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. . . and will be back in about three weeks.
 So, after two whole months of on-and-off beavering away, it’s time to take stock. On the plus side, I’ve made more progress than expected, mostly because I’ve kept at it and not laid it aside, helped enormously by the cold, wet, cloudy “summer”. But this is where doubts begin to creep in, and I can’t help feeling, looking at it laid out on the table, that it may be just a shade on the long side (they didn’t call them knit-frocks for nothing…).
Also, my calluses have grown nicely, and I could probably win this year’s Somerset All-Comers Knobbly Fingers competition if I bothered to enter.
 I’ve almost finished the back now, just an inch more pattern and then it’s on to the shoulders. This is the point where my laissez-faire approach to planning comes back to bite me, since I’m just coming to the end of the current round of diamonds, just a quarter inch to go. What do I do? Finish the diamonds and just have a half-inch band of plain knitting at the top? Try and make it look neat by completing, say, another half- or whole diamond (but probably end up with sleeves that are too wide and a VERY long body)? Or just do as much of the next diamond as it takes to reach the desired length?
In practice, it will probably be the latter, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed that no one notices, or, if they do, that they’ll be too polite to say anything.
 As predicted, I’ve completed the first half of the gussets and divided front and back.
The gussets got to 21 stitches wide, with an extra knit row (whose purpose I’ll explain when I get to the arms), and were then placed on holders. I use old, leftover balls of guernsey 5-ply as temporary stitch-holders, usually in a different colour to make it easier to tell the holding yarn from the stitches. (This time I’m using leftover “conifer” green from my abortive Cornish gansey attempt.) The only downside is, if you’re not careful, some stray strands of the holding yarn can get caught in the stitches when you put them back on a needle; so there’s a risk I might end up with a faint line of conifer green running across the middle of my nice cream gusset.
 As you will see from this week’s photos, I usually leave the other half of the body’s stitches on the same circular needle I’ve been knitting on up to now, and use a new circular needle for the half I’m working on. It’s fine if you don’t mind being jabbed with needle points every now and then, but it beats transferring 200-odd stitches to a holder and then back onto a needle again in a few weeks. (Life’s too short – or I’m afraid mine might be, anyway.)
I usually do the back first, up to the shoulder join: this is partly to get me used to working the pattern back and forth on the half that will be less noticeable – unless someone is standing behind me in a queue with nothing better to do than stare at the back of my pullover (in which case, ha, let ’em) – but it also has the advantage of deferring any decisions about the neck (e.g., how deep to make it, where the best place to interrupt the pattern would be, etc.) that little bit longer.
 The great thing about reaching this stage in the gansey is just how much progress you feel you’re making, zipping back and forth like a mechanical loom. It grows more than twice as quickly, especially now the gussets aren’t slowing you down. The only complication is remembering how to cable from the back…
 Ever get those dreams where you’re running, but no matter how fast you run you never seem to get anywhere? That’s what the last week’s knitting has felt like. There’s a couple of reasons for this. First of all, a cold which has left me feeling tired(er) and stupid(er). And secondly, the underarm gussets.
Ah, gussets – one of the defining characteristics of the true gansey. It’s always good to reach the gussets, they’re sort of a milestone, a halfway marker like a 40th birthday. The only problem is, like reaching 40, everything starts to take longer (and you find yourself thinking about getting a pension because The End is that little bit nearer…).
 By the end of the week they gussets have increased to 19 stitches wide – but when you think about it, that’s a whole extra 38 stitches per row. So each row can now take as long as 40 minutes if there’s something good on television, like England thrashing South Africa at one-day cricket. Hence the feeling of running to stand still.
 The good news is, now they’re almost halfway, they look much neater than when I started them. I guess this is mostly because your eye is drawn away from the untidy increases along the edges to the regular rows of knit stitches in the centre (and they’ll look even better once the finished pullover’s been washed and blocked).
The body is getting pretty long – nearly 18 inches. So next week, time to divide front and back, and say goodbye to knitting in the round for a while.
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