Fair Isle is pretty much any color knitting or color changes are frequent. In other words when
you're not working with large blocks of color. I'm Vickie Howell from DIY’s Knitty Gritty, and
I'm going to give you the scoop of Fair Isle knitting. Let's take a look at some right now.
This sweater, pretty traditional in advance fair isle knitting. It’s also called jacquard by some
people. You can see there's bunch of colors here, but you never use more than two in a row. For
this project, I used super chunky iron, bigger needles. Gives it a little funkier edge, also much
easier for you to see at home.
So what you're going to do is you're going to work with your two colors and you just let the color
that you're not working with hang on the back of your work. So we're on the right side of the
fabric now. And it looks like it’s time for me to work with the purple. So I let the green drop and
I knit with the purple. Then I drop the purple, pick up the green, knit with that. You want to
make sure you're not pulling too hard, because that will make the fabric gather. Drop that, work
your next color.
Okay, so we're finish with that row, so now it’s time to turn it over and work on the back side.
This is a little bit different because you're going to carry your yarn in the front. So you're actually
going to see all of the sort of dirty work going on this way.
Alright, so, we're going to purl, we normally would, our first color. Purple. Now for the first time
we're using the green from the last row, because it's still all the way over here from the last time
we used it. I like to just give them a little twist, just to make sure there's no weird gap. That’s the
only time you’ll need to do that. Just the first color change of your wrong side row. Drop that
color, purl those stitches and just continue on in that manner.
You can see on your wrong side row, the carries look a little different, they look more like
traditional purls. Where this longer strands are from the right side.
Really quickly though, it’s important that you don’t pull too hard while you're stranding. If you
pull really hard, your fabric will gather which you don’t want. If you don’t pull hard enough
though, you’ll get these loops. Not only is that not very pretty, it can get tangled up in your
jewelry or your fingers when you're putting on the garment.
So a quick tip would be, while you're working your fair isle, every few stitches, not a bad idea to
lay it down and smooth it out. It’s a great practice to get into.
That’s all there is to it. I think you have all the skills you need now to get started on jacquard or
Fair Isle knitting.