Knitting Tips: Fair Isle and Color Work

1. Fair Isle Pulling In
2. Fair Isle Color Choice
3. Jogless Color Change

Joan Schrouder 2/9/03

Hi all. I am trying to make my son a tube scarf with one block worked in a 4 row simple fair-isle pattern. One stitch red, one stitch white........my problem is this: The colorwork is pulling in on the scarf. How do I fix this? I don't want to knit overly loose so that the scarf has gaps in it. I've never done fair-isle before and thought that a simple 2 stitch repeat would be a good starting point to learn. I need tips on how to get my stitches to lay more loosely so that the blocks on the scarf all lay flat.

This is probably the trickiest part of Fair Isle knitting, getting the gauge correctly. You're working a tube. Are you using a circ ndl? 16" is a common length for a shorter circ. If your scarf is in the neighborhood of 12-16" arnd, (6-8" across), that should fit fine on the 16" ndl. In that case, the sts will be nicely stretched out so that there shouldn't be any puckering.

If you're using different ndls, then make sure that you do stretch the sts on your right ndl every few sts so that the stranding behind stays loose.

Also - there may be some minor puckering, but blocking will even that out. You can tell if that is your answer by gently spreading your work out with your hands. If only a little stretching makes everything lay smoothly, then you can rest assured that blocking will solve it. If your gentle stretching still shows puckers, then go back to swatching with different sized ndls 'til you get your desired fabric.

One more thing - if parts of the scarf have Fair Isle patterning, while other parts don't, and you're only using 1 ndl size throughout, expect that the Fair Isle parts will pull in more than the plainer parts. This is a very common occurance as the stranding usually pulls in more. To keep your scarf the same width throughout, you'll need to switch to different sized ndls for the two parts. Swatching will tell you what sizes to use.

[back to top]

Rebecca 2/11/03

How do you decide about fair isle colors????

I've made lots of color work sweaters, and I always make up my own colorways, and lots of times my own combination of patterns. Here's what I know.

Fair isle, as in the patterned knitting with alternating bands of little then big patterns look great in several catagories of colorways. The most limited is the two color, and it doesn't make much difference if it bright on dark, or light on dark, or the other way around, as long as there is good contrast between the colors. So dark grey and white look good, bright yellow and bright pink, soft purple and bright blue, but light blue and medium gray are awfully subdued, nice looking but not a big standout. Using more than two colors presents lots of opportunities to take chances. There are several over all choices. Do you want to have the pattern be light or dark? Do you want the colors in the bands to repeat...for instance black pattern on a background that goes from light at the bottom and top of the band and brighter in the middle? Or is each band going to be different? Just make sure that there's enough contrast between the background colors and the pattern color so the pattern doesn't get lost.

Many sucessful sweaters are made with a repeating striped background and alternating bands. Say a perrie pattern on a light grey band, and an X O pattern on a background of 4 different shades of red and a pale blue. Put the blue in the middle and the reds go from dark to light to blue back through light to dark. If you reverse the sequence and put the light at the outsides of the X O band and the darkest in the middle you have another, very interesting colorway. And then there's one I saw on a boy once, stunningly beautiful sweater in medium blues and greens with a very dark pattern and a bright salmon colored stripe in the middle of each X O band. That said I once made a highly sucessful vest out of the left overs from a big intarsia project. It was green, black, pink, rose, two blues and a yellow. I mixed it all up, made perrie, X O, perrie and made each band of pattern different. Its wild, but it suits its owner. My own preference is to use a couple of colors in one family, a dark and a light that are contrasting and not of the first color family and a 6th color for the XO and perrie. Say, three blues, a dark purple a sandy beige and black for the pattern color. But it would look good with the sandy beige as the pattern color....decisions. Sometimes I just make the decisions and knit. Trying not to fuss over the choices and just knit it up. This method didn't work once. That sweater is now a bunch of crinkly balls of Tuir and will remain that way until I find a color I want to replace the brick color that looked terrible, or maybe it was the blue? Funny how nice colors by themselves take on evil alter egos when paired up?

AS's "Fair Isle knitting" has a very good explanation of this and lots of charts, swatches and drawings showing how changing the sequence of background colors changes the look of the pattern. She also shows how some things are not so sucessful. I think there's a little bit about it in the big Vogue book, the how-to one, I'm not sure of its name but it was recently reissued.

Don't be too put off by the "colors on the rug" thing. If you can make a sort of logical sequence in your mind, and your choices have both harmony and contrast you're probably good to go

[back to top]

Joan Schrouder 4/6/03

Knit one round with one ball, then pick up the next ball and knit another round. You'll have a little wrapped line up the side, where you've been carrying the unused yarn, but it's not at all noticeable on the outside. Just keep them attached, and pick up the next ball when you come to it.

If you're working circularly, you can avoid any "lines" or jogs altogether. The trick is to NOT twist the two yarns arnd each other when changing.

[back to top]

The information on these pages was taken from posts to the KnitList with permission of the original poster. Tips remain the copyright of the original poster. Do not reproduce without permission.