Knitting -- it doesn't get any older than this

So if you read my post on netting, you have an idea of how much I like finding ancient techniques. This post is about another one best known from Finnish work.

A pair of socks from Egypt worked in the Coptic culture of the 200s-500s CE uses a technique now called nålbinding which is related to both knitting and crochet. Because people used it that long ago, and because it is found all over northern Europe, you can suspect that it has a much longer history, possibly back as far as the breeding of wool sheep out of the original mouton hair sheep. So, by 3000 BCE. Museum pieces of nålbinding in Scandinavia date to the same time as development of the Selbu rose motif but obviously reflect a long history.

You use one needle with an eye, so if you have yarn or tapestry needles, those would work. 

You use long pieces of yarn, you don't work directly from the skein. 

You form a chain of loops by working the yarn into old loops and then into a loop around your thumb, which you push off your thumb while forming a new thumb loop.

This technique works best with wool yarn, unless you have a fairly sturdy yarn that will survive working with very long pieces to avoid having to add yarn. You have to add in new pieces of yarn when you get to the end of one. Adding yarn involves slight felting, which requires hackling. Only wool yarn hackles. 

Hackled yarn isn't strong enough for a loom. You want to take your spun yarn, wind it into your loom and cut off the extra. You don't waste those pieces, you work them up into small items with nalbinding. They couldn't afford to waste anything in those days.

This site gives the most detail, including videos for several families of stitches: Finnish; Oslo; York. York was captured by the Vikings and became the capital of the Danelaw so it makes sense that the Vikings imported their crafts. This site includes instructions on classic ways of doing multi-color work and the patterns used by people the writer interviewed.

https://www.en.neulakintaat.fi/

You can get special needles at a number of sites like Mielke Fiber Arts and Lacis. Do NOT buy Woolery's curved needles. I worked with them for a week and could not turn out a nice braid. The swelling around the eye is too large. They're nice to look at but it's like the "darning needles" that Woolly Thistle sells: that flange at the eye makes it impossible to use them for darning, duplicate stitch, tucking in loose thread or sewing seams. None of the nalbinding videos use needles this fat and most of them are straight; the curved ones do not have such an extreme curve.

Mielke's has three types of needles. The wooden ones should work well with heavy worsted and bulky yarns. The bone one works with worsted and should work with sport weight. The metal ones would be good for DK and fingering.

Most people make socks and mittens in nalbinding. If you use a three or four yard piece of cotton yarn, you can make a nice lanyard. There’s also a pattern for a shawl in two parts at this site. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVUEFGYEjTc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAoTjPjGruE

You can learn to carve your own needles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wQcdqiLjnU

When you are learning to work on the flat, use this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaKlTSKqcvk

When you work your first sample, I highly recommend that you use a different color of yarn for the second row so that you can see which loop you picked up to make your last stitch, and then you can be sure which loop to pick up for your next stitch. Also notice that when you are about to start a new row, you pick up two loops before taking your stitch, but as you work down the piece you only pick up one loop.

Hints.

To splice in new yarn, unravel the plies of your yarn for a couple of inches. Lay them together, get them wet and lay them across one palm. Then use the other palm to roll them together and get them to hackle. Work slowly for a while so you catch it if they try to unhackle, and dampen and roll again.

If your yarn refuses to hackle, go ahead and use a square knot. Wait until your working yarn is less than a foot long and then you will get past the knot pretty quickly and go back to using plain yarn. Use your needle and fingernails to loosen old stitches and get them over the knot. But first make sure your grandma from the Old Country isn't watching cause she will throw a hissy.

I tend to use my lowest three fingers to stabilize the working yarn.

The biggest problem is knowing which loop behind your thumb is the previous thumb loop. Pull gently on the top of the current thumb loop; the one behind your thumb that moves is the previous one and that's the one you want to pick up going front to back, then turning and working into the current thumb loop and under the working yarn.

Before making a new stitch, gently tighten the previous thumb loop to lie against the braid. This will make a neater result. Then tighten the current thumb loop slightly by pulling on the working yarn that goes to the needle, and then take your stitch.

When I stop working, I put my needle through the previous thumb loop in the direction it should go when I make my next stitch.

