Midsummer

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket!

This week, we of the northerly persuasion are celebrating Midsummer, and I will relate various traditions from this very local part of the world, Viborg – I apologise beforehand to anybody living in the Southern Hemisphere for leaving you out.

I have some musings on running in summer weather, rain and shine; there is summer knitting going on; and my book of the week also has a summery theme – it is The Great Gatsby.

So, let’s dive in!

The Apple of the Week

It is Midsummer! Summer Solstice, the longest day and the shortest night of the year.

Did you, like Daisy Buchanan, watch for the longest day of the year and then forget? Probably not: you have more sense and presence than that, don’t you? (And I have a sneaking suspicion that her distractedness is an affectation, anyway.)

The shortest night is, like the other astronomical high points of the year, imbued with magic and special powers.

This is the time when the Sun turns around and we are once again headed for winter and darkness. Of course, it is not the Sun who turns around and moves away from us, merely the effect of Earth tilting on its axis so that the sunlight in winter reaches us at a shallower angle.

But to ancient peoples knowing nothing of orbital astronomy, the effect is the main thing: right now, on Friday 21^st June, is the longest day of the year, and that has to be special.

All around the world, the solstices and equinoxes have special significances and rites or traditions connected to them. Maybe not surprisingly, Midsummer festivals are most widespread in the northernmost parts of the hemisphere, where the days are really long and even unbroken, with the midnight sun reigning to the far north; even here, it doesn’t get quite dark at night, though the sun does go down for a few hours.

The Midsummer bonfires celebrating the Sun and the light are well known and attested – and around these parts, often a wet and windy affair. There is a running joke that the weather is the same on Christmas Eve and on St. Hans (St. John’s) Eve: 12 degrees and raining. And though we have had a couple of white Christmases lately, it is not far off; today, it’s 15-16 degrees, grey and wet and windy. So, all the mayors around the country preparing their bonfire speeches for tonight may have smaller audiences than they would like.

Here in Viborg, the ‘official’ bonfire is lit on a raft out on the lake, with the speeches and songs taking place at Borgvold, a park and restaurant area right on the water’s edge. We haven’t usually gone, as it is rather late for smaller children, particularly on a school night; and now, my boys aren’t really all that interested. They would rather have a small bonfire in the garden, if the weather behaves.

The official celebrations this year are connected to the festivities surrounding the Hærvejsmarch which takes place during the last weekend of June, but have already begun this weekend. Hærvejen (Army Road), Ochsenweg (Cattle Road) in German, is the ancient cattle and military road starting in Viborg and leading southwards to Germany – and ultimately, for wandering pilgrims, to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Viborg is an ancient holy site: the vi- part means holy or sacred and is derived from an Indo-European root *weik- meaning ‘choose, separate, set apart’. We find words from that root in various modern languages: English victim from Latin victima originally denotes a sacrificial animal, chosen to be a gift for the god(s). The same root also appears in wicca meaning ‘sorcerer’.

And borg or bjerg corresponds to burg and means hill or hill-fort.

So, Viborg is ‘the sacred place on the hill’, has been since the 9^th century CE, and thus has been long established as the appropriate place to set out from for a pilgrim’s walk to the other end of Europe.

The more modest, though taxing enough, way to do it is to walk 45 kilometres each day on Saturday and Sunday; women can choose the 40 k route, and there are shorter walks for less able persons and families with small children.

For the more adventurous, there is a seven-day pilgrim walk to sites around Viborg during next week, or the Hærvej relay run starting in Flensburg, about 200 kilometres south of here and ending today.

There will be festivities all week; on Thursday, I will be telling a little story at Café Fredina along with a couple of others from the story tellers’ club (Viborg Fortællekreds). Rather exciting: I am not at all used to performing in public.

I have been out running my little bits during the week, in varying weather; we have rather humid conditions for the time being, with warm temperatures at first and now cooler. On Wednesday, it was grey and rainy, so I thought it would be rather cool and put on my long-sleeved skiing undershirt – which quickly turned out to be a huge mistake: the sun came out when I did, and it was warm (18 degrees) and muggy. Then on Saturday, it was 15 degrees and grey, and I put on a short-sleeved tee; much better, though my hands were cold all through the run.

