Finished! Designing and knitting a fisherman's sweater - part 7

 

Ta da!  One fake gansey finished!  The angle is a bit foreshortened, but you can get the idea of how it looks.  Oh, and the yarn is a bit more olive than the camera wants to show.

Here's what it looked like yesterday after I finished weaving in the ends and, obviously, before blocking.  Messy, no?  But that's what a wool sweater is before a tender blocking.

Isn't it weird how where and when I photograph the sweater the color changes?  The very top photo is the closest, but I'm posting these so you can see how nice everything looks once blocked.  Ah well, I'm not a photographer.

All of this magic takes place when you block a woolly sweater.  Here's how I do it.

I fill up a sink with lukewarm water and dunk the sweater into it.  You really have to push it down into the water because wool resists water absorption and wants to float.  So, gently, you push it into the water until it's thoroughly soaked.  Then, supporting the garment with both hands, you lift it out, drain the water, and very very gently squeeze the sweater all over to get rid of excess water.  Do this over and over, always supporting the garment as best you can.  This sweater weighed a ton before I started the squeezing process, but I got rid of a lot of the water.  The trick is "gentle".  This is not superwash wool, and it will want to shrink or felt.  Nope, don't want that.  So treat it like a delicate object and gently squeeze.

When you think you have gotten rid of the bulk of the sogginess, dump the sweater onto a bath towel, roll it up and push down on it to get the towel to absorb water.  Repeat with a couple of other towels.  Your towels will be totally soaked, which is what you want.

Lay out the largest towel you have.  Pick up the sweater by the shoulders, and it will lengthen like you can't imagine.  Take a deep breath, and give it a couple of good shakes.  Now your sweater will look like it would fit a giraffe.  That's OK.  What you've done is get all your uneven stitches to even themselves out.  It works, but you have this bizarre garment that you will now lay out on that large towel.

Now you shape the sweater.  It's still very wet and you can make it wider or narrower, make the sleeves look good, align the side and underarm fake seams.  In short, you make it look like the sweater you want it to be.  Takes a bit of time, but you need to do this so that it will look nice.

You'll need to change the towel under the sweater very often; it's absorbing all that dampness.  Each time you do this, reshape the sweater.  If you have a fan available, you can blow air onto the sweater and that will help a bit in drying time.  You can expect it to take at least 12-14 hours to thoroughly dry, and even more if you have a dense garment or heavy yarn.  A lace shawl will dry in 2-3 hours easily, but not a sweater.  Turn it over each time you change towels.

And that's it.  A lovely, soft, cuddly garment to keep the recipient warm and toasty.  Here in northern New Jersey, it's still cold enough to need a woolly sweater.  Mail out the garment to DD, who lives in the Frozen Northland, and then cast on for another sweater.  Email a pic to Miss P, the MN grand, and try to convince her that she needs a sweater next year.  Hah!  Middle school kids resist such stuff, silly kids.

A vest for the Hubz.  The Hubz is not a delicate little creature like I am.  I knit 36" sweaters.  This thing is 50" around.  Fingering weight yarn on size 3 needles.  It'll take forever.  But, he wants a vest, so no sleeves!!!!!!  I'm not in a hurry with this one, since he won't wear it any more this season.  But next fall, when it gets cool again, then he'll have it.

I think I'll put a bunch of my fake cables on it.  V-neck, because that's what he likes, and I also like knitting them.

Thank you all for your kind words.  Don't be intimidated by the gansey; I've been doing my own sweater thing for 45 years, so I can do it in my sleep.  But you can do it too.

Designing and knitting a fisherman's sweater - part 5

So, now the body is done up until about an inch or so from the armhole.  Here's where I like to put in a pattern that separates the body from the bodice, and that is that cute little diamond pattern.  I use this one a lot because it works very well.

Now I'm ready for the bodice.  This is the sweater from the beginning of the armhole to the shoulder.  I always work the back first so that I can see where I want to place the neck opening.  I like to put in a number of patterns here, just for the fun of it.  Typically I use a lace pattern, my favorite fake cable, a knit/purl pattern, and lately I toss in a twist stitch pattern.  This is where I veer away from traditional gansey patterns, and here is where I have the most fun.

 

These patterns are mostly from Japanese books, with the exception of the ladder one (the one on the far right and left. I usually pick out the lace pattern first, and then add the rest.  My one caveat is that there is no patterning on the wrong side.  All I want to do is knit the knit stitches and purl the purl stitches.  Life is too short for me to pattern on the wrong side, and I will completely modify a pattern so that I can do this.  So, when I have a bunch of purl stitches on the right side (look at the lace pattern), I know that I can just follow along on the wrong side.  Makes it easy and very pleasurable to knit.  (On the body and sleeves, however, because they are knit in the round, I will use any stitch at all since all the work is done right in front of me on the right side.)

That fake cable appears in everything these days; I love it that much.  The twist stitch pattern is between 2 of the fake cables.  No cable hook here; these guys are just twisted, and only on the right side.  What I love is that the outer edge of this pattern looks as if I'm manipulating something or other.  It's just a trick of the eye; you want to see it look like an outside edge, and it's not.  Just knitted along.

I'll work the back until I have approx 8-8.5", place the stitches on a piece of yarn and then work on the front.