Work slowly and carefully until you get the hang of it. By the time I finished my first row for my learning project, I had considerably picked up speed and the second row went even faster despite having to double check and make sure I was consistent about which loop on the first row I picked up before taking the stitch.

If things go wrong, just work backwards to the last place that looks right and start from there. I had to do that twice yesterday.

If you've done nalbinding and this looks wrong, let me know what you think I messed up on. 

I'm just getting started with nålbinding and I think I will try to work some things in bulky yarn once I clear out old projects that I never got around to.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- the -enu suffix

So I wrote something different here on my blog from what I wrote in Narrating the Torah and I thought I'd better do some homework to back up what I say.

See Genesis 1:25-27 in the table of contents, specifically this post. In it I go along with millennia of translations but I have changed my mind.

The -enu suffix does not always mean "our". My Hebrew word processor has a great function that lets you search your own files, so I did. I had to attach the "e" to a consonant so I used mem, tav, and dalet because of specific cases that suit my point. Out of 249 occurrences seven were odenu, which is always singular, and some were mimenu which can be either singular or plural.

How do you tell? What is it I always say? CONTEXT IS KING.

So what's the context of these two verses? Because naaseh is nifal 3rd masculine singular (NOT qal 1st masculine plural), they decree the making of humans. If Gd says "Our image", that's nonsense. Gd has no image. Judaism prohibits inventing an image for Gd, let along creating an image and claiming that it is Gd. All the more so as we know that people have gender and Gd does not.

Because Hebrew grammar allows the -enu suffix to be singular, b'tsalmenu is more likely to mean "in his image" than "in Our image". All the more so as there is no "Our" in creation. Verbs about what happened in creation are singular -- except for that other nifal decree for the waters to collect together, and it has to be plural because maim is a grammatical plural.

And those two nifal verbs divide the creation narrative neatly in half, with two THREE day intervals, at the THIRD day and the TWO TIMES THREE day. This is Olrik's classic Law of Three in his Epic Laws.

In the same way, ki-d'mutenu is also more likely to be singular. People are similar to people in a bunch of different ways -- and they are unlike Gd in all those ways except for one, which we don't get to until the denouement of the narrative, and another that we don't get to until the Gan Eden narrative.

And that throws out the window the argument that elohim ever was a plural in the creation story. When it refers to Gd, this word always comes with singular verbs. When it has plurals around it, it refers to mortals -- Genesis 6:2, Exodus 4:16 and Exodus 22:27 are examples.

It also throws out the window the idea that Genesis 6:2 is about gods having sex with mortals. Judaism would never allow such a thing. It comes from the mistaken idea that ben always means a genetic relationship. In Genesis 16:17 Avraham says he is ben meah shanah and there is no possible way to interpret that as him being the genetic descendant of a hundred years. If you call somebody a ben brit, you can't possibly mean that he is genetically related to a covenant. So in Genesis 6:2 we have people with the characteristic of being lords or masters or somehow the rule-makers, in my sense that elohim who is God is the rule-maker and the Tetragrammaton is the promise-keeper. But the bney-elohim are not gods.

And this all gets me into one of my pet peeves which is Gentiles writing about Jewish scripture. There's a three hour documentary on Internet Archive debunking alien astronaut claims and it would be fine except that the guy who did the documentary not only proves he knows nothing about Tanakh, he also drags in on it another guy who knows nothing about Tanakh, and at one point they burble about the Nefilim, whom I have debunked on my urban legend thread. 

Plus they pretend to know what the Mahabharata says, quoting a translation of that. There is one, count 'em, one English translation of Mahabharata online, and I have compared it line by line to the Sanskrit (us retired people have time to do that sort of thing) and it is no better a translation than the horrible Septuagint is of Tanakh. 

So I gave the documentary a one-star rating and told them why, then I went over on the website and gave him links to all my stuff here. It remains to be seen if the guy who posted the documentary is embarrassed enough to take it down, or the guy who made the documentary is embarrassed enough to go do his fucking homework.

So next time you see somebody claiming to know something about Tanakh or Mishnah or Talmud and it's not on a Chabad site, let me know. I mean, there's a sheet on the Sefaria site that burbles about something supposedly in Avot d'Rabbi Natan that isn't in there. Let me know, and I'll point you to data that proves you heard/read an urban legend.

