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 It’s a little-known fact that parts of the West Country still preserve their traditional rural customs, and not only have the radical changes of the 20th and 21st centuries passed them by, but even the 19th century is seen as unduly modern – so much so, in fact, that this is the only part of the world where the novels of Thomas Hardy are seen, not as quaint relics of a bye-gone age, but rather as cutting-edge social commentary.
It comes as no surprise, then, while hiking across the barren heath land of Dartmoor, to come across itinerant gansey-wool merchants on their way to the great gansey wool fairs at Exeter or Barnstaple. They’re easy to spot once you know what to look for: the great baskets of wool-skeins on their backs, so large that from a distance they look like a man giving an armchair a piggy-back ride, and a set of 2.25mm double-pointed knitting needles in their hair, which is done up in a bun like a geisha who’s had an accident with a model helicopter.
They’re a less common sight than in former days; for the farmers took against them after some of the more unscrupulous pedlars took to following sheep about the fields in Spring with wool clippers, hastily clipping tufts from their backs before the dogs came after them, and then passing the wool through the hedge to their accomplices (which is, of course, why receivers of stolen goods are known as “fences”, and why you see so many strands of stray wool on hedgerows in early Spring). So unpopular did they become that country folk refused to wear garments made from their wool, and that’s why you only see pictures of fishermen wearing ganseys.
All of which goes some way to explain why, after buying the wool for this pullover from one such itinerant gansey-wool merchant whom I met late one evening in the tap room of the Pig and Poke, and fell into an absinthe drinking competition with (the pedlar’s drink of choice), I’ve just discovered that it comes from two separate dye lots… But how was I to know a one-armed, dirty, shabby stranger I’d just met in a pub, with an eye-patch, teeth like a piano keyboard and a bag marked “swag” was not to be trusted?
So there we are. A gansey made out of wool from 3 separate dye lots, which is something of a first for me. And hopefully a last as well! (D’oh!)
Ah, the joys of working with double-pointed needles. (Well, I mean there must be some, surely?)
 I suspect a time-lapse sequence of me knitting a sleeve would resemble those speeded-up nature documentaries of a spider building a web: those long, slow circles round the outer edge, gradually getting faster as it nears the centre, until it’s just a blur at the bullseye. So it is with me. The top of the sleeve is a bit of a slog, but by the elbow it’s picking up speed, until by the cuff the needles are no longer visible and Einstein’s theories of matter and energy come into play… Well, a girl can dream.
The problem is, of course, the number of stitches in the row is about the same as the back or front half, with the gusset added on; and it takes a while for the decreases to noticeably kick in. So I’ve got into a routine of doing an hour a night, i.e., four rows, and immersing myself in Joseph Haydn’s string quartets and piano trios, which may be the sanest music ever written. And sanity is certainly welcome right now.
 Technical Stuff:
1. The gusset was decreased at a constant rate of 2 stitches every 4 rows; now it’s finished, I’m switching to 2 stitches every 5 rows which I plan to maintain all the length of the sleeve to the cuff.
2. One of the drawbacks to using double-pointed needles is that when you move from needle to needle, the first stitch on the new needle tends to be a bit larger than the rest. Unless you move the stitches around the needles a bit, you can end up with a line of these uneven stitches running all the way down the sleeve, which looks terrible. On the other hand if you follow the advice the books give, which is to move the stitches around one stitch per needle per row, you end up with a noticeable diagonal line running all the way down your sleeve and around it! (This is very obvious with plain knitting, though as ever washing and blocking cover a multitude of sins.) My solution, which seems to work, is to leave the stitches on their needles for 4-6 rows, then move them around by 5 or so stitches, and so on. In theory, this should leave lots of little lines all over the place but it never seems to show. And of course, when you’re working to a pattern, then the number of stitches you move around can be adjusted to fit the blocks of pattern. Brilliant, eh?
 With the feeling of an intrepid mountaineer – or a middle-aged, flabby and desperately unfit person who occasionally strolls to the shops for a paper – who reaches what looked like the summit, only to find another twenty miles of jagged rocks to haul himself up – I have finished the body, and am now faced with the sleeves.
 The neck was a breeze, or should have been, picking up the stitches from the front, back and shoulders and knitting a basic rib of knit 2/purl 2 until your fingers (and brain) grow numb, or you reach the requisite couple of inches. As it turned out, I got carried away by nostalgia and decided to recreate an authentic traditional collar (which was finished off by a couple of rows of purl stitches on top of the ribbing, then a couple of rows of knit, and then casting off).
 Well, it looked horrible, all squiggly and uneven, like a clam’s lips, and after having it staring at me from across the room like a mad scientist’s experiment gone wrong, I called in armed backup and got Margaret to rip it out, and finished it off again by casting off in the rib pattern. Much better.
 Getting the sleeve underway is officially the Worst Part of the Pullover, and usually requires a period of fasting and meditation to prepare you for the horrors to come. Picking up all those stitches is a real slog for those of us with unartistic fingers, and when there’s almost 200 of them per sleeve you just have to wrap a wet towel round your head and draw the curtains and get it done. (But, of course, it’s still better than sewing!).
Remember that extra row of stitches I mentioned back in Week 7 on the gussets? This is where it pays off, because as you pick up the gusset stitches and incorporate them into the rest of the sleeve, you decrease by one stitch at each edge of the gusset on the pickup row. This means you are now in synch with the rest of the pattern, which starts on the row after the pickup row, and you have a nice sharp corner on the gusset’s edge. As the increase was 2 stitches every 4th row, that’s what the decrease will be too. (This is either genius or so obvious as not to be worth mentioning. Or both.)
