Lockdown day 18: Appreciating the Skill of Fair Isle Glove Design

I knitted the Hoosiefield gloves designed by Hazel Tindall from the Shetland Wool Week Annual 2019 as soon as it was out. I used a mixture of Shetland yarn, some natural dyed yarns and some purchased colours and  included  the purple to enable the gloves to coordinate with more of my outdoor winter wear. I love them. The fingers are fair isle and super snug by being double thickness  but time consuming for me to knit.

My much worn gloves

Michael (husband) asked me if I could knit him a pair of Fair Isle gloves that would match the colours in his red based Katie’s Kep, Shetland Wool Week annual 2020.

M’s Katie’s Kep

As he could try on my Hoosiefield gloves and I could judge the size I decided on this pattern. I spent some time playing with the colours.I decided to stick to reds,and black, as I had plenty of these in stock too and these would look good. The purple and blue of his hat were too distracting to my eye in this planned glove colour set. 

On trying on the smaller size that I had knitted, he needed a longer rib, longer hand, longer fingers and wider.

I checked my tension, which was fine for the pattern and decided to lengthen the bigger size of the pattern a bit more. I could lengthen the fingers when the time came.

I helped myself time wise by knitting 2 ribs with the knitting machine and both longer cuffs were completed in 15 minutes. He preferred a plain single rib as he choose for the hat too.

All was good and so I started the glove and convinced myself although a little loose in the width all would be good.

So I got as far as this and decided they were too big. I had a hunch they were too wide.

So I got him to put on my gloves again and could see his hands although longer were very little wider than mine.

Back to the drawing board and a couple of days were taken up with planning a size intermediate between the two given sizes.

Decision 1 - base the custom pair on the larger glove pattern.

Decision 2 - I did not need to add length to the palm

Decision 3 - I needed to remove 6 stitches from the width

Then I began to really appreciate the skill of a Fair Isle glove designer. Finding out how to remove the 6 width stitches and keep the integrity of the pattern took me on a great journey. I appreciated how all the elements fitted together to make the perfect glove pattern. It is far more complex than a fair isle cardigan even with fitted sleeves!

It is all working so far and I am confident he will have gloves that both look good and fit his hands well. The bonus to me has been understanding what is needed in Fair Isle glove design. I will look at Fair Isle fingered gloves with even more admiration now. (There is still another change I would make if he asked for another pair!) 

The custom glove so far.

Glove Pattern: Hoosiefield Shetland Wool Week Annual 2019, a great design by Hazel Tindall 

Extremely useful video: Shetland Wool Week 2020 video Elizabeth Johnston ‘How to Knit Perfect Fingers’. 

Lockdown3 : Day 10: a brick wall, textiles and timber framed buildings

I am always interested in walls and like to photograph these. As we walked down the lane a few days ago I took a picture of an interesting wall at the front of a substantial house. On getting home I looked at the brickwork and started working out how it was built. The bricks looked old and the build was irregular. The middle part appears to be English Bond, where one course is placed long ways  and the next is placed at end ways at right angles. This gives a strong single brick thick layer of wall if the whole wall is made like this.  

I was cross that I had not looked at the bricks of the house. When Michael wanted a stroll the next day he sketched the placement of these bricks. 

The structure of the walls of the house

This is a Flemish Bond and broken bricks can be used in the build. It is  not such a strong wall but is  thought to demand  more skill in getting the brick placement exactly correct. 

This observation of this local wall set me of on some research on local housing! 

The brick house is in fact one of the many listed houses in a small area. It was built as an early 17th Century timbered frame  house with a north wing, so quite a large house in those days. In the 19th century this house was bricked round completely and a west wing was built, which fronts the lane. Hence I had thought it was a much ‘newer house’. 

Starting at the North end of ‘our’ lane there are, all on one side of the road, in fact 4 other listed buildings, 3 of these are farmhouses and 2 of the buildings are thatched. (The Grade 2 listing notes that one of the other farms is thatched but it is not thatched now). The  farm house nearest to us has such a pitched roof it must have been thatched too at some time. 

