Monday, January 01, 2007

Fair Isle for the Easily Intimidated

Working on a vest using Khroma. This is seriously delicious yarn, half merino, half baby Alpaca. The colours are tremendous -- a rainbow of tweedy delights.

I wanted to do a Fair Isle design, but I had two constraints to worry about: that the yarn isn't cheap, and therefore I wanted to use it wisely, and that my gauge in stranded Fair Isle is nowhere near the gauge I achieve working with a single yarn.

What resulted, after 3 or 4 hours of doodling with pencil crayons and graph paper is this design... it uses a minimum of extra yarn, the pattern is easy easy easy to remember and work, and is regular enough and widely enough spaced that my gauge isn't going to go bonkers.


It will have a v-neck. What the back will look like and how I handle the edgings will depend on how much yarn I have left in the extra colours. I want to use as much of the colours up as possible, but I know that I don't have enough to do the back fully coloured. So... hmm... maybe just plain blue with only the small contrast boxes? Maybe the armhole edgings in one colour and the neck edging in another?

Decisions, decisions.... enjoying the process very much.

The pattern will be available at The Naked Sheep later this month.

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