(Or rather, the start of blogging about the new gansey; the actual gansey has been in production for about a year now. As of this writing I’ve divided for the upper front and back. As always, I would rather do the thing than write about the thing).
The release of Beth Brown Reisnel’s updated Knitting Ganseys made my fingers itch to knit another. One day, when I can better concentrate on crossing cables, I will knit Beth’s Snakes and Ladders (designed with Upton Yarns Coopworth 5-Ply Gansey yarn) for myself, but at the moment much of my knitting takes place in cars, or in a dimly lit room while the toddler sleeps, or when the toddler was still small enough to fit in a baby wrap, around the bump of sleeping baby in front of me. In these circumstances horizontal motifs of seed and moss stitch are soothing and occasion fewer dropped stitches and muttered bad language.
Sam has been the beneficiary of my gansey knitting impulses twice before, but both instances predate Upton Yarns. When he fell in love with the steely like blue gray gansey yarn on my drying rack it seemed time to remedy the Upton Yarns shaped hole in his gansey wardrobe.
This colorway has been christened “Falling Waters” after my favorite hiking trail in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I have spent years at sea knitting ganseys meant for service in a maritime environment, but with this gansey (now that I have walked inland with my metaphorical oar) I am setting out our intentions to relearn the New England mountains we grew up in. While a little heavy to carry on long hikes, ganseys are great for shoulder season day hikes.
The Swatch
I am an impatient knitter, or rather, I am a knitter who is impatient to start working on the actual piece. I do not swatch as much as I know that I should. Upton Yarns has actually helped me with this; previously I could never really figure out what to do with the swatches after their initial use in garment planning was complete. I am a process knitter and generally knit for the love of feeling yarn move between needles, but even so swatching felt like a speed bump on the way toward the really satisfying work of creating a garment. Now, swatching has become a way of creating little inspirational pieces that fit on my display table when I go to yarn events. Swatches help other people imagine their own creations, and as such I have discovered that I love the pressure-free act of creating them. When I swatch I’m not trying to “get gauge” or concerned about trying to fit the yarn to a pre-existing design, I’m just moving the yarn from one needle to the next and seeing what it wants to be, experimenting with different motifs to see how they fit the yarn, and how the yarn fits them. Freed from expectations, swatching has become one of my favorite ways of knitting.
When I started thinking about this gansey last year, I was usually knitting around a sleeping baby in the baby wrap. It turns out that swatches are perfect for this kind of knitting. So I got carried away.
I swatched until I ran out of yarn. This is what one 240 yard skeins looks like when knit, or rather as much of it as will fit in frame. There is an additional six or so inches of stockinette with the wearer’s initials, and a garter stitch welt with channel island cast-on just below the bottom edge of the photo. The whole thing is about as long as my arm, and if seamed would be a reasonably fitting sleeve. I cast on a bunch of stitches (66? I did not keep good notes on the swatch) knit the welt I knew I wanted to use, the stockinette and monogram that I also knew I wanted to use, and then turned to pages 42-3 in the updated edition of Knitting Ganseys. I knew that I wanted to make a relatively simple gansey full of horizontal motifs, possibly with a large definition motif at the top of the plain stockinette, or possibly not.
Pages 42 and 43 are a joy. (Actually, the whole chapter on pattern motifs is a joy, but the motifs on pages 42 and 43 are the ones that were most relevant to my design interests for this gansey).
Beth doesn’t include any photos of the motifs knit up on these pages, only the graphs, which makes knitting the motifs an act of discovery. I moved from knitting one to the next, knitting each for as long as I wanted to until I felt like I had a sense of what it would look like knit full size.
And when I finally ran out of yarn, I cast off my swatch and cast on for the full size gansey.