le Tour de Gansey, part trois: Stage 7

Today may be the final day of the Tour de France, but this Tour isn’t finished yet! We’ve just finished the body (for now), so now it’s time for…

Stage 7: Sleeve #1

We’re going a bit non-traditional this year, and entering the sleeve stages a bit early, and from the opposite direction as in a traditional gansey. Which is to say, we’re knitting these sleeves from the bottom up. This stage began with the Channel Island cast-on, just as the body did. Here you have some very close-up footage of what that cast-on looks like:

I just cannot get enough of those little garter picots. Again, a split, overlapping garter welt was worked, with the welts overlapped to form the beginning of a baby cable that would run up the inside seam:

Motifs were borrowed from the body to create the designs on the sleeve. Here you can see the pine tree motif, as well as a baby cable running up the outside of the sleeve. There’s some excitement in store for that cable, further along in the Tour, but you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out what.

The sleeves on this gansey are going to be short sleeves, a look which is not entirely untraditional. The wearers of traditional ganseys were primarily fishing folk, and some of them chose to knit their sleeves shorter in order to avoid the mess of fish guts on their lower arms. The eventual wearer of this gansey has no intention of dismantling fish while wearing this gansey (or at any other time), but still liked the idea of a short-sleeved gansey.

Well, that’s all for this first sleeve stage! Stay turned for Stage 8, where we will see sleeve #2 all the way through to its completion.