In the meantime, here's the TOC for my Biblical Hebrew lessons, and here's the TOC for my urban legends page.

Knitting -- Argyle with small diamonds

The big annoyance with working Argyle is all those little bobbins you have to wind your yarn onto. They clatter, and you can't unwind too much yarn at once or they get tangled up, and you have to refill them every once in a while because you can't fit a whole skein of yarn onto one.

And when I wrote about Argyle before, I said you couldn't do it using Fair Isle floater control because it left dimples.

Well, that's true when you use big diamonds. But if you use little five-stitch diamonds, you can group them to look like big ones and do your lines at the same time as you knit the diamonds.

The problem here is that you are working with three colors most of the time. So the same thing applies as when you are doing Icelandic jumpers: you hold two yarns in one hand and the third in the other, and it's not easy to keep an even tension on the yarn. 

You also have to use bigger stitch counts because the fabric will have even less give than Fair Isle. 

You have to work loosely and slowly so that you remember to catch in your floaters. 

I finished the jumper and washed it, and it looked too narrow for me to get into. So I had an old kitchen chair with a back as broad as I am. I fitted the jumper over the back while it was still a little damp and left it there for several days. Not only did the dimples smooth out but when I took the jumper off, it stayed that width. 

Then the weather turned warm so I haven't tried it on yet.

I call this Girl's Best Friend (IYKYK) and with it I used up a mess of different blues that I bought when I was making my Myrdal jumper, along with a mess of neutrals. 

Knitting -- finagling a sleeve join

If my description reminds you of any pattern you've used, let me know. I was between a rock and a hard place and did this to try to eke out some yarn.

It's Jaggerspun yarn; the company went out of business in 2024. I was using a cone of Maine 3/8 to knit a jumper and I knitted a lace motif from the antique Williamson stole (Shetland Islands) into the body. To keep working in the round, I did steeking at the top.

Normally when you do steeking you pick up around it and knit from the top down, but I couldn't do the lace motif in the sleeves that way, I had to knit from the bottom up. To test whether I might have enough yarn for two full length sleeves, I knitted one of them close to the length I wanted, then cut the yarn. Then I knitted the other one. 

Now the problem was how to join them to the body around the steeking. I supposed faggoting would have worked and maybe I'll try that some other time. But this time here's what I did.

I had underarm stitches on holders.

I did not cut the yarn when I finished the second sleeve. I cut the steeking and pulled the yarn through the stitch at the bottom of it, then went around the whole steeking pulling yarn through each stitch, the way I normally do.

I turned the sleeve inside out and put it inside the body so the wrong sides were together. 

Then I knitted off all the stitches around the steeking with all the stitches around the sleeve, the way you knit off at the shoulders of the body of a jumper. 

At the underarms, I did Kitchener stitch to close them, and closed up a couple of stretched stitches.

I'm still working on the second sleeve hoping against hope that I have enough yarn, but this post is about the sleeve join, and here's how it looks. 

Knitting -- Paton's classics

If you've been knitting for a while, you've probably heard of Paton's, who made yarn and published patterns. I bought a couple some time ago, but here is a mother lode, all free to download.

https://archive.org/search?query=patons&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22texts%22

Get to work.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- 08 innovation

Georges Polti wrote a book in 1868 giving a list of 36 dramatic situations or plots to which every work of fiction, and some popular historical scenes, belong. They are the only subjects people write about. He gives examples of the situations. He drew many of them from Greek tragedy, but he also included literature up to and including Dostoevsky. To cover important literature that did not obviously fit his broad categories, Polti gives subcategories. Here is a link to his work.

https://archive.org/details/thirtysixdramati00polt

This book illustrates a couple of points.

There are no “original ideas”. Writers may produce innovative presentations, and movies may take advantage of new technology with the same goal, but the situations they present are limited to these 36. Test it for yourself with a random selection of 36 books or movies. Then do it with some of the top-selling books or top-attended movies this century. Let us know what you find.

