One of my personal guidelines is that if I finish a project that has been subject to procrastination, I give myself extra points. I'm not sure what these points are good for but it's a lot more fun than beating myself up for taking so long. I just finished a Fair Isle sweater that I started a 17 months ago. I hereby give myself lots of points!
The pattern is my own. I first tried out the colors and flower pattern on a tam. I love trying to mix in a few surprise colors like the rust and a bright dark pink. I prefer shading effects in the two color ribbing.
I decided to make the sweater as a rather fitted cropped jacket. This is the first Fair Isle sweater in which I have I shaped the arm holes so the sweater is a bit sleeker.
The knitty gritty: The yarn is Jamieson and Smith two ply jumper weight knit on 2.5 mm needles (US 1.5). To figure out the armhole shaping I referred to Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting
and found a sweater using about the same number of stitches as I
needed. The body was knit with steeks for the armholes and the front.
After knitting the body and cutting the steeks, I picked up stitches
around the arm hole for the sleeves and knit down until the sleeves were
long enough for me. The front bands and cuffs were knit on 1.75 mm/US 00 needles and have facing knit on size 1.5mm/US000 needles. Maybe that's why the closer I got to the end of the sweater, the slower it seemed to go.
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4 comments:
What a beautiful sweater - and the colours are so becoming too! The two of you make a perfect match :)
Thank you so much! Now you can see why I'm so amazed at the speed with which you knit sweaters. I'm in awe.
I am in awe of your beautiful knitting. Is this your own design? I would love to do a fair isle project - even if it takes years - but I really love the few I have seen with colour shading. I can't seem to find many patterns or ideas.
Thank you Joan! My favorite book on Fair Isle is Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting published by Dover. It was long out of print but it's back now and very reasonable for all the wonderful info. As far as learning about colors, I highly recommend making a hat or some other small object to try out colors. Not only do you get lovely hats, you learn a lot about colors. (My nether garment started as a study of colors, but that's as large a project as a sweater. However it was tremendous fun to do.) For shading you need colors that are similar or you get bands of colors instead of shading. Another important thing is that any two pairs of colors you use must have sufficient difference between them that you can see there are 2 colors. I test this by wrapping the yarns on a ruler and checking that they can be seen from a distance. I hope you have many happy Fair Isle adventures!
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