 There! Things are finally coming together, literally, as the front and back are finished at last, and the shoulders joined. Now it starts to look like a gansey, even without the arms and collar.
From what I’ve read, it seems that the neck was often not shaped at all, so that both sides were identical. But I’m not convinced – if you look at old photos the neckline seems lower at the front in quite a few of the featured pullovers. (And anyway, if both sides were same, the how would they know which was the front, getting up early on a dark winter’s morning?)
In any case, it’s just not an issue for me. Leaving aside the question that a nicely-shaped neckline adds a certain style to a gansey, I hate having wool next to my throat – can’t bear it. Maybe it’s because I usually have a sort of stubble down there (life’s too short to shave regularly), but it scratches. So I always go for a lower front neckline.
The pattern will normally dictate the depth. In this case, I decided to finish the current diamond, which meant that I only had a dozen rows to play with before having to start the shoulder straps; so it’ll be a shallow neckline, as befits these austere times, and I’ll have to think about buying a stylish scarf to wear inside the collar.
To get even a modest curve in the neck I had to decrease every other row, giving me 6 decreases leading in to the shoulder; it doesn’t sound a lot, but it’s just enough to take some of the four-square rectangle-ness out of it and soften the shape.
I divided at that point, working back and forth on double-pointed needles as I did on the back, decreasing every other row for 6 decreases, then concluding with the shoulder strap as before (12 rows rig and fur’). When I’d finished the first shoulder this way, I joined it with its counterpart on the back, before returning to finish the other front shoulder (see photos). It really doesn’t matter which way round you do this – finish all four shoulder-straps and then join them together, or do as I’ve done here, cast off each shoulder as it’s ready. One reason why I like to join them as I go is because you have the yarn ready in your hand when you finish the last row of each front shoulder-strap: you might as well use it to knit the shoulders together, and it’s one less yarn end to darn in later.
 Speaking of the last shoulder-strap row, it’s a good idea to knit this a little looser than usual, as it makes it easier to knit it together with its counterpart when you join them and cast off.
To cast off the shoulder, start with the front stitches on one double-pointed needle, and the back stitches on another. Align them side by side, with the stitches next to each other. Take a third needle and carefully insert it through the first stitch on each needle; loop some yarn over it, and withdraw it back through the two stitches, slipping them off their needles as you withdraw. You’ve basically knitted them together, and have a (new) single stitch on your third needle.
 Repeat the process with the second stitches. You will now have two stitches on your needle. Slip the first stitch OVER the second and, in so doing, cast it off. And so on, until all your stitches have been knit together/cast off; finally, cut your yarn and thread it through the last stitch and pull it tight and there you are. Sorted.
The great thing about this method of casting off, used in conjunction with ridge and furrow shoulders, is that the cast off row kind of looks like another ridge, i.e., it “seamlessly” becomes part of the pattern. It’s enough to make you think those old knitters knew what they were doing…
 Good progress this week, helped by a couple of days’ leave to put my feet up, knit and listen to Arnold Bax’s elusive symphony cycle conducted by the late Vernon Handley.
Normally I find doing the other side a bit of a slog, as the novelty’s worn off by now and it’s just a question of getting your head down and doing the hard yards. In fact, this is often the point when I get careless and make mistakes, and before I know it I’ve got bored, set the pullover aside and taken up reading instead, and weeks and months pass until I pick it up again. But this time I’ve persevered, enjoyed it even, and if I’m lucky I’ll finish the front next week. (One more push…)
I wonder if this is down to the fact that the pattern requires me to keep score of completed rows on a sheet of paper? This way, I know exactly how many rows the back consisted of, and I can tick them off as I work my way up the front – which gives a curiously satisfying sense of progress. Rather like chasing a total in a one-day cricket match, you know exactly how many runs you need to win, and you just have to accumulate them.
 As I near the top the circular needles tend to get a bit floppy as they’re effectively unsupported, which makes the act of knitting a bit unwieldy – like trying to dress an ornery drunk in formal evening dress – and I’m acutely aware of some unevenness in the panels of moss stitch (the alternating P-K-P-K-P-K/K-P-K-P-K-P pattern), with occasional (but very noticeable) gaps appearing, like sunlight streaming through holes in the roof of an old barn. Once again, I’m relying on the final washing and blocking to even things out.
Next Decision Point coming up: how deep to make the front neckline?
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It’s a little-known fact that parts of the West Country still preserve their traditional rural customs, and not only have the radical changes of the 20th and 21st centuries passed them by, but even the 19th century is seen as unduly modern – so much so, in fact, that this is the only part of the world where the novels of Thomas Hardy are seen, not as quaint relics of a bye-gone age, but rather as cutting-edge social commentary.
All of which goes some way to explain why, after buying the wool for this pullover from one such itinerant gansey-wool merchant whom I met late one evening in the tap room of the Pig and Poke, and fell into an absinthe drinking competition with (the pedlar’s drink of choice), I’ve just discovered that it comes from two separate dye lots… But how was I to know a one-armed, dirty, shabby stranger I’d just met in a pub, with an eye-patch, teeth like a piano keyboard and a bag marked “swag” was not to be trusted?