I keep saying ‘run’ – actually, I’m alternating running and walking, now 3 minutes of each for 30 minutes in all. I have some residual soreness in my right ankle now; I do hope it’s not the peroneal tendonitis coming back. That, I can really do without.

They were clean once, I promise!

I so enjoy getting out there, feeling the air and watching the lush, green foliage come out and change colour, the trees blossoming, running barefoot in wet grass – this week, I have run the last of the 3-minute intervals without shoes. To begin with, I run in Vibram FiveFingers SeeYa, the most light-weight of them all, so taking them off is really mostly a matter of conditioning the soles of my feet; there is no difference in support or cushioning or angling. But it’s fun to be completely barefoot for a bit.

The Knitting

The Ninja cowl is snoozing for now, while I work on more summery projects; like the secret stuff, still, that is coming along very nicely. I expect to finish it up during next week, and then there will be a pattern coming out.

I started swatching for, and working on, a summer skirt, in Allino from BC Garn. This is a sport weight cotton-linen blend; the two fibres give the yarn a slightly variegated look, and I chose a dark, denim-ish blue to make the skirt as versatile as a pair of jeans. So far, that plan seems to be working: whenever the skirt project happens to bundle up to something else, the yarns look good together. The skirt itself is worked top down in a chevron pattern, with the chevrons growing gradually wider downwards. Very simple, very easy. Again, there will be a pattern coming out soon.

Less summery, but also moving along, is the V neck jumper for Victor; I have almost finished the body now and have to start thinking about the rib at the bottom.

The Books

As so often, when a big film comes out, I go to my Read The Book default setting. In many cases, this is the thing to do, and the film can take care of itself; sometimes, I do both.

In the case of the Shakespeare plays for which I catch the commentary on Chop Bard, I listen, read, and watch the films – for Hamlet, I watched two, both the David Tennant version and the Kenneth Branagh one.

And I am really looking forward to Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing, by the way.

Now, we have The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, filmed by Baz Luhrman and with Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby himself; I may watch this at some point, but I feel no particular rush to do so.

Ages ago, I read the book; this was one of the dozens of books, literary classics and otherwise, that I read in Danish simply because they were sitting on the book shelves in the living room at home. So I may have been 11 when I read this one first time around, and I wasn’t terribly impressed.

Now, I have the Audible version read by Jake Gyllenhaal (and generously shared by my sister; we do regular audio book swaps), I have Heather’s Just The Benefits commentary – at least, when the app and the wifi decide to play nice once in a while – and I started off by listening to the BBC World Book Club (free podcast) episode about the book. And, of course, I have years of living and reading experience in which to anchor this story, so this time, I am terribly impressed.

The language is richly poetic, mellifluous and poignant, like honey with flakes of chilli in it; Fitzgerald describes people, emotions, actions and reactions with surprising and evocative turns of phrase. The central plot is a love story, but of course there is more, not least pointed commentary on class and social censure: the value ascribed to persons of different social and economic standing – and personality.

In case anyone doesn’t know already, the story takes place in the summer of 1922 in Long Island and New York; the narrator, Nick Carraway, rents a house by the shore while working in the city and finds himself a neighbour to Gatsby, of whom he hears numerous more or less outrageous rumours before meeting the man himself at one of his many extravagant house parties. Gatsby is in love with Nick’s cousin, Daisy, who is married to the very unpleasant Tom Buchanan; he has worked his way from nothing to nouveau riche – and so still nothing in the eyes of the ones coming from old money – in order to be worthy of Daisy.

I have a feeling that the end is going to be heart-breaking ...

I have found another literary podcast – or rather, I have finally gotten round to taking a proper look (or listen) at a podcast mentioned by Heather on CraftLit some time ago, I’m not sure when: in my time, it was sometime last winter, maybe, in real CraftLit time, it was probably years ago. Anyway, this is Forgotten Classics with Julie D.; and it does just what it says on the tin. Julie takes classic books that are forgotten and unread by most, and reads them out loud in her mellow voice.

I subscribed on iTunes a while back, and it offers me episode 198 as the first. I could go back to the beginning via the archive on the Forgotten Classics website, of course, and I may do that some day. For now, I have begun listening to the book that begins in episode 200: The Unforeseen by Dorothy Macardle. This is an Irish story, set in the 1930’s, about 40-something Virgilia, her daughter Nan, and Virgilia’s new ability to apparently see into the future.

