Well, I just finished my first little test swatch. It was...interesting, to say the least.
I generally have pretty high tension in my knitting - I definitely knit tighter than I purl, but I keep trying to fix that by pulling even tighter on my purl stitches, and, unfortunately, totally forgetting to do the opposite with the knits.
Let's just say that this really, really doesn't work so well with fair isle.
All those floats of yarn across the back of the work? Far too tight. I mean, it wouldn't be as stretchy as regular knitting, anyway, but, well...see for yourself:
Alright, it might be a little difficult to tell in the photo, but that turtle is very wobbly. That swatch will not lay out flat for me. I might try blocking it to see if I can fix it, but it's an acrylic yarn, so I don't think that's going to work.Needless to say, I had better do a bit of practicing before I try to make an actual project with fair isle.
Other thing I learned, though, is that it's actually rather fun. I mean, the actual process of doing it is a bit frustrating, since it requires a lot of concentration, and I kept messing up, but it's pretty cool to see the image slowly form on the needles. I think the turtle's darn cute, anyway. Much better than the little learning charts I could find. I just got this one from a book.
Actually, I think I'm going to use the same chart to try out double knitting. It should basically work the same. But I'd better not try to work that out today. I do have some other projects in the works. I did the fair isle swatch as a break from one of them, actually. I need to get it done, and it's going well, but it's plain stockinette stitch almost all the way, which can get a bit boring. Especially since I'm not good enough at it yet to knit without looking at what I'm doing. If I try to watch something that's too involving, I forget to pay attention to what my fingers are doing, and next thing I know I have a whole bunch of mistakes I have to go back and fix.
Of course, sometimes I get mistakes even when I'm looking at what I'm doing, but that's beside the point.
Eventually, though, I will learn how to do fair isle, and make it look pretty. Definitely understand why it's generally only used as a border or something, though - it must take forever to knit an entire project in fair isle.
...which I'll be doing, hopefully relatively soon. After all, the whole reason I'm learning it now is so that I can make my nephew a Christmas Stocking, and that pattern is fair isle almost the whole way.
The important thing is: turtle!
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