Adventures with Fair Isle, Part III

I haven't disappeared in case anyone was wondering! Sorry to keep anyone who might be interested in reading more waiting, but it has been a busy week with work and the kids' schedules. I knew when I began this blog over vacation that it might be tricky keeping it going once work got busy again, but I am determined to hang in there. I am really having fun with this, and I hope those of you who are checking in from time to time are too. Please leave a comment to say hello or to add your two cents if you would like to do so. Just click on the area that currently says "no comments" and help me change that to "1 comment" or more. :)

So here is what I have been working on in the few spare minutes I have each evening -- something mindless and soothing: Granny Stripes from the delightful Lucy of the Attic24 blog.

We have been living through a very challenging winter here in Ohio, so I find the colors in this blanket to be soothing yet lively in contrast to the greys of winter. Lucy talks about "soul colors" on her blog, and anyone who knows her blog knows that her soul colors are deliciously bright and cheerful. My tastes run a little more to autumn colors, though, so this blanket provides me just enough pep to lighten my spirits yet make me feel at home.

Onto Fair Isle! I haven't been doing much of it this week since my mind hasn't been in shape in the evenings for any more challenges, but I have been thinking a lot about how I learned the little I do know. I want to share with all of you some of the wonderful sources of information that helped me to get to the point where I feel confident to try to knit a Fair Isle vest. Here are some of the books that have been my guide over the years:

Like many, my first introduction to Fair Isle techniques was Alice Starmore. Many years ago when I wanted to read about Fair Isle, her original book on the topic, Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting, was out of print and cost around $200 to buy on ebay. I couldn't begin to think about forking over that kind of cash for it, so I checked it out of the library and read and reread it, hating to part with it when it was due. Foolishly, I let an opportunity to buy this book at the regular price of $40 when I saw it in a knitting shop along side Alice Starmore's original Aran Knitting. I wanted both books very badly, but since Aran knitting is my first love and my true love, I decided I could only afford one of the two books -- it had to be Aran Knitting. I regretted not buying both within a week, went back to the shop to buy Fair Isle Knitting, only to find it had been sold that very morning to someone else. I will regret that mistake for the rest of my knitting life. I have since been able to buy the reprint of Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting much to my delight and as much as I love it, I still wish I had the beautiful, hard-cover original with the picture of Mara being knitted on the cover. 

I encourage anyone who is interested in Fair Isle to buy the reprint of this book immediately for the following reasons:

• It provides an excellent historical account of Fair Isle and the island from which it developed.
• It discusses patterns in detail, including how to choose them to create your own designs. It also includes many pattern motifs.
• It provides an in-depth discussion of Fair Isle techniques such as stranding using the two-handed method that A.S. recommends and steeking. The illustrations used are excellent and easy to follow.
• It provides an in-depth illustration of Alice Starmore's inspirations for her designs. 
• It provides many patterns for sweaters and hats.

My second "bible" of Fair Isle knitting is Ann Feitelson's The Art of Fair Isle Knitting. I adore this book. In many ways it has been even more helpful to me than A.S.'s book. Feitelson does an excellent job of providing history and techniques, but she even goes one step further by providing in-depth explanations of color dominance (yarn dominance) in stranding. Before reading her book, I hadn't heard about the importance of consistently holding the background color of the pattern in one hand (usually the right hand when stranding with two hands) and holding the pattern color in the other hand (usually the left hand when stranding with two hands). After reading her book, I have a great understanding of how important it is to keep the background color strand running over top of the pattern color strand and the pattern color strand coming up from underneath the background color strand if one wants the pattern colors to stand out and wants the motifs to appear consistent. This tip alone (which she learned from speaking with Shetland knitters) makes this book worth its price in gold! Of course, Feitelson explains many other aspects of this craft brilliantly in her book and provides some great patterns. Here are some of the highlights:

• History - great detail gained from her experience interviewing Shetland Isle knitters
• Techniques - steeking, stranding, choosing colors, choosing patterns, and doing the math
• Illustrations - helfpul, clear, and beautiful

The other two books I show above have been helpful to me, too. Stranded Color Knitting by Nanette Blanchard, seems to be out of print now, but I found it to be incredibly helpful since Nanette provides simple, clear instructions and illustrations of many of the techniques I learned in the previous two books I mentioned. I had followed Nanette on her former blog years ago where she provided many tips for Fair Isle knitting. You can still find some of her advice on the group pages for Stranded in Ravelry, but it appears that Nanette is no longer blogging. Lastly, Sheila McGregor's Traditional Fair Isle Knitting was one of the first well-known books written about Fair Isle. The motifs included in this book are very helpful to anyone who wants to create his or her own patterns.

Lastly, I must give a lot of credit to Eunny Jang! Her inspiring work on her former blog, See Eunny Knit, really got me interested in trying Fair Isle way back when. Her amazing instructions and illustrations in her Steeking Chronicles are still available for free online for anyone who wants to view them. I highly recommend them as I do her dvd, Introduction to Fair Isle: The Ivy League Vest. 