I find myself relating to the mothering theme: the intermingled difficulty and pride in allowing your fledglings to fly off and make their own mistakes; Nan has gone off to London to become an artist, and Virgilia would prefer her to come home, but knows that the young woman needs to live her own life, at her own risk.

My boys are still at home, all of them – but in only a year’s time, two of them may be ready to move on: Andreas will finish his IT education and go off to work, and Thomas will finish school and may want to travel and/or work before starting whatever higher education he chooses.

So it goes.

Virgilia has a lovely cottage in Ireland, south of Dublin, that Nan comes back to for the summer – for this is another summer book, beginning in early June. Whenever they need to go shopping, they bicycle into Dublin; having been there a couple of years ago, I enjoy the mention of specific street names and places.

Well, this is it for this week – I am going to go and enjoy the summer before it starts raining again :o)

I hope you have a great week; I will be back next week with more summer shenanigans.

Happy New Year!

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket! Yes, I am back, and I do hope that you are, too.

It has been a while, I know, and I am sorry about that. Coming up to Christmas, I had so much to do that I felt unable to take time off knitting to write ... bad planning. I did finish the last present around noon on the 24^th, just in time to wrap it before Christmas Eve – which is the time, as you may know, that is celebrated in Denmark.

Then, of course, Christmas happened – and I got the flu; so between that and visiting family near and far, I was pretty much fully occupied. I did start on an essay about the Winter Solstice; but that will have to keep. Since the world didn’t end this time around, either, I expect to get another chance to share my wisdom (!) on that topic.

But now the gift frenzy and the festivities are all over, the boys are back in school, and I have only a cough left to remind me of my mortality, so it is time for the first Apple of this year, and a substantial overview of The Knitting.

The Apple of the Week:

So, a new year has begun – but why now? Using the span of a year as a measurement of time makes sense, whether it is regarded as a whole cycle of seasons or a whole cycle of the Earth around our Sun. Different seasons present different opportunities and challenges to Stone Age hunters as well as to farmers; it seems obvious to note the return of a set of similar conditions. But how does one decide when to mark the beginning of a new year?

Several ancient calendar systems have chosen springtime as the Beginning: this is when the world wakes up from her winter sleep; the ground thaws, plants grow new leaves, birds mate, and life generally becomes easier and more pleasant – for a while, at least. It is time for the farmer to sow, for the sailor to put out to sea without the threat of winter storms, for the armies to leave their winter shelters and march again.

A lot more can be said about this particular choice of timing for the new year’s beginning, and I will do that in a few months, when the time is right.

In the Celtic calendar, the year ends on Halloween, when the doors between this world and the next are open, and the dead walk among us. The new year begins after a not-day, on what in our modern calendar would be the 2^nd November.

The Jewish calendar lets the New Year begin in the autumn, around harvest time; and for the Chinese, the year changes in January or February. In some desert regions, the new year begins when the rains come.

Practically every time of the year is regarded as a starting-point by one culture or another, and none can be said to be more or less right than any.

The ancient Roman calendar is the basis for the Gregorian one that we use; the names of the months are mostly the same, and the system of 12 months with roughly 30 days in each is familiar, as well.

But: the original calendar, allegedly designed by Romulus himself, featured 10 months from March to December; the first four months were (more or less) named after Roman gods. So:

Martius           after Mars, god of war and fertility

Aprilis              may mean ‘opening’

Maius               after Maia, the mother of Mercurius (Hermes in Greek)

Junius              after Juno, the queen of the gods

After those, they gave up; the following months only had numbers: Quintilis, Sextilis, Septembris, Octobris, Novembris, Decembris, aka the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth. Imaginative, eh?

We recognise most of these names, of course; those that have stayed with us. Quintilis was renamed Julius after Julius Caesar, since that was his birth month; and later, the emperor Augustus wanted his own month, too.

These 10 original months consisted of about 30 days each – which leaves a gap in the year. The time of winter had no name; this was a dead period. The problem was soon remedied, though, by the second Roman king, Numa Pompilius; he named two more months at the end of the year, Januarius and Februarius. These were named after the two-headed god Janus, who gazes into both past and future; and the purification ritual februum, held at year’s end.

There was on several occasions some fiddling about with the number of days in each month, and every time someone came up short, they stole the missing days from the last month of the year – which February has never really recovered from.

