Fairisle cowl

I had hoped to have more of this to share with you but last Tuesday having planned an outing with my camera, I went down with the dreaded norovirus. They say one to three days, well I make it at least four! in my case. During this time all I wanted to do was rest with eyes gently closed, and, anyway, I didn’t want to risk contaminating my beautiful cowl.I found the cowl pattern on The Twisted Yarn’s blog HERE and absolutely loved it.

She used all sixteen shades of Stylecraft ‘batik’ yarn but I knew that doing the same would leave me with a lot of leftover yarn, so I calculated that four balls should be plenty. I was rather taken with the look of the ‘batik’.

So I went to a local yarn shop and chose my four favourite shades that I thought would work well together. (Teal, Raspberry, Violet, Sage)

Of course it wasn’t enough to just substitute colours for the sixteen in the original so I sat at my computer with my favourite drawing programme and played around with the colours till I produced a chart I could use. I found I had left one row out but luckily I discovered it! Can you see where? It’s the symmetry gives it away.

After earlier very poor attempts at fairisle type knitting I thought that this was a chance to master it, or at least to see if I could produce something acceptable. I think the batik effect of the yarn is fairly forgiving of irregularity.

I have been working very slowly and have found a way, laying each ball either side of me as I twist the yarn together, of not ending up with a tangle. I felt that my mother had twisted the yarn every stitch and that is what I have tried to do before but, as I can no longer ask my mother, I spoke to someone who said that she thought you only had to catch the yarn every two stitches so that is what I have done. However not up to my mother’s standard as you shall see below.

For those of you that like a story here is why I am so frustrated by my inability to knit fairisle and similar two colour knitting.

My mother knitted the most beautiful fairisle jumpers for my children This was my son’s favourite jumper for some years and as he loved it so much, when he grew out of it, my mother made him another in a larger size.

I had wanted to do the same for my grandchildren but all my attempts as this sort of knitting, large or small, have come out with a very irregular pulled look to them.

This morning I remember my mother’s knitting bag that I had inherited and how the lining is always coming adrift. So here is a photograph of the outside – and the reverse. It does look as it she was twisting every stitch so I still have a long way to go to achieve that smooth, could almost have been made by a machine, look.

Since I think that the cowl does not look too pulled I will maybe leave mastering the every other stitch method for later.

Now to catch up on all the blogs I haven’t read over the last week!