In this area there are another couple of houses called farms. In 300 yards there are 5 farms, and an old building that was a public house. This latter was one of 3 in the village that are now all closed. There is then a field and this larger house and barn complex , lived in by a local farmer which is also a listed building and where the wall is. 

 I have been surprised since we moved here that there are so many farms in such a small area. Then I began to work out why. 

As I found out more about the listed buildings, they all date to the 17th century and are timber framed buildings. The wall infill is likely to be an East Anglian version of wattle and daub. Of the five listed buildings, all except the brick house are all plastered. 

Oak (and to a lesser extent Hazel) were woods used in building and thatching. Hazel is much more flexible than oak. 

The infill between the oak frame is likely to be something like this: 

When we lived in Norfolk, before our spell in Cheshire, we owned and lived in a thatched 17th century cottage outside Diss for 16 years. We learnt much of the history of the building when we lived there and I will write about it sometime.

 

Thinking back to our lane and all the farms! Until relatively recently the land on the other side of the lane to us was common land and probably going back to the 1600’s could have been used for grazing. Sheep were an important animal and were the basis of the local weaving industry. Norfolk was a very (if not the most)  populated county around that time and Norwich was second only to London in terms of wealth. 

Going back even further, thanks to an archeological survey  carried out in the village a few years back under the auspices of Cambridge university, we know quite a lot about earlier village inhabitants.

Sticking out into the North Sea, Norfolk had many peoples arrive by sea. The river Tas was larger in those times and Palaeolithic remains have been found on land rising from this. 

The area in the middle of Norfolk, roughly running north/ south was a central forest zone on a clay heavy soil. Once tamed this was extremely fertile land and the region could support a high population. Today agriculture is still by far the most predominant use of the land. The cloth industry was labour intensive, but the rich soils could support the sheep, and be good for growing both flax for the linen industry as well as corn to feed the population. Norwich was close  to the continent and probably easier to transport cloth to, then getting it to London by road. And so for many years this was how people lived and worked here. 

Several Bronze Age and Roman  items have been unearthed and by Saxon Times there is  evidence that there was a settlement in this area of the village  that I am describing. Perhaps having all these farms goes back to that time, and hence why there are so many farms in such a small area. 

More research needed and all this interest just from taking a photo of a brick wall. 

Lockdown 3 - Photography day 1: flint

Another wet day here so an inside more uplifting photo. 

Living on land that we know was inhabited from Anglo Saxon times and probably earlier makes digging the garden more fun. The village has benefitted from a quite extensive archeological study over several years. My normal digging doesn’t go that deep, although some of the invasive nettle roots do! We are on clay with lots of chalk and flint. One of my most interesting finds form Lockdown 1 digging was this hand sized piece of flint. 

Discussing it with the eldest grandson we thought it might be ‘an apprentice piece’ for an axe. The edges look as if they have been worked. 

We discussed whether it was made by a young flint maker, just a teenager - like my  grandson. Thoughts came on to safety. The grandson has done a bit of flint napping wearing safety glasses. Was it done with the eyes closed when this flint was made we wondered? 

The Brecks, a very special area in  the west of Norfolk/Suffolk are well known for Grimes Graves, the only Neolithic Flint Mines open to visitors in Britain. (English Heritage site). On arrival at what is also a Site of Special Scientific Interest due to being a habitat for rare flora  and fauna, one sees a lunar like landscape of over 400 pits. One can imagine it being like that 5000 years  ago when the flint was first mined there. One shaft is open so you can descend 30 ft down a vertical ladder (if you are over 10 and are wearing sensible shoes and are not too scared by this!) Once down you can see the jet black flint and tunnels the early miners crawled through. Believe me the climbing up is easier, if you don’t look down! It is so special, that it ought to be on everyone’s bucket list. But perhaps I am biased, it was  one of a very few school visits I was taken on in my first year at Grammar School in Thetford and I was terrified. The ladder is better now I am told. 

 

Hearing an expert talk about flint I hadn’t ever thought about the fact that flints became throwaway items in those days. Once blunt you just made another! Flint can be incredibly sharp. 

If you decide to visit the Brecks sometime, do look up other places to experience flint before the visit. Both Brandon and Thetford  Museums have displays and Brandon has its own flint mines. Brandon being the centre of  the flintlock industry for over a century.