Anyway, March was still the first month of the year, in keeping with the Greek and Babylonian calendar systems which the Roman calendar was based on, and the people celebrated New Year in the spring. But during the Republic (509 – 44 BCE), the magisterial year came to begin on the 1^st of January; and so, when Julius Caesar reformed the calendar during his third consulship in 46 BCE, he kept this date as the beginning of the new year.

It may seem odd to have several different beginnings of the year; but for farmers and country people in general, the seasons of the soil were the most significant, while the magistrates in the city saw to their own affairs. It may be compared with the academic year nowadays, which begins after the summer holidays in August or September; talking to a child of school age (or, indeed, a teacher!), ‘next year’ can mean equally the next year in the calendar or the next level of school.

The 1^st of January did not become the official New Year’s day in Europe until the 17^th century, by which time it had acquired a new layer of meaning: the circumcision day of the child Jesus, since a Jewish boy is circumcised on the eighth day after his birth.

Incidentally, the Church has her own day for beginning the year: the first of the four advent Sundays, placing it in late November or, occasionally, very early December (this time around on the 2^nd December 2012).

Well, that’s the date taken care of, but what about the year? I have already seen talk about 2013 being an ‘unlucky’ year – presumably because of the 13 in it – so why does this year have that number? Silly question, I hear you cry: we are counting since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, whether we believe him to be the Christ or not. What’s funny, though, is that the king Herod who ordered the slaughter of the babies to get rid of this one perceived threat to his rule, died in 4 BCE. So Jesus was born not later than that; this discrepancy was noted centuries ago but does not seem to be fixable.

Other traditions count from other starting points and come up with wildly varying numbers; so let’s not fret about the number 2013. We could choose to note, instead, that this is the first year since 1987 that has four different digits.

So there you have it – the date and the year may be random, but I wish you a Happy New Year all the same :o)

The turning of the year is traditionally the time to take stock, to do like Janus and regard the past and the future at the same time. How did you fare in the past year, did you accomplish what you set out to do? And what about the coming year: which goals and wishes do you have set up for yourself?

These considerations can of course be done at any time, and should probably be addressed more than once during the course of a year to make sure that you are still on the right path towards your goals.

The yearly stock-taking, however, is a sound undertaking, and you can pick any time of the year to do it: you could pick your birthday, your own personal new year’s day; or coming back from the summer break to a new academic year. 31^st December / 1^st January is the obvious point, supported by the media, by the expectations of people around you, by the changing of the date to be written itself.

Whenever you choose to do it, make sure that you set yourself reasonable goals. The public view of January seems to be a month of purgatory, of dieting and exercising to get rid of the Christmas-induced blubber and to be ‘healthy in the new year’. At the same time, we have to get started on all those old projects that lie in wait, all the old hibernating dreams, so that we can become who we really are: fit, healthy, slim, creative, sexy, social, and rich (feel free to add to the list). And all that in January.

Really? No. It is all well and good to set yourself a number of goals and work to fulfil them – just don’t try to do it all at once. If you stop smoking and drinking and eating sugar or wheat or whatever is the trend right now, and start exercising five times a week, and put on lingerie every night for your man’s sake, and join a pottery class as well as that course in French conversation, and set out to write a novel, all in the first week of the new year, chances are you will give up most of it, if not all, during the second week.

Make a list. Find out what you really want to accomplish, and why. The ‘why’ is important for clarity and motivation: you want to do what you want to do, not what your friends do or the magazines tell you the celebs do – or what you think your mother would want you to do.

Then break down your plans into smaller bits, make a timeline and set dates for these partial goals. Losing 20 kilos, writing a novel or running a marathon are huge and daunting tasks – but you can have one cookie instead of two, write 100 words and run for one minute, right? Every journey, including the unexpected ones, begins with a single step.

The Knitting:

For this section, we need to call on Janus again to look back and forwards; I have so many things I couldn’t really share before Christmas, so let’s first take a look at that. Afterwards, I will show you what I am working on right now, and divulge my plans.

