Let's call it a Gansey summer!

As my friend Donna would say "A herd of turtles moves faster" than the progress on my gansey sweater (Project 5 of 9 for Year Two, Nihon Vogue). It is painfully slow, but tiny stitch by tiny stitch, the garment is turning into something I hope will be treasured for years to come. On size one needles (2.25 mm or 2.5mm - I have seen them sold by the same vendor in either measurement), it takes me nearly half an hour to essentially knit a single round or a row on each side for front and back. Even my smallest cable needle was too large to use so I raided the pantry and resorted to using toothpicks as "the just right circumference" cable needles. Can you believe it? 270 rows from the bottom edge to the top of the shoulder calculates to 135 hours of knitting from cast on to shoulders. That estimate assumes NO errors! Add in time for ripping out, fixing mistakes and figuring out pattern design, then you get an idea of what a significant investment of time and energy this project is turning out to be. I'm fretting about it as I imagine losing an entire summer due to this sweater. Right now I estimate at least 28 hours left until I am able to 3 needle bind off the shoulders together. I've spent my fair share of time fixing mis-crossed cables, adding a forgotten yarn over and re-aligning seed stitches. With each row taking so long to complete, I have become adept at what I call "micro-knitting". Rather than ripping out row after row to get to the source of the problem, I'll go the section where the mistake is and rip back down just that section width of stitches until I get to the row where the mistake originated. Then, using extra needles (and sometimes toothpicks in this case!), stitch markers, and a crochet hook, I'll knit whatever pattern I need within that segment all the way back up to the last row completed. So far so good, but definitely not advised to be done late at night when one is already tired of knitting and just plain tired. Our next Nihon Vogue class is July 18 and 19th so there is an optimistic 50/50 chance the gansey will be ready. Inspiration for the gansey sweater came from Design 3 in the Japanese Guernsey and Aran sweater book. I am using the same center cable but substituted lace bordered rope and claw cables rather than using the existing wave cables. Since I needed 7 rather than 5 motifs to provide the length of sweater required, I designed an anchor, a lace pattern and a tree of life to augment the existing assortment of Design 3 motifs such as sailboat, lace diamond and starfish. The single size sweaters in the Japanese books are made for very petite models and I, ummm, certainly don't fit within their sizing parameters! In order to get the marriage band to fit the width of the sweater for me, I redesigned the arrow length and width to get the number of stitches I needed. For the main body, I adjusted the width of the side pattern between the last cable and the side seams. I did a channel island cast on and garter welt. The garter welt keeps flipping up just as Karen Campbell warned me about, so I will have to block the heck out of it to get it to eventually lay flat. I added my "JMB" initials from an alphabet template in Beth Brown-Reinsel's book. Too late for me, but I also found impressive lettering patterns (Gothic, Codex, Germanic, Danish, Irish Half-uncial) in a book by Nancy Spies called "Here Be Wyverns". After the cast on, the sweater was knit in the round to the underarm gussets. The gussets were created by adding stitches adjacent to a center purl stitch on each side seam. That gusset section is then held on a stitch holder or waste yarn for a later time. The front and back of the sweater is then worked flat separately. This is the stage I am at now. I still have to finish the front and back up to the shoulder seams, incorporating the neck shaping. Once the shoulders are joined, the sleeves will be picked up and worked down from the shoulder. The other half of the gusset will be added while working the sleeve. For the neckline ribbing, I plan to do a mock turtleneck with a button placket but don't have that process clear in my mind yet. I also have to figure out how to reverse the cables and patterns I am using on the sweater body for the sleeves since they are worked from the bottom up on the sweater body but will be worked from the top down on the sleeves. Lastly, I need to determine what cuff ribbing and cast off I want to do that will complement the channel island cast and whatever neck treatment I decide on. Lots of thinking to do. Lots more knitting to do!