Fair Isle

Maybe for Shetland Wool Week, which is September 27th to October 3rd this year.

Lerwick is a beautiful, walkable and safe city with lots of cute shops and incredible Fair Isle knitting everywhere you turn.

I'm currently sitting by the water, looking at the North Sea and watching the seagulls dive for their dinner.

It's so peaceful.

And, [lips smack] um, so this hat a week, I thought, "Well, I can get creative," 'cause a hat is essentially a kind of a rectangle, and I can get creative.

I can do Fair Isle.

I can do tuck.

I can do all kinds of cables if I want, you know? And I, uh, one of the things that I, I tried was a, um, a program called Stitch Fiddle where you could design your own Fair Isle and, and that sort of thing.

And so, uh, one of the things that when I was designing in Stitch Fiddle and I found, um, [lips smack] when I went to make a punch card, I c- it wasn't just a simple matter of saying, "Oh, this is my design.

I will now send it to a punch card." You had to jump through all these different hoops because you had to change it to a TXT file, and then that had to go to a punch card file, and then blah, blah, blah, blah.

And one of the things that I had to kind of pitch and, and to, to give my publisher props, you know, they really do trust me.

So they, they posed the question, "Is it too complicated to put in, you know, repairs in brioche and repairs in, in Fair Isle and, and slip stitch knitting and cables and lace? You know, would we have to explain how those things work first?" And I said, "I'll put in the introduction that there will be fixes in this book for techniques you might not have tried yet."

Mm-hmm.

But I hope knowing that they're here will give you the confidence to try them.

So for instance, stranded knitting, working in the round.

In Patty's Knitting Bag of Tricks, I have, you know, my tricks for, for a, a join that's completely seamless, a cast on edge, bind off edge.

Then I, I have a trick that is not in the book, 'cause I didn't invent it yet, about jogless, um, Fair Isle, jogless stranded knitting.

And I know in Shetland, they're like, "But Fair Isle has a jog.

And then we're watching Felicity jog up to an administration building as we hear her tell Sally her work study is filing student applications in the admissions office a few times a week.

The only serious rule is to respect the confidentiality of the documents by not reading them, which she obviously is n- ignoring as she crouches down a hallway in her gigantic Fair Isle sweater, of course, putting a hand on her heart as she reads what we may all safely assume is Ben's application essay.

And then Felicity's back in her dorm room, hair all down for the first time, pacing in what looks like a Depression era nightgown [laughs] during-

Mm-hmm

... at, at Jemison's.

So it's a floral, um, Fair Isle vest.

Steek.

Steek.

So first, first Fair Isle, first Steek project.

Mm-hmm.

Um, I used, uh, like, a navy blue for all the ribbing.

... as yours is on Instagram.

So I do get an idea for something that I wanna knit, you know, like, um- Fair isle or a stranded color work hat in fingering weight yarn.

Like, thinking about the latest perk that came out, the Barn Loft Hat.

Yeah.

So that is where a pattern is woven into the knit.

So the classic example is like a fair isle sweater, like the ones you would get on vacation in Iceland or something, you know? Or like, I mean, you obviously can buy them other places, but you're going to be seeing those a lot all over.

Or like last year, I saw a lot of like funny things being woven into sweaters, like horses and stuff.

I was going to say.

I'm sure that that theme is probably going to keep going, but that is in Tarsia.

So it means that there's like... a pattern or a picture or something woven into the actual knit of the sweater

i every time i think fair isle i think of childhood because most of my clothes i'd say up until like six seven eight were from my sister and we were in Germany when she was I mean I was there too but yeah I'm like I was there too obviously but I was just so little so I got her hand-me-downs and all her stuff was from Germany so everything was so many knits so many fair isles and so every time we see stuff like that me and Tara are like oh my god it's so Germany

that's so funny yeah yeah that's what that