Gansey

Here's the sweater that my ex gave back to me recently. The only real explanation that I've gotten is that it didn't "fit" his lifestyle anymore - whatever that means. I'm just quite happy that I've gotten it back. Which is a bit weird. I mean, there was a lot of serious design collaberation going on while I was making it. I sampled until I came up with a color that he was happy with, then went through my stitch pattern books until we found something that we were both happy with. He was pushing for some seriously complicated cables - and lots of different vertical motifs. I wanted something fairly simple - I find cables to be fiddly, and wasn't about to do different vertical motifs where you've got umpteen bajillion different things to keep track of depending on the row, and which motif you're on. Really not my idea of a fun knit. So I found a nice knit/purl all over pattern, which did actually require a lot of tinking back to fix mistakes. I probably knit the entire sweater twice by the time that I ensured that there weren't major mistakes in the knitting.

The yarn is a 3 ply, each ply being fairly close in value but quite separate rovings: "Denim" colorway merino, Mountain Meadows colourway from Copper Moose, and a grey merino/silk blend that I picked up years ago... I used Beth Brown-Reisels excellent book to go through and plan the sweater out. It was very definitely a great resource. It has a split garter welt at the bottom, fake seams (garter/purl), I'm really pleased with a lot of the little details on this sweater.

I used diamond shaped underarm welts.

And the inverted neckline gusset was a brilliant touch. You can see the three needle bind off that I used - this picture was taken with the sweater layed out sideways, to show the detailing along the inverted neckline gussets. You can't see it in either of these pictures, but I also carried a repeat and a half of the main pattern all the way down the arm.

I wasn't entirely sure if I'd have enough of the yarn to finish the sweater. So I ended up using a 3 ply of the Copper Moose Mountain Meadows on the plain knit part of the body. It ended up being close enough to not look funky, but you can see a slight difference.

It's just lovely, warm, soft enough to wear by itself, comfy as anything. I've been wearing it a lot since I got it back, and washed.

Now I might just get in a bit of trouble for posting this, but I just couldn't resist. My son has been bored just lately, and is on a mission to fill up a bobbin (just to see if he can do it, not because he wants to knit with it or anything.)