Start of Red White Gansey

Pattern: White Gansey from Beth Brown-Reinsel's Knitting Ganseys

Yarn: Knitpicks Swish, a worsted weight superwash wool

Color: Pepper Red

Needles: Knitpicks Options #3

Gauge: 6 stitches/inch, 9 rows/inch in stockinette. A very firm gauge for this yarn but great for showing stitch definition.

I want a practical red sweater for myself and I have a hard time resisting sweater patterns where the stitch pattern changes every few rows.

There's no sewing in this pattern. Starting at the bottom hem, I'm knitting 252 stitches in the round.

With a little over four inches completed, I have two inches of ribbing and am now working on 4.5 inches of stockinette, except for my initials.

In traditional gansey form and construction, "The initials of the intended wearer were often worked in a garter stitch or purl pattern into the lower part of the plain area near one of the seam stitches."

The book provides two alphabets. I chose the smaller alphabet, ten rows high, for my initials because it seems to fit the proportion of the sweater best. The letters are about an inch high and located on the right front of the sweater.

Here is a shot of the picture in the book.

I'm hoping to have this done by the end of June at which time I plan to start Autumn Song, the Acorn Sweater.

In all my years of knitting, I don't remember dithering as much about yarn selection as I am doing with Autumn Song.

I haven't decided not to splurge for the Louet. After all, this is going to be a long term knitting project. But I haven't convinced myself the Louet is nicer than the Swish. In fact, I haven't even convinced myself I want to knit Autumn Song in a superwash yarn. Maybe what I really want is some Elann's Peruvian Highland Wool.

Over the weekend, I knit a second Autumn Song swatch in Dublin Swish with size 3 needles. I like the color, but the swatch is too small, the stitches too tight.

At the moment I can't remember why I thought #3s were the right size to try and I'm trying to resist thinking of it as a dumb waste of time. That's why we swatch. Right? So it was smart that I got it out of my system.