I Love Color

Wow. Time has really gotten away from me. It’s been two months since I’ve written. There has been a lot of things getting me sidetracked from my blog and my designing. The holidays and my year-end work for my bookkeeping business to name the main reasons. But things are getting back to normal and I’m consciously putting more focus on my knitwear business. I’ve decided I need to start scheduling blocks of time during the week to work on pattern writing, etc. Leaving it for “when I have time” isn’t working and I have a lot to get done.

Back to the theme of this post. I love color. One of my favorite knitting techniques is Faire Isle, or stranded colorwork. I’ve done quite a bit of it. A few years ago I took a class at Knit Purl from a talented knitter and designer named Ruth Sorensen. At the time, I was holding one strand of yarn in either hand when doing Faire Isle. It was a bit cumbersome for me and very slow. And I wasn’t getting a consistent tension. During the class, as she was teaching, Ruth was continually knitting. She was really fast and wasn’t even looking at what she was doing. Right then and there I decided I was going to teach myself to do that. I noticed she held both strands of yarn in her left hand and was knitting continental style. That was the first thing I had to learn. As with any new technique, it was quite awkward, but I stuck with it and now I only knit continental and I’m really fast working with two strands. The other reason why I like this technique is because you can get a really nice even tension. I’m going to try to make a little video showing the process, but for now I have a few photos. The key to keeping the two yarns separated enough in order to make it really easy to pick up the one you need, is to wrap both yarns together around your little finger for tension and then put your middle finger between the two yarns from top to bottom, then lay the two yarns over the top of your index finger. You’ll also notice I keep my fingers very close to my needles. That also make knitting much faster.