Remember The List? This is the slightly amended version after the additions I made along the way:

4 cowls: Minotaur, Moya, Moebius, and Owl; 

6 hats: Turbine, 2 Nottingham, Knotty but Nice, and 2 Helmet; 

4 pairs of mittens: Podster Gloves, Knucks, and 2 toddler mittens; 

1 pair of socks: Farmer McGregor; 

2 shawls: Dragonfly Wings and Cassandra; 

6 animals: 2 Little Owls, Oliver Owl, Nessie, Tarragon, and Oy the billy bumbler (from the Dark Tower series by Stephen King); 

a set of stitch markers; 

and 3 cross-stitch bookmarks: the Dark Tower itself + the Rose (read the books); a Dalek (no introduction required), and a Space Marine from Warhammer 40K.

Everything got done, right in the nick of time – I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I am really pleased with that. I would have absolutely hated to have to hand out IOU’s.

So, here comes the picture gallery; all the links are to Ravelry pattern pages.

From top left: Minotaur, Moya, Moebius, and Owl Cowl

Top left: Turbine, Nottingham x 2; Knotty but Nice, Helmet x 2

Podster Gloves, Knucks and two pairs of toddler mittens

Farmer McGregor socks by Alice Yu

Bottom half: Dragonfly Wings, top right: Cassandra, top left: Regrowth

From top left: 2 Little Owls, Oy the billy bumbler, Tarragon, Nessie, and Oliver Owl

Stitch markers

Left: a Dalek and a Space Marine; right: the Tower and the Rose

Those were the Christmas presents I gave out; I got knitting-related presents, as well: my lovely sister gave me a skein of Fyberspates Scrumptious DK in a gorgeous, deep purple. I promise you, this yarn is made of kitten fur, it is soooo soft. I have to find just the right thing to make with it: I am leaning towards a cowl or scarf, something to wrap around my neck. Yummy.

And KnitPro cubic dpns, 2 and 2½ mm; those I would have had to buy, if they hadn’t been presented to me – after knitting my Dad’s socks on 2 mm bamboo needles that bend, I need something sturdier.

And books: my parents gave me Knitting from the Center Out by Daniel Yuhas; I love books with new techniques, and I already have a couple of things in my queue from that book. How do you like heel-up socks, for instance?

Now for the now:

Having read through several Ravelry threads on the joys of handknitted dishcloths – many of them started with a Why? – I have come across the concept of tribbles:  round, knitted scrubbies, named after the featureless, multiplying creatures in Star Trek.

Now, while washing dishes and pots with a cloth is alien to me, I have usually employed a polyester sponge with one rough side; and so using and reusing washable cotton scrubbies instead of adding yet more petrochemicals to the landfill appeals greatly to me. I can use a tribble for up to a day, depending on the level of yuckiness involved, then toss it in the hot wash and this time of year in the dryer. Voila: it’s ready for a new day.

I have entered into this new project by making a set of 10 tribbles in a bulky cotton; a few years ago, I was planning to make a bedspread out of mitred squares in different colours, but gradually came to realise that I would have to not only weave in all the ends, but sew up all the bloody squares, as well. And weave those ends in, too.

So the squares have been sitting around together with the remainders of the huge, 1-kilo spools of thick yarn for way too long. I have used bits of it for cushions and potholders – and now I may have found a new use for it. A tribble takes up 20 grams of yarn ... so they have plenty of resources for multiplying!

The tribbles are my little project this week; the big one is the Georgia Blues that I was going to cast on in September. I found the pattern for this sock yarn cardigan in an aplayfulday group thread on Ravelry, fell in love, bought it straightaway and decided on a yarn: the Arwetta sock yarn in the Perfect Storm colourway that I used for my Bigger on the Inside shawl. Then, of course, I had to go and decide that I wanted to dye the yarn for it; that took a while, and in the meantime the Christmas knitting had descended on me. So the cast-on for this cardigan was officially put off until the 25^th December, and I could daydream about it whenever I felt oppressed by gift knitting.

It is a very easy knit: a top down raglan cardigan, all in stocking stitch with incorporated button bands and the sleeves done in the round. No seaming at all. Perfect for my fevered brain, for TV knitting or for reading.

The yarn is knitting up nicely, as well: I know and love the base yarn already, the Zitron Trekking XXL, from sock knitting for both Victor and my Dad. With variegated yarn, especially hand dyed, there is always an added element of surprise: how will it look? – and it is behaving rather well, I think, even living up to the name of the colourway Clouds Across the Moon.

So, all is well on the knitting front; the immediate future holds more stuff for me, more socks for Victor, and sometime soon I need to start looking into the next birthday sweater for my nephew.

