Usually, knitting ribbing on a sweater’s waistband seems
rather tedious to me. I suppose it actually goes a little slower because of changing
the yarn from front to back to front. And too, it seems slower because I want
to get to the fun of knitting the body and it feels like it takes so long to
get started. However, on this project, the ribbing didn’t seem tedious at all.
I believe that is because of the cable columns. In every round of knitting I
encounter 8 cable columns, and every 6th round involves a cable cross
for each cable. That requires just enough of my attention to keep things
interesting. Good thing it’s not totally boring, because in ribbing, on US#0
needles, the row gauge is about 16 stitches/inch – 3 inches requires many rounds!
After reaching the end of the ribbing I was ready to increase for the body,
switch to stockinette stitch and change needle size.
When increasing from ribbing to stockinette stitch, patterns
often recommend doing so “in the last row of ribbing.” Most of the time, we
want our increases to be as invisible as possible. One good way to do that is
to increase using a “bar increase” (“Kfb”), properly positioned. This style of
increase leaves a purl bar behind. That works to your advantage if you perform
the increase into the last knit stitch before changing to purl. For example, on
K2P2 ribbing, the sequence would be “K1,Kfb,P2…” That puts the purl bar in
vertical alignment with a column of purl stitches in the ribbing, and makes the
increase very hard to see. On this sweater, I also needed to position my
increases so they did not disrupt the cable columns. So, I had to chart the
position of each increase. The body has 316 stitches/round, increased from 286
stitches/round in the waistband. Note that 286÷316≅90%, which is a traditional ratio of ribbing to
body circumference. While doing the increases, I also changed to US #2 needles.
Here is what the transition from ribbing to body looks like:
A traditional gansey has a “plain area” (i.e. stockinette
stitch) below the point where the knit/purl patterns begin. On this sweater,
the plain area will be 7 inches tall. Also, a traditional gansey often had the
wearer’s initials knit into it somewhere. Frequently, the initials appeared on
the wearer’s lower left, in the plain area. In her book, Knitting Ganseys,
Beth Brown-Reinsel writes that, on a stockinette background, seed stitch
initials are easier to read than purl stitch initials. I didn’t believe her,
and some years ago I knit my own experiments (I know – those of you who know me
are shocked…shocked…to hear did my own test!). And…surprise…she is
correct, seed stitch is better. My dad’s initials are RGB. Brown-Reinsel has
nicely charted 14-stitch high seed stitch letters in her book, and I choose to
use those. I placed “RGB” on Dad’s sweater in 14-stitch high seed stitch
letters, beginning about one inch above the ribbing. The cable locations
necessitated placing the initials just to the (wearer’s) left
of midline. Here is a photo:
Of course, while all this was happening, I kept doing cable
crosses every 6 rounds. Next time we will talk about the definition ridge and
my choices of knit/purl patterns. Until then, as always, happy knitting!