden, cooking and cleaning and raising children, they were often contract knitters - earning just enough for their families to get by.

When I read "kitchen garden" I think of my containers of compost on my apartment deck, where I grow herbs, kales and lettuces, tomatoes, peas, and beans.  I think of the lovely P-patches just opened in my neighborhood, or my parents' beautiful vegetable garden, or any other version of gardening in our comfortable culture.  For this woman on Stornoway, gardening was enormously demanding and vital for survival.  She would have put many hours of hard labor into growing just enough potatoes and a few vegetables to feed herself and her children while her husband was away for weeks at a time.  

The peat she is carrying on her back would have been the only source of heat in her small home, and the only means to cook.  Here she is knitting as she walks - there are countless photographs of women knitting as they go from one task to the next, because the only other time they had to knit was during hours of darkness, and they would not have used candles.

This woman was probably a "crofter", renting less than a quarter of an acre with a tiny stone house from an English landowner.  These families were entirely dependent on their tiny holdings for their survival.  The income from fishing or farming went to paying the rent; the family ate what they grew and caught, and any cash earned from knitting was used to buy the necessities they could not produce themselves.

These old photographs fill me with gratitude for the life I have!  Looking at the dark navy yarn in this woman's hands, I am so grateful for my strong lamp and the means to pay for the electricity to light it.  I sit in a cozy rocking chair while I knit, listening to the dishwasher and washing machine doing my work for me.  While knitting does indeed supplement my family's income in important ways, we do not have to depend on it for survival.  

I wish I knew this woman's name, and which patterns she might have knit.  It is because of the work of these women that I now have a means to support my own family, and I hope you will help me to share their stories so they are not forgotten!

 I wasn't expecting this shipment to arrive until Wednesday!  It is always a delight to get another box of gansey yarn from Cornwall, England, and this is the largest order I've made so far.  Being a commercial handknitter is actually a downside when it comes to shopping for yarn - most knitters eagerly go off to visit local yarn stores when they want to start a new project.  Because I buy my yarn wholesale in large amounts, I get really really excited when I break a circular needle or lose some stitch markers - I get to go to a yarn store!  But receiving a big box from England with new colors for new designs and projects more than makes up for it.

I am still new at being a "cat person".  We got Midnight the day after our 16-year-old Jack Russell Terrier passed away last March, and I was pretty concerned about how a cat was going to fit in with my life as a traditional handknitter.  I keep my yarn out on shelves because it is beautiful to look at, and fortunately Midnight leaves it alone and has become my beloved daily companion during many hours of knitting.  He "helped" me unbox my new yarn this morning and immediately made himself comfortable in one of the boxes.  He was thinking, "Quick, get the UPS guy back and we can visit Frangipani!"  We still have to visit online: www.guernseywool.co.uk.

This traditional English fisherman's sweater is based on the oldest known published gansey pattern, printed in Weldon's Practical Mirror in 1880.  It was made available to the ladies of the area who wanted to make a charitable contribution to the local Fishermen's Mission.  Many of the traditional fishing villages had begun to decline by the late 19th century, and the crofting lifestyle was becoming more difficult for the fishing families.  

It is unclear from the 1880 article what purpose the completed sweaters served, whether to be given to fishermen who had no one to knit for them or to be sold to supplement their incomes.

The original pattern was a fun challenge to decipher!  In the style of the day it is written entirely in narrative form, with no paragraph breaks and in only one size.  The textured pattern is known as "Bird's Eye Stitch", and is found in various arrangements in Cornwall and all around the coastlines to northeast England.  The bottom edge, however, is quite unique. Called a "welt", it consists of 2 patterned flaps which, when overlapped at the sides, creates a durable and elegant edging that is a nice substitute for ribbing.

The doll-sized sampler shown here is knitted in Frangipani's 5-ply Guernsey Wool in Pistachio, a lovely soft unisex green.  My pattern will be in three adult sizes, and will be available at my farmers' market stall this fall!

At long last my crowd-funding campaign has ended, the new computer is purchased, and I finally have a real website!  Many of my friends know how very "non-techy" I am, and customers at the farmers' market and elsewhere have been asking for a website for years.  I feel enormously proud of this project, and I will continue to use my campaign page as a launchpad for a while longer:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/beannaigh-traditional-handknitting

With a Facebook business page and newly branded business cards and a banner for my market stall, my growing business will feel very grown up indeed!  I am looking forward to sharing stories of fisher-wives, working moms, and cottage industry lifestyle.