The thing nobody told me about colorwork knitting is that it’s really quite easy – especially Fair Isle colorwork, where you only have to orchestrate two strands of yarn at any one time. It turns out that working with several colors at once is enjoyable, relaxing, and rewarding. In fact, it’s the most instantly gratifying kind of knitting there is. Even after working a scant ten rows, you can clearly see a motif emerging. As soon as you notice it, you immediately have the feeling of having accomplished something. After all, the whole point of colorwork is what you do with the colors; without that, it’s just plain old stockinette!
Generally speaking, when I knit things, they only come in one, single, absolutely correct color at a time. Once having seen the finished item in my mind’s eye, I’ll go to great lengths to get exactly that color. For the sake of that one perfect skein, I will spend hours upon hours searching for and sourcing from multiple destashes (yarn other people don’t want anymore), hopping around to yarn stores that are hours apart, over-dyeing yarn I am already in possession of, or dyeing and spinning my own yarn, from scratch (which is sometimes easier, and less time consuming!). And that’s just for one skein. When there are multiple colors, plural, in a project, I can easily get caught up for well nigh on a month or more, setting straight every value, tone, and shade before even considering picking up a pair of knitting needles.
Like this hat. It should have been simple; it IS simple. Gloriously simple, in the way only an incredibly well-designed thing can be. And as with so many of my projects, I had a vision. Of fluffy, curly-locked, natural-wool-colored sheep, on a handknit field of some-colors-or-other (the colors of that certain spin-a-long fiber, in particular…), with softly glistening, slightly sparkling, snowy white “snow” yarn falling gently from a cloudless “sky”. Essentially: I excel at making beautifully simple things artfully complicated. Lucky for me, I had the perseverance (and coincidentally had sufficient time during a vacation) to create the yarns of my dreams. Color problems solved!
Then I started knitting.
I’m just going to come out and say right now, that when those Shetland and Fair Islanders hit upon creating elaborate-looking colorwork patterns while only using two colors in any single row, it was – and is – sheer genius. I, on the other hand, in my untried, untested, and inexperienced foray into such things, took a nice three color pattern and inadvertently turned it into a seven color pattern, with five of those colors appearing in a few single rows. Oops./Whee!
On the one hand, the finished product came out great, and I love it, and accompanying mitts are already on the way. On the other hand… well, let’s just say those seven colors made two color knitting seem like a breeze (which it is, really). Truly, carrying five colors wasn’t hard or bad, it was just a lot more like Tetris than I fairly want my knitting to regularly be. And also – I need to have an footnote here about BFL. For some reason, every spinner I know jumps all over BFL (Blue Faced Leicester, a breed of sheep). It’s the “background yarn” in this hat (the “meadow” and the “sky”). Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice fiber to spin, and it dyes very well, and the finished yarn looks great, especially when it has silk added in. I just can’t seem to be able to wear it, except on my head (although, for certain, I’m going to go through the itchy agony to wear these glorious mitts for a few hours at a time, once they’re done). Even just thinking about putting a BFL scarf around my neck makes me squirm; and BFL is soft. I’ve seen people snuggle up in high collared grey masham sweaters and not even twitch. I am amazed by, and envy, those people, and I would spin and knit what I consider “wool with character” for them, all day long. Not so for me. I’ve spent the past several weeks picking stray BFL fibers off of everything I own. Not because they look bad, stuck to whatever they’re stuck to, but because I can feel them, and they’re irritating! I do believe I’m about to become a very picky crafter when it comes to my own skin. The personal wearable wools campaign is ON.