As a corollary, you must read widely to avoid producing hackneyed writing. Everything you read before you start writing teaches you what situations people want to read about – especially in your favorite genre – and then you have to find your personal twist on them. The basis for that personal twist is your own experiences – and this is a reason why young writers produce autobiographical works. The number of people they know, on whose experiences they could draw, is limited; the ability of youth to identify with the experiences of others, is limited. But as with Burt Lancaster and screenwriters, reading widely will likely show you that the things you like best – use Olrik’s principles.

If you take this to heart, you will never earn a publisher’s contempt for your ignorance, by saying that your work is absolutely original. Publishers and editors probably haven’t read Polti, but they’ve read enough manuscripts to realize that you can’t come up with a truly new plot, and they know when that brilliant story you wrote is absolutely hackneyed. Your best defense is to read lots of books in your genre, so that you know when somebody else has used that “new and improved” plot device you think you invented.

Second, Polti’s examples come from literature going back thousands of years, including the Tanakh, the roots of which go back at least to 5000 BCE, before the Semites and Indo-Europeans or Indo-Iranians differentiated out of the parent culture that produced the flood stories in all three traditions. As such, at least some of these situations existed in oral traditions – necessarily oral because this goes back before the origin of writing. The situations that get us interested in a book or movie or manga, are the same ones that got our ancestors interested enough in a story to pass it down, some of them for thousands of years. These are the truly shared concepts of the human mind. Compare them to the oral tradition of your own culture.

Polti has references to historical events as examples of the situations. This reinforces Olrik’s statement that orally transmitted narratives originate as realistic descriptions of cultural or historical events. Polti refers to written material in every case, but identifies another facet of the link between oral and written material.

The introduction to the book says that there are also 36 emotional states, but when you study the subcategories as Polti divides them up, you can see that none of his main categories evoke only one emotion. If nothing else, the different relationships between the people involved in the situation should generate different emotions, but what they are is not clear from what Polti wrote. Since you illustrate emotion with action, and you follow the Law of Cascading Contrasts in their behavior, Olrik’s principles guarantee that people’s reactions will differ.

 I’m sure that it’s been a downer for you to have me rehash old advice and tell you that all the plots in your writing will be the same as the old plots people have been “writing” for thousands of years. I’m sure you don’t love me for telling you that your work has to conform to the standards of the culture you’re writing about, when you write a story you imagine yourself starring in. If you write yourself into that story the way you are now, not only are you not writing it like a fairy tale, you’re committing an actual fallacy of logic called Presentism, pretending that people two hundred years ago thought about things or understood them the way we do now. It’s another facet of the “Harlequin novel with a few famous names inserted” that I keep talking about. If you’re literally writing for people just like you, they may not throw your book out. But you won’t sell as many books as if you do your homework so you can truly understand how your heroine thought and behaved two centuries ago. Doing that homework will help you grow as a writer. It’s up to you how much you want to grow.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- 07 Language

Remember back when I said that you had to use a grammar book in your writing and you said, “But this is the Regency, they spoke differently”?

They sure did, but they also spoke differently in Shakespeare’s time, and in the 21^st century, you practically need a phrasebook to understand Shakespeare. So too in our century, Regency grammar will jar on your audience. If you really use Regency grammar. Read the Four Mothers carefully and take notes.

The biggest hurdle to face is that with verbs of motion, Regency authors do not use “have” as an auxiliary. They use “am”. “I am come to tell you…” “He was gone to Birmingham…” This derives from French, Je suis venu vous dire…   Il est parti or Il est allé … Compare Georgette Heyer’s use to the Four Mothers; I saw an instance in one of her books where she had the modern usage, not the Regency usage. This Regency usage is not passive, this is the grammar of verbs of motion 200 years ago.

Where we would say “Tea was being carried around,” they might say “Tea was carrying around.” It will help your word count to do likewise. This is how they expressed the progressive in the Regency period, it’s a variety of the imperfect tense.

Where we would say “alone”, Regency authors would say “only”: “That answer only is acceptable.” This is one of those habits of the Four Mothers you should take notes on in case you decide to use Regency diction.

In a number of works you will find muted language. One does not hate rain, one “does not love rain”. A journey may be described as “not uncomfortable”, a décor as “not unpleasant”.

