le Tour de Gansey, part deux: Stage Ten!

That’s right y’all, the gansey is finished, and is currently drying on our upstairs bathroom floor after having a little soak in SOAK, and I hope to be able to share some photos of it in an Epilogue post this weekend (my parents do have their camera with them, hooray!). But enough of that! Let’s talk about…

Stage Ten: Finish Neckline

At the beginning of this stage, we had a straight line of stitches across the back of the neck on a holder, as well provisionally-cast on stitches from the tops of each shoulder strap and bound off stitches in the front. The stage began with a trip around the neckline, picking up and knitting around, with a few well-placed k2togs to tighten things up. From there, a 2×2 rib was established, and knit for 3 inches. 3 inches, that seems like an awfully tall neckline, you might say? Am I giving my gansey a mock-turtleneck? While that wouldn’t be entirely untraditional , my reason for knitting so much ribbing was that I wanted a folded, ribbed neckline on my gansey, which necessitated knitting twice as much neckline ribbing as I wanted to show on the final sweater.

The folded, ribbed neckline is not a neckline finish for impatient people; as I said, it requires knitting twice as much, and at the end, the still-live stitches are sewn down, one by one, to the corresponding stitches at the base of the ribbing on the inside sweater, creating a folded neckline. The upside, though, is that this neckline is nice and flexible (a must for large-noggined people like myself, though I did leave my neckline rather wide to begin with). I also just really love the look and feel of a folded hem, be it at the base of a sweater or at the neckline ribbing.

After I’d finished the long, arduous task of stitching down every neckline stitch, I set about weaving in my ends. Don’t let anyone tell you that knitting a traditional sweater in the round eliminates finishing…it eliminates seaming, yes, but there are still many ends to be hidden. With that task accomplished, I gave my newly finished gansey a nice bath in some SOAK wash, rolled it in a towel and squeezed as much water out as I could, and left it to dry in the bathroom upstairs. I’m hoping that sometime this weekend I will be able to take a few pictures to share here, but for now, you’ll have to live with an updated version of my graphic from the last post:

Stay tuned for my final knitalong Sprint post, as well as a hopefully photo-filled Epilogue!