I created this pattern so that I could concentrate on learning how to do Fair Isle knitting. I chose to do it in the round so that I didn’t have to worry about purling while trying to achieve my goals.

I had two goals in mind:

1. how to correctly tension my yarn for the floats
2. work with two hands, each holding a different color

I wasn’t too concerned about goal #1 because I tend to have pretty even tension when doing normal knitting, so I knew it was just a matter of learning how floats react within Fair Isle patterns. Goal #2 was going to be a bit more challenging for me because I am not very dexterous with my left hand. I normally refer to my left hand as a “holder”, because other than using it for typing, I don’t find much use for it except to hold things so my right hand can manipulate them.

Keeping those two goals in mind, I thought about doing a hat as my first project; but I really wanted to have more width to my project so I could lay it flat and see how my tension was doing periodically. Plus, in doing the project as a cowl it was easier to flip the project inside-out periodically to check on how I was doing with my floats (twisting, uniformity, huge jumbled mess, etc.).

I also decided to use a color-transitioning yarn and black as my two color choices. This pattern can be used with multiple skeins of different colors, but I didn’t want to get distracted by having to change yarn colors all of the time and figured that using just two different yarns would be the easiest way to accomplish something pretty without all the fuss.

I made up a simple Fair Isle repeat chart. I knew I wanted the pattern to be a simple repeatable design so that I didn’t constantly have to refer to a large chart. I created a simple geometric pattern that did not have large floats (more than 4-stitches per float) so that I didn’t have to think about securing the floated yarn all the time. With this pattern securing the floats just naturally happens as the pattern progresses.