Oh, and I mustn’t forget my own 2013 Doctor Who toy-along: during the Ravellenics, I was inspired by another Raveller’s project to try and make little Doctors, and decided to make 13 toys in 2013: the 11 Doctors, a Dalek, and K-9. So, I’ll be reviving that thread – in the Who Knits? group – and looking more into patterns for little stuff, probably some amigurumi. More about that – and, of course, come along and join in the fun, if you are so inclined!

That’s it for this week; the new Rowan magazine, no. 53, has come out, but that will keep for next time. Have a great week, and:

Happy knitting!

Superstition

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket!

The TARDIS wearing a Santa hat ... in the snow

Today is a snow day; most of Denmark is veiled in snow, and in parts of the country, driving is discouraged or even impossible. It isn’t too crazy around here; but still, my visit with friends in Aarhus was cancelled. We agreed that today was not the day to choose for driving 80 km and back, and that we will meet some other time, when the weather is in a better mood.

So I have only been out on foot today, which was fine. Now, of course, it is after 4 pm and so utterly dark outside; but it is light and warm inside, and I have my knitting – and you! Or, at any rate, my laptop and the illusion that I am writing to someone. So, there will be an update on the Christmas knitting, of course, and some musings about what people believe and how that is regarded.

The Apple of the Week:

I came across a Ravelry thread the other day about knitting superstitions: what you should and certainly should not do with your knitting. Examples ranged from ‘do not stick needles into a ball of yarn’ over ‘never knit with green’ to ‘never knit on a Sunday’; including such advice as ‘do not let your needles be empty: cast on a new project immediately’. This, it seems, is particularly important when working on socks: make sure you can cast on the second sock right after casting off the first.

All this got me thinking about superstitions, their nature and origins. After all, one person’s superstition is another’s religious doctrine; so what is it that we deem ‘superstition’ and not ‘belief’ – or even ‘fact’?

It seems that superstitions fall into several categories:

practical advice based on everyday observations and given a supernatural weight;

religious beliefs and/or practices that you do not yourself subscribe to, either because they belong to a belief system that differs from your own, or because the belief system they belong to has become obsolete;

instances of magical thinking based on intuition rather than evidence: the connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm or between substances that look alike or even whose names sound alike in a given language (time and thyme).

Examples of practical advice.

If we look at the above, knitting-related instances, the one about never letting your needles be empty is akin to the adage about idle hands being the Devil’s playground: it ties in neatly with the Protestant work ethic – which was very appropriate in a world where clothes were handmade, food had to be grown and/or killed, houses were built of timber that you felled with an axe, &c. Everybody needed warm socks, and somebody had to knit each and every pair of them. So of course you were always knitting.

The one about casting on the second sock immediately after casting off the first could be a specific instance of the above; I have also seen it interpreted as a means to avoid the dreaded SSS, second sock syndrome. This ‘syndrome’ is, of course, a modern, first-world problem – but hey, if it works. I did it myself the other night: I finished the first of the Christmas socks for my Dad, felt greatly accomplished – and cast on the other sock before I was tempted to feel that I was done. Allowing a pause at this point could make it harder to ‘start over’ on a new sock; better to stay in the I-can-totally-twist-those-stitches mode.

Outside of knitting, there is always the ‘don’t walk under a ladder’. Now there’s a piece of sound advice: by squeezing through the often tight space, you could knock over the ladder, including the guy who is probably perched on it, and his tools, paint, bucket of soapy water – you name it. And even if the ladder stays where it is, you risk having something drop on you. So, there is every reason to walk around it.

Of course, one could go into anthropology mode and talk about doorways and liminality: the junction of the ladder, the wall (or other vertical structure) and the ground underneath create a temporary door or opening, which by its nature will always lead to somewhere else. This is on the face of it rather obvious: doors and doorways lead to other rooms or to the outside. By extension, then, doorways are believed to lead into other worlds or other planes of existence. Around 1790, the poet William Blake spoke of the doors of perception, allegedly referred to by the 60’s rock band The Doors: there are things known and things unknown, and between them are the Doors. So, any opening, be it natural or artificial, permanent or temporary, is perceived to be a doorway into another place. And if you cannot see what may be on the other side, it is even more mysterious and magical. Standing beside a ladder and looking through the ‘opening’ to the other side – and lest we forget, this doorway is triangular, which imbues it with even more magical power – nothing may seem out of the ordinary; but that does not mean that it isn’t.

