Fair Isle knitting uses slightly advanced techniques to create colourful garments that look amazingly complicated. Traditionally, they're made of multiple colours (up to five) to create horizontal stripes and repeating geometric patterns that give the item a very intricate appearance.
The style is named for Fair Isle, a small island in the Shetlands, northeast of Scotland, where it originated and should not be confused with Scandinavian, intarsia or mosaic knits, which are techniques all their own. Garments made in the Fair Isle knitting style are in high demand due to the uniqueness of patterns and colour combinations available to choose from. Traditionally, wool was the yarn of choice and was dyed using plant extracts, resulting in soft muted shades, and knitters that continue these traditional techniques create garments in subdued but beautiful colours. Click here to buy your wool.
Fair Isle knitting never uses more than two colours in any individual row - a background colour and a pattern colour. Its not very much more complicated than working in one colour but the results can be really impressive and since its typically knit in the round, with the pattern facing you at all times, the purl stitch isn't used. Also, traditional Fair Isle knitting patterns normally have no more than five consecutive stitches of any particular colour, with the alternate colour being carried along at the back of the piece in a method called "stranding". These strands are visible from the back and they add extra thickness and warmth to the garment.Read more about this technique
It's very important to keep the strands loose. If you pull the strands too tightly along the back, your work will look puckered and won't lie flat. The shape and size of the project will be distorted and the finished project won't drape properly or have the proper amount of stretch. Try stretching the stitches on the right needle a bit before you change colours so that the strand will have a similar amount of stretch as the knit stitches. Even when you keep the strands loose, they don't have the same amount of stretch as the actual knitting stitches do and as a result, Fair Isle knitting is usually stiffer than your other knit projects. Unfortunately, if you do strand too tightly, the only thing you can do is rip back your work and try again.
With traditional Fair Isle knitting the background and pattern colors usually change places every few rows giving a striped effect, meaning that the yarn threads are rarely dormant for more than a few rows. The dormant yarn can be carried up the rows to where it will be used again but if you are working flat, the yarn will need to be cut and the ends woven in later.
The easiest way to work a Fair Isle knitting pattern is with a graph chart that shows the design pattern. They're sometimes printed in colour, showing the placement of the different coloured stitches as chosen by the designer, which can be helpful with visualising and comparison to the photo of the finished item, but can be confusing if you choose to use different colours for your own project. If this is the case, make a black and white photocopy of your pattern graph and using the dots, lines and X's that indicate the colour changes, you can quickly and easily substitute your own colour choices. Even if your pattern graph is already printed in black and white, we recommend that you make a photocopy so that you can colour it, mark off each line as you go or make notes without damaging the original.
Watch this excellent video on YouTube to see a simple way of holding, and working with, multiple strands of yarn and if you'd like to know more, there's a fabulous book by Ann Feitelson, full of beautiful patterns and information on the history and techniques of Fair Isle knitting. Buy it here at a great price.
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you do strand too tightly, the only thing you can do is rip back your work and try again. 