Monday, January 21, 2008

Playing With Yarn

Brrrrrrrrrr, it was so cold yesterday, so I stayed in all day. All day. Didn't go out once. I only opened the door to grab the newspaper and closed it real fast. This staying in thing was kind of cool. I played with yarn most of the day! I decided to bite the bullet and do some two color knitting. I think it's fair isle? I think two colors is fair isle and more than that is intarsia, or is it the other way around? I did two colors. It took me an hour to knit this little square, I think it's a snowflake.







Just never mind those screwed up knit/purl rows at the top and bottom, it was just to practice working on the colors and . . . reading a chart. Talk about screwing up. Left, right, main color, contrast color, knit, purl, left, right, rip out the row, do over, swear, read left to right, then right to left, and so on, arghhhhhh So I fiddled with it and fiddled with it and finally knit the 13 rows in the little practice chart. That's it . . . 13 rows. Took an hour. But, I did it! I'm sure I didn't hold the strands correctly to do the back as they were quite tangled after a couple of rows, had to untangle them and continue.



Here is how the back looks:



It was a learning experience for sure and I will practice it again. Maybe I can do it in 59 minutes next time. I'm determined to learn this.



6 comments:

Heather said...

It doesn't look bad. It was your first attempt afterall. I heard that holding the colors in opposite hands works well. I googled fair isle and color knitting and came up with some good stuff. I am staring my fake fair isle hat, so wish me luck!

Krystal said...

Well, I may be totally wrong, but tradition fair isle is more than two colors, and intarsia was two... but I keep them separated by thinking if it's a picture, where all of one color is together, then it's intarsia. but again... I'm probably wrong. :) Looks great though! Really. It gets easier.

Heather said...

http://www.magknits.com/Nov06/patterns/fakeisle.htm is fake isle. Krystal made one, and I already had it on my list of todo patterns, and that just pushed me over. So far so good. Altho I am just at the beginning.

Leeann said...

How exciting! I'm dying to learn fair isle but kinda scared to try it out, since I have a feeling it would end up with some yarn very tangled and me very frustrated. Yours looks great for a first attempt, though!

My understanding of the fair isle/intarsia difference is that intarsia is when you have a big block of color, like a circle in the middle of a square or something, and fair isle usually involves more continuous interaction between the two colors, if that makes any sense? That's how one of my books explains it but really I think the lines are kinda blurred. Whatever you call it, it looks great!

Larjmarj said...

Looks good, I haven't really done any two color knitting other than mosaic knitting. I am dying to try the skull mittens though. Your's looks fine! Everything takes time to learn, its a process.

Tina said...

It looks great. The first time I did color work the two colors got all twisted around each other and I vowed never to do colorwork again. Then I learned how to knit continental and now I can keep the yarns from getting all twisted, even when I have to carry the yarn over more than 3 stitches. Keep at it and eventually you will find what works for you.