Rites of passage often utilise temporary portals to symbolise the passage from one stage of life to the next; think, for instance, of the blossoming arches wrought over couples at weddings.

Lots of literature utilises this concept of doorways into other worlds: first and foremost, we remember the wardrobe that leads to Narnia; Stephen King has a whole series of doors in the Dark Tower books, as has N.D. Wilson in the 100 Cupboards books; and Stargate is all about doorways to distant places.

...

The question of whether a certain non-rational practice is seen and respected as religious doctrine or dismissed as superstition is rather interesting and depends on the status of the belief system it is a part of.

Many people regard with a good deal of scepticism Ronald Reagan’s deferral to his wife Nancy’s astrologer; astrology is not these days generally believed to be ‘true’, whatever that may mean. There is no discernible scientific basis for believing in connections between individual persons and the constellations of stars – which are in themselves imaginary – or the positions of planets in the sky at the time of their birth. Astrology, as do many instances of magic, relies on the perceived interplay between the microcosm, the individual, and the macrocosm, the universe in general. So, those who set their stock in horoscopes are not taken all that seriously; people question, as they should, the decisions made by a president who consults, or at any rate is influenced by, an astrologer.

An altogether different matter is the eating or not eating of pigs’ meat; this is a religious and cultural tradition based on problems with food hygiene and disease in a certain part of the world around 3,000 years ago. If you repeatedly get sick after eating certain foods, you learn not to; and in an age when the supernatural was looked to for explanations, it would have been obvious to infer that Jahwe did not want you to eat those foods. As such, the rules surrounding foods that are found in Exodus, can be viewed by us methodological agnostics as instances of practical advice turned into supernatural rule.

But these rules are not generally deemed ‘superstitions’, though there is no scientific basis these days for following them. You can agree or disagree with the validity of them; but no one in their right mind will insist that Jews or Muslims eat pork, if they find it important not to. Please note here that I am for now only concerned with the religious argument against pork; questions of health, animal welfare &c belong in an entirely different discussion.

So, the difference in the respect afforded on the one hand looking to the stars for guidance and on the other following ancient and obsolete rules about cooking lies not in the level of rationality of the practice, nor in its age: Babylonian astrology is just as old as the texts of the Pentateuch. What is it, then?

It used to be that astrology and astronomy were two sides of a coin: the court-appointed Tycho Brahe made observations in the skies, not least discovering a supernova, a stella nova (new star), in 1572 and thereby challenging the Aristotelian concept of the immutable heavens – and he calculated the birth horoscope for the newborn prince who grew up to be Christian IV, King of Denmark.

During the age of enlightenment in the 17^th century, belief systems were challenged by the search for scientific evidence – and the art and science of star-gazing were separated. Gradually, astrology as well as alchemy was relegated to the realm of magic and superstition, while the factual, physical and falsifiable became science.

So, astrology was demoted to pseudoscience; but what about the food rules?

Well, the Middle Eastern, Muslim world never had its age of enlightenment bringing with it the scrutiny and sometimes rejection of religious rules – or cultural rules with divine justification – that seemed old-fashioned. Hence the continued obeisance to practices long since abandoned elsewhere.

Jewish communities have historically been persecuted and threatened; being under constant siege from the surrounding world, a society tends to close in on itself and cling to tradition. Thus, the ancient laws have been upheld to this day.

In my personal view, people can eat what they like and believe what they want – as long as they do not insist on others doing the same. Of course, decisions concerning matters of state should not be made based on the position of the stars or planets rather than analyses of the political or socio-economic situation; but lots of people (including myself) read their daily horoscope, take note if it seems relevant and forget it otherwise. No harm done.

So, what else is new? I have opened an Etsy shop. Or rather, in the virtual market place that is Etsy, I have put up a parasol, spread a rug under it and laid out my – so far very few – wares. I have a handful of skeins of plant-dyed yarn there, and I will have more in future times; but as long as the temperatures around here are below freezing, I am not going to work with water solutions of anything out in my studio shed. So, when weather permits, and if there is any interest, I will put up more in the shop. We’ll see.