British authors tend to use “amongst” and “whilst” where Americans would say “among” and “while”. Study the Four Mothers and see if you can identify the rules they went by.

Regency authors sometimes say “you was” instead of “you were,” but only in the singular.

The Four Mothers have all their main characters use proper grammar; Georgette Heyer lets some of them use bad grammar, especially young men who are slangy and older men who probably didn’t go up to university. You may, however, find “eat” and “ate” in unexpected places; I found one example in Persuasion.

For slang, go through Heyer’s works and make a list with the modern meanings. For your lower class Londoners, Bow Street Runners, and criminals, find a dictionary of thieves’ cant online. I think Heyer over-uses slang; you should probably restrict it to young men talking to each other, not older men or her Mark II hero and especially not when talking to ladies. Sir Richard Wyndham gains the respect of a thief by proving that he knows thieves’ cant, but he does not use it toward Penelope Creed.

Be careful about regional dialects. They are just as difficult to write as foreign languages. Especially in the Celtic parts of the Kingdom, some people will use words with their old Celtic meaning. So “a brave lass” does not mean she is courageous, it means she is a fine girl: braw, brav (from Welsh braf), and Irish brea all look like “courageous” but they all mean “fine”. Take Florence Castle’s advice – but the links to the recordings are broken.

https://florencecastlewritings.tumblr.com/post/633528132553588736/writing-british-accents-and-dialects

This page has links to Youtube clips.

https://www.studiocambridge.co.uk/a-brief-guide-to-british-accents-and-dialects/

Don’t try to represent the accents too closely. I served on a jury once here in the US and the minute he opened his mouth, one of the lawyers gave himself away as Irish. It was the quality of his “t” and some of his vowels that gave him away. Burt Lancaster and Michael Ironside, both of whom were Irish, had a particular strength to their “l”. You’ll never get that onto paper, any more than you can get the British difference between “a” before a double consonant and a single consonant, like “cawn’t” and “het”, the latter being very close to the Latin æ or German ä.

Especially don't use dialect without a clear geographic connection. Remember, people didn’t travel as much in the Regency as they do now, and while London might have speakers of every dialect, your heroine has to have a connection to the region that uses the one you pick to imitate. So, for example, she ought to have an estate in the west of England, if you want her footman to use that accent in London. But she probably will not hire a cockney as a footman, or be served by a cockney in a warehouse (retail store) or shop. Cockneys were denizens of the City of London, and few ladies went there because few ladies had business dealings with anybody there, plus they looked down on Cits as well as cockneys. Tradesmen dealing with the carriage class hired their own relatives, who spoke much like their customers, as much not to alienate the customers as to be able to trust employees not to steal from the shelves or the till (a very real problem up to the invention of the cash register). A man, however, might have a groom from his own estate, or hire a cockney. If you want to hear cockney speech, watch Eastenders online – and remember, a cockney “born within the sound of Bow Bells” rarely left that region.

https://archive.org/details/1-tv-vhs-rip/1+TV_VHS_RIP.avi

In general, only characters low down in the social scale, probably not wealthy and therefore stuck most of their lives where they were born, should use dialect all the time. People higher up will mostly use dialect when strongly moved and less in control of their speech patterns. People at the top of the scale will likely use dialect only in fun, and then they will use the dialect from the shire they grew up in, mimicking their estate workers.

Be very careful about Irish characters and their speech. Don’t copy the speech patterns of US movie Irish like Thomas Mitchell as Gerald O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (he could also speak with a perfect American accent). They are overdone. What I did with a character in one novel was had him use an Irish bull, an internally contradictory sentence: “Could I be asking a question and not take offense?” He meant that the person he questioned would hopefully not take offense, but there’s no pronoun for that person. However, such sentences are not restricted to the Irish; Sam Goldwyn will forever be famous for saying “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” Yogi Berra was famous for them: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee_N3g4ORLk

Likewise there are multiple Scottish accents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=styynTNHpVo

And multiple Welsh accents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_2UW8v3Q80

Never let dialect or slang take over your writing. You’re telling a story, not writing a dissertation for ’enry ’iggins (IYKYK). And judge for yourself how much of your audience will sit still for real Regency grammar, or how long they’ll keep trying to understand it before they pitch your book.