I must thank one more designer for her help to me in this process of learning Fair Isle, Beth Brown-Reinsel. For my fortieth birthday a few years back, my husband treated me to a two-day workshop with Beth focused on Fair Isle. She had us all make a small, teddy-bear-sized Fair Isle sweater with steeks to learn the entire process in a hands-on manner. It was the most wonderful birthday gift I have ever received! Unfortunately, I nearly lost my job, because the school at which I was teaching was closing, right after that and had to plunge full force into job-search mode and then become familiar with learning the ropes of a new college. Fortunately, I am very happy where I am now and I am blessed to have landed safely after nearly losing my teaching career. The knitting did take a backseat during those years, though, as it should have, so my inspiration to really master Fair Isle waned for a bit. I am now back on track and hope that all of this book-learnin' pays off soon! It is time to dive in and really make a go of it. We scholarly types can sometimes lose ourselves in reading and studying instead of doing, so now it is time for me to do. I recommend that you try some studying, though, if you are new to all of this since it is a whole lot of fun and time well spent. 

Adventures with Fair Isle

Although I have been knitting for 20 years and have a lot experience under my belt, one area in which I need more practice and have dreams of unmet accomplishments is Fair Isle knitting. As you probably know if you have read my introductory post on this blog, knitting Arans and other types of textured designs has been my primary focus for much of my knitting "career." If you check out my Ravelry profile (suzknittyspinner), you will see that I have knitted several cabled sweaters of varying difficulties (and even more than are pictured on Ravelry since I wasn't always great about taking photos) with Alice Starmore's Inishmore being my most prized achievement. My dream is to knit one of Alice Starmore's Fair Isle designs now that I have one of her Arans under my belt.

However, during all those years of dreaming about and knitting cables, I always had a desire to learn Fair Isle (stranded) knitting, too. Lack of time due to a busy work and family-life schedule kept me from pursuing this dream as intensely as I would have liked to have done. I did make some small steps towards my goal over the years, though. I began by knitting hats, starting with a very easy hat and slowly trying others:

I highly recommend this simple pattern from Homespun Handknit: Caps, Socks, Mittens & Gloves, the Mushroom Cap and Mittens by Jacqueline Fee, as a way to begin to practice your stranding technique. If you have done any reading about Fair Isle knitting, you probably know that there are several ways to hold the yarns when stranding. You can hold them both in one hand, or you can use two hands by knitting English-style in one hand and Continental-style in the other (as Elizabeth Zimmerman and Alice Starmore recommend). I choose to strand using both hands, but because I am an English-style knitter, I had to learn to knit Continental-style with my left hand. Before I even started the hat above, though, I practiced Continental-style knitting on a scarf. Once I felt fairly comfortable with it (after over five years of practicing it, I am still not nearly as comfortable with it as I am English-style -- can't teach an old dog new tricks!), I tried this hat. Since the pattern only requires you to strand the yarn for one stitch at a time, it was fairly easy to get the hang of stranding and to get into a flow with my knitting. The yarn used was also a sport weight yarn, so that made the stranding a bit easier to manage for a first project.

After this hat, I tried another Mushroom Cap in different colors for my niece as well as a stranded hat of my own design (using one of Barabara Walker's motifs from one of her Treasuries) for my other niece:

Making these simple hats and especially choosing the motif for the second hat was a lot of fun, and I began to feel like I might be getting the hang of stranded knitting (these hats weren't technically Fair Isle since they were only using two colors without changes in the colors in the background), so I decided to try something that looks a little more complicated but really isn't, The Fake Isle Hat by Amy King.

It was so much fun to knit that I made another:

After my success with all of these hats, I began to gain confidence and decided to try some mittens at a slightly smaller gauge, so I began Beth Brown-Reinsel's Nordic Mittens, and this is where things began to get a bit more tricky. Working on double-pointed needles is usually a breeze for me since I was fortunate to have a knitting teacher who got me going on socks as my second knitting project (long before socks on two circs or Magic Loop existed). However, dpns while stranding was not my strong suit (and still isn't, which is why I am now using Magic Loop for stranded mittens). Here is what I started and have to this day not finished:

Unfortunately, I put these mittens aside when I began feeling frustration from trying to strand across the gaps between dpns, and my enthusiasm for Fair Isle withered a bit for awhile. I then decided that maybe I needed a class, so for my 40th birthday, instead of having a party, I asked for a weekend-long knitting class on Fair Isle with Beth Brown-Reinsel. It was awesome, and I learned so much. That class renewed my interest in Fair Isle, so I began an Ivy League Vest by Eunny Jang. 

It was a bit slow going at first since the gauge of the Shetland wool is finer than anything I had used previously. However, I began to feel like I was getting a rhythm, and then I made a mistake in the pattern! I intended to find it and fix it, but life got in the way, and before I knew it, this project was put in hibernation along with the Nordic Mittens. They both sat in a closet for over five years. However, this is the year that I plan to finish both of them. For some reason, cable knitting came very easily to me, but I have had to work at Fair Isle. I am now at a point, though, where I really want to be able to say that I met the challenge and have become a proficient Fair Isle knitter. Hopefully, I will be able to do that by the end of this year.

I will be posting later this week with some tips about how I have jump-started both of these projects and the ways that they seem to be coming along more smoothly this time.

Please share your experiences with learning Fair Isle knititng or any questions you might have if you are just starting to learn this technique in the comments below. Click on "no comments" to get to the page where you can add your own comment. I would love to get a discussion going here about this subject. I have a lot of great ideas for further posts that can link you to many of the helpful resources and tips I have picked up along the way even though, as you can see, I have been very slow to put them into practice. I have studied this subject a lot more than I have practiced it over the years. :)