Oh, that’s right, now I remember why I prefer to start my ganseys with a ribbed welt.
It’s Week 3 and I’m a couple of inches into the body, plain knitting in the round: and the garter stitch welt-flaps flop around like sheets hung out to dry on washing day in a strong gale. The thing is, ribbed welts naturally concertina inwards, which makes the stitches easy to manipulate round the needles; but a garter welt remains actual size, and that makes it harder to manage the stitches. So I’m forever stopping to coax them round with both hands to get them distributed evenly.
And then, just to make it more interesting, the plain knitting curls over the tops of the needles like a very frothy head on a freshly-drawn pint of beer… So all in all progress hasn’t been quite as smooth as I could have wished!
You’ll see from the pictures that I’ve decided to add my initials to the front of the body, just above the welt close to one of the fake seam stitches. The letters are adapted from those in Rae Compton’sComplete Book of Traditional Guernsey and Jersey Knitting, page 60, which I find work pretty well. Adding your initials is, of course, a high-risk strategy – if you’ve miscalculated and the gansey turns out to be way too big or too small you can’t easily give it away to someone else whom it fits without having to explain yourself, which can be awkward. So this is something of a declaration of intent on my part. But I’ve always wanted one in this pattern, so I figure it’s worth it.
Now I’m knitting in the round, I’ve also been reminded of another problem of hand knitting directly from these 500g cones – the yarn naturally twists and twists until it’s twisted itself into knots, and keeping it constantly untangled can be a right nuisance. I’ve devised a cunning plan to overcome this, however, which involves placing the cone on the top of our window curtain rails after each session, and letting the knitting dangle freely below. After a very few minutes it’s untangled itself, and you’re ready to go again. (The only thing to remember is to ensure that the stitches on your needles are pushed far away from the points, so they don’t pull off and drop as your knitting spins and untwists. Oh yes – and make sure your cone weighs more than your knitting…)
Finally, here’s a question: has a gansey ever featured in a novel?
The end of the first full week of knitting, at least it was when I wasn’t suffering from yet another cold (you can tell all the kids are all back at school, pooling their germs, can’t you?), and already we’ve seen the back of the welt. That’s one advantage to keeping it short: knitted back-and-forth in 2 separate pieces (or “flaps” as I like to think of them) of garter stitch, they measure just 2 inches top to bottom (34 rows plus the cast-on row), though they’ll probably get longer and stretch with use.
(All right, but it’s every bit as simple as that: knit a row along one welt flap; lay the other alongside and knit it onto the same needle, so you’ve got the two welt flaps on one circular needle, joined in the middle, in a great U-shape. Then just start knitting in the round and – hey presto! – you complete the circle, like a snake devouring its own tail. In fact, snakes have been much in my mind this last week, as knitting the two welt flaps has been like trying to persuade a couple of large and uncooperative rattlesnakes to mate.)
New Year, new pullover…
Another change from the last gansey, is the welt. Unusually for me, I’ve decided to knit this in two separate pieces, in garter stitch, one for the front and one for the back, instead of my customary knit 2/purl 2 ribbed welt. Plain borders like this were quite common back in the day, and get joined at the top edge on the last row to make the first round of the body. (They have the added advantage that, being flat and knit back-and-forth, they don’t get twisted on the cast-on row!)
Casting on is crude but effective. The first “stitch” is a slip knot on the left-hand needle, pulled tightish, but left loose enough to pass a needle through. The second stitch is knit through the knot’s loop and placed beside it on the left-hand needle. Then, each subsequent stitch that is cast on is achieved by inserting the right-hand needle in between the most recent two stitches on the left needle; yarn is looped over the tip as it protrudes through the reverse side, the needle is withdrawn bringing the loop of yarn with it, and this new stitch is slipped onto the left-hand needle – and so on. I use differently-coloured wool to mark a certain number of stitches cast on – in this case, one marker every 50 stitches – to make the counting easier (see illustration).
T H White, who wrote the classic reinterpretation of the Arthurian legend as a means of exploring man’s inhumanity to man in the light of the twentieth century’s terrible wars, The Once and Future King (on which the musical Camelot was based; and the first part of the book, The Sword in the Stone, was made into a Disney cartoon), also wrote a fascinating little book called The Goshawk. In it, he describes how he once laboriously tried to tame a goshawk using only the information contained in antiquated manuals on falconry – unaware that the world had moved on, and that there were easier and better ways of doing it now.
I have a sneaking affection for the book, and for White’s approach, for part of me suspects he would have carried on regardless, even if someone had told him he didn’t have to do it that way. It was his choice, after all, and sometimes our choices are as revealing about us as anything we do.
Which brings us (finally, I hear you cry!) to knitting. I’ve been toying with the idea of turning this blog into a rather more detailed “how to” guide for the next gansey, which I’m going to start in the next few days, with more in the way of detail and illustration so you can see exactly how I go about it. The problem is, as faithful readers will have gathered by now, I tend to knit the way T H White trained goshawks, so it may have limited value to the modern world… Ah well. I was thinking of doing a simple pattern anyway, as a change of pace, so we’ll see.
Meanwhile, the completed gansey has had its day in the washing machine and is now, thanks to Margaret and her Amazing Plastic-y Board Things, securely pinned out to dry. As I wasn’t sure what my stitch gauge would be after the cataract operations (which was one reason for knitting this gansey) we decided to block it to what seemed a natural size, not too taut, and by a happy coincidence it ended up the same size as my favourite roomy pullover (48 inches round the chest, so with 432 stitches it gives me a gauge of exactly 9 stitches to the inch for a pullover with cables). So now I have to decide what to do with it: keep it (the weather’s been cold enough recently), or give it away to a deserving cause.