Oops! She Fumbles! She Recovers!

Remember when I said in the last post that you can't tell for sure how a sweater will be until you sew the pieces together. Welp, that goes double and triple for the current item under construction. Sewed Sleeve #1 on, no problem. Got sleeve #2 ready to pin and, um, let's just take a look, shall we?

That's #1 in place, fine and dandy. Here's #2:
 

Compare and contrast. One of these things is not like the other. If you said there seems to be a triangle missing from the edge of #2, you'd be absolutely right! This is what comes of knitting the first sleeve as a "swatch", then the body, then the second as an afterthought. You stop increasing too early and end up with two utterly different sleeve shapes. Sigh.

My life flashed before my eyes as I initially thought I would have to frog all. of. the. pattern. area. of. the. sleeve. and do it again with edge increases. And how would it look made with partially shrunken and frogged crinkly yarn and partly with new yarn? Or knit a whole new friggin' sleeve and shrink it?

In the midst of the Slough of Despond (where the frogs live), I realized that this is a gansey. (I know, brilliant deduction, Sherlock, but stay with me.) One of the design features that marks gansey construction is the arm gusset, a diamond-shaped piece in the armpit area that makes for freer movement of the fisherman's active arms. I could make a half-gusset, a triangle rather than a diamond, to add the missing shape! Counting rows and stitches of the missing area, I came up with this:

I sewed it to one side of the misshapen sleeve (easing to account for its non-shrinkage) and washed the whole sweater again.

This is in its pre-shrunken state. Notice color difference as well.

Now what do you think?

According to the trotting horse theory, it's game over and fix accomplished, all within the tradition! Anyway, it's in the underarm area, and anyone who is inspecting my sweater armpits can go sit on a fishhook.

Yet More Yarn Yarns

Trawling (appropriate for fisherman sweater, no?) through denim yarn patterns, I think I've found what my ecru Rowan pile wants to be:

The Cornish Knit Frock by Jane Gottelier from the book Indigo Knits. I had a flirtation with the Whitby Sweater from the same book, but decided that in ecru it would look like any old aran, as it would not have the lightening effect that makes the cables stand out when using a colored yarn. Besides, Whitby is in Yorkshire, not Cornwall.

An added attraction is that the Cornish sweater was made by one of the Knitting Goddesses, Kay Gardiner of Mason-Dixon fame, and was done with the same yarn substitution I am using, Rowan Denim for elann.com Den-M-Nit. Happily for me, Kay demonstrated that the shrinkage of the two yarns is the same.

Plus there is the connection to Cornwall. My DH is from there, and we have visited family there many times.

Fisher ganseys are also on my mind because I am happily anticipating my sojourn to Cordova, Alaska this summer for the Fisher Folk knitfest:

I have always loved gansey sweaters, the look of them and their lore. I have knitted a few, and will enjoy knitting more. They are a garment that looks great on everyone, men and women, big people and little people.

And when I'm in Cordova, one of the workshops I'll be attending is an indigo dyeing session. I'm going to take my now-foofed 6 Juniper Moon CSA cormo skeins and dunk them in the pot.

For a while, I was conflicted about whether I should just do them plain indigo, or go for spaced shades of blue, or tie them up to get white spaces in the blue. Wait. Three techniques into six skeins divides evenly--I could do 2 of each! Hope the teacher agrees...