I am a beginner with Fair Isle knitting. Other than practice pieces at classes, I’ve only done two Fair Isle pieces: a pouch (we are medieval reenactors) and a hat for my husband for Christmas The hat is shown above. The pouch is below.
I never thought I could do Fair Isle knitting even though I’ve taken a couple of classes on it. The reason that I did not think I could do it is the classes were so intimidating. I simply cannot knit with both hands. I knit continental and am very right handed. At classes I fought to knit with both hands. What they say in the classes is if you knit continental, then for the dominant color knit Continental and for the contrast color knit English style. With a lot of hard effort I could do that, but I could see that I would never do much Fair Isle knitting if it was that hard. Also my tension was terrible, way too tight. This wasn’t working out for me.
Then I saw on a TV show (Knitting Daily) a woman who did Portuguese two color knitting who had a pin with two slots, one for each color yarn. That got me thinking: What are the key parts of Fair Isle knitting? The first is only two colors per row and you have to keep the yarns in alignment, meaning the main color should always be on top and the contrast color on the bottom. This is always the case. If you bring in a new contrast color, it still remains on the bottom. The yarn, for the most part, should run in parallel lines like below.
Now you are going to say, but I see small areas, particularly in the hat, where the grey color does a short diagonal. That is where I caught the thread in the back when the pattern calls for more than 5 stitches of one color. You don’t want very long “floats” in the back to catch fingers and such. A float is the distance one color is carried in the back.
So what is my trick? How did I switch to doing Fair Isle? Something they would tell you never to do: I just knit one handed. I do Continental knitting with my right hand. No two hands; it is all with my right hand. Normally when I knit, the yarn is in my left hand for tensioning.
For Fair Isle I have both yarns in my right hand. The dominant yarn is between the first and second fingers. I drop the contrast thread most of the time when I am not knitting it. Dropping the yarn helps ensure the dominant color stays on top. Or else, like two color Portuguese knitting, without the pin, I use the fingers of my right hand to separate the two colors of thread, as shown below. The grey is the dominant color and the brown is the contrast.
Carrying the dominant yarn between my first and second finger on my right hand gives a very light tension, which is needed in Fair Isle.
You will never knit Fair Isle fast this way, but you can do and it looks good. This is just my way of doing Fair Isle that works for me. Many people would say I should work to do this the right, official, way. I say what works for me is best for me. And really even doing regular knitting, I’m not fast.
Sweetie Hubby modelling the hat I made him for Christmas.
What is everyone else Working On?