The shop’s name is Bifrost Yarns, in keeping with the whole Norse theme I seem to have going. As you know, my username on Ravelry is Ydun, as it is here; the Norse goddess Ydun provided the other gods with strength, health and longevity from her apples. So my offerings of chat & wisdom are named after Ydun’s basket of apples, in the hope that you all will gain something from reading them. Bifrost is the name of the rainbow, the passage between Asgard, the home of the gods, and Midgard (or Middle Earth), the home of the humans. In the Marvel Thor movie, that’s the one that is a wormhole generator. So there you have it.

nray ym yub

This is a subliminal message designed to creep into your subconscious and control your actions. Mwahahahaha ...

The Knitting:

If you were with me back in the summer, you may remember a certain huge Estonian lace shawl that I was planning to wear for a wedding in July. No? Well, it has been a while, I’ll be the first to admit that. It is the Regrowth shawl by Toby MacNutt; I am knitting it in dark purple Semilla Fino from BC Garn, a fingering weight organic wool, very soft. Anyway, this shawl was not finished for the wedding – which by the way was no problem, as it was 25 degrees that day – and I decided to repurpose it. No longer a wedding shawl, it became a Christmas shawl; a big woollen thing is much more useful in December, after all, and I had loads of time to get it done. After the Ravellenics stuff and the post-Ravellenic knitalong and the other stuff ... and then the idea of the knitting for everybody for Christmas entered my head, and took over my needles. I did at some point in September, I think, or October, tink back a few rows that I had had to do in another colour and knit several rows on it, but then it was put aside. So, now that the calendar says December, I felt I had to face it again and find out just how much needed to be done.

Nine rows.

That’s right, I had only nine rows left. Of course, that is at least ten hours’ knitting, because I have something like 1,200 bloody stitches per row by now, but still, if I can manage one row a day, I will have time to wash & block it before Christmas. So that is the plan; I have this week done a row nearly every day. Five rows in seven days. Impressive, eh?

And I have been working on the Elven Leaves cowl for the Knit 1 Geek 2 hobbitalong. That was done fairly quickly: the pattern was easy to memorise, and I even did six repeats in the round instead of seven, because I was using a heavier yarn. I even have enough yarn left over for fingerless mitts or handwarmers to match; right now I seem to be wearing a pair most of the time. Those will be for after Christmas, though. So early this week, two of my four active projects – I try to have four things on the go and do a bit of each every day – have been for me; which seems a bit weird given the whole Christmas knitting deal. But that didn’t last, of course.

Even before the cowl was finished, I cast on another gift – which I would love to tell you about, but I can’t just yet. Some sneaky people may be reading this.

The third active project is – still – the socks for my Dad; I am on the second sock now. These are the Farmer McGregor socks from Socktopus by Alice Yu. Not surprisingly, I have developed a bit of a love-hate relationship with this pattern; I know it well by now, though I haven’t memorised all 16 rows, and I set myself the task of completing one pattern repeat every day. Some days, it is all I can manage to get that done; other days, I happily knit ‘ahead’ of this schedule. I am looking forward to being done with them – I only hope he’ll like them and that they fit. I measured the first sock against Victor’s foot to see where the toe ought to begin, so it can’t be far off.

What else? Oh, I finished a little owl for my cousin’s little girl; this is the third little owl I've done, so now I am done with this pattern for now. And I cast on – finally – the Cassandra shawl for my mother. This being deadline knitting and all, I felt the need for a schematic to know how much I have to knit every day; so I counted the number of stitches in each row and added them all up, knowing from experience that a fitting ‘chunk’ of knitting is around 1,000 stitches. Or 1,200, if that is how many there are in a row ... Anyway, the total number of stitches in a Cassandra shawl is 22,580. Aren’t you glad to know that? That means, of course, that it won’t be enough to do one 1,000-stitch chunk every day, I’ll have to do 1½. Or something. Luckily, the WS rows are just purled, so as they get longer, I can read while I do them. Silver lining. 

And it will be pretty, and I may at some point learn not to do a yarnover with every k2tog, like I am doing on the Regrowth ... by the way, a quick guesstimate says that there must be about 100,000 stitches in that. The mind boggles.

So, that will be it for this week – as always, I have knitting to do.

I will be back next week with more chitchat and general weirdness. And knitting.

Until then, have a great time, and:

Happy knitting!