theraineysisters knitting and so much more

I won’t steal Susan’s clever “skirt lifting” title, but Lisa asked me to show the inside of Widdicombe Fair. She was also wondering about some of the floats, which she thought looked as if they could be quite long. As a quick refresher, here is what the blanket looks like. (I’ve now finished the third out of five horse repeats.)

Some of the floats are quite long for fair isle. I think the longest is 17 stitches, but there are numerous others in the 10-13 range. My rule of thumb is to do nothing for any float up to 8 stitches. Eight is my cut off. At that point, I will “catch” the other color at some convenient point. For example, if I have a 9-stitch float, I will:

1. Try to convince myself that I should stretch my 8-stitch rule to include 9. I’m never successful.

2. Knit 4 or 5 stitches, catch the unused color, knit the remaining stitches.

What I try to be careful of is where I catch it. I don’t want to “stack up” those catch points on top of one another. So, if in the row below I also had a long float, I try to make sure I catch the next float one or two stitches apart from the first. I also don’t want that caught color to ever peek through, so I try to not catch it right above a color change. I’m probably thinking too much, but that is my nature.

If I have a really long float — such as the 17-stitch one in this blanket — I’ll catch the unused color twice.

Here is the inside of the blanket:

Someone asked about wedding shawls. I’ve been thinking a lot about that question, but I don’t have a great answer. I think it so depends upon what level of difficulty you would want to tackle and what shape shawl you want. For example, the Forest Path Stole that was published in Interweave Knits would make a beautiful wedding shawl if you wanted a rectangle. Heritage Knitting and Fiddlesticks both have some lovely patterns — but there are so many shawl patterns out there. I’m no expert.

What does everyone else think?

Toby asked a few questions in the comments to my last post, and I thought I would answer them here to make sure she saw the answers.

1. I have never knit Fair Isle, but given your comments I think that I might try one of these one day. Would you recommend a class or is it possible to learn Fair Isle from a book?

That’s a hard one. If you want to try to learn how to knit fair isle two-handed (holding one color in one hand and the other color in your other hand), then you might want a class. True confession time: that’s not how I knit fair isle. I never got comfortable doing it that way and didn’t feel like taking the time to practice. (Thank goodness there are no knitting police.) When I did try it, I found that my gauge wasn’t as consistent as I’d like. I know that practice would greatly improve that, but — well — then I’d have to be practicing instead of knitting. So I drop one color and pick up the next; I’ve gotten very fast at doing that. I keep the dark color always hanging to my right and the lighter color to my left. It’s just how I do it.

Anyway, back to your question. The only tricky parts are cutting and finishing the steek. You might be able to find someone to give you a private lesson on that if you can’t find a class.

2. Do you order the kit from Virtual Yarns or purchse the yarn from your LYS?
Is the yarn in the kit a wool that is soft enough for a baby? Is the pattern available separately from the kit?

You can’t purchase these blanket patterns separately; they are only available as a kit from Virtual Yarns. Although it’s not the softest yarn in the world, it is much softer than other fair isle yarns in my opinion, especially after having been washed (by hand of course). Moreover, if you used a different yarn, you’d probably have to do some sewing in order to keep the yarn from unraveling after you cut the steek.

3. One thing I wasn’t clear on is where there would be steeks in a straight piece of knitting. I’ve read about them. I thought steeks were normally inserted in a sweater where the piece was knit in the round. Is the blanket knit in the round and then cut?

Yes. The blanket is knit in the round and then cut. It fits nicely on a 24″ circular needle. As I said in my first post, I started with a provisional cast on. When I finish all of the repeats, I’ll leave the live stitches on the needle. Then I’ll cut the steek, pick up stitches along one side, pick up the stitches from the provisional cast on, and then pick up the stitches from the remaining side. The border is then knit in the round as well. There will have be a LOT of stitches on the needle, at that point but I’ve done this before and the border is slow but not difficult.