The yarn I used was a lovely hand dye from Jorstadcreek.com. The colors I used were a saturated shade of Teal with a light Gray. The yarn is lovely to knit. It has a nice sheen, drape, and great stitch definition.

I only needed two rows of the second skein of gray. If this hadn’t been a test knit I might have fudged it a little so I wouldn’t of had to use the second skein.

NOTES:

Skill level: Anyone who is comfortable knitting fair isle.

Swatch, Swatch, Swatch! I would encourage knitters to swatch this project. With a shawl it is a temptation to skip this process. I did a swatch for both the stockinette and pattern. For fun I swatched different yarns with different needles until I came up with a fabric I liked.

I knit this as a test knit for Olga. If I was knitting from the final copy of the published pattern I would have printed off the fair isle instructions and marked the rows off as I went. What I did was sit with the computer whenever there was a pattern repeat change, knit the first row and then there would be 7 repeats that I could knit without the computer.

Abbreviations:

p1tblR Change yo orientation and purl through the front loop

pltb1L: Purl yo through back loop

I’ve knitted many fair isle projects but always in the round. I struggled with purling fair isle. Once I had it down pat it became fun to do!

I used this video to learn how to purl fair isle:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWHr3PH0RHg

There is a lot of knitting to this project …. so you can’t whip through it in a day or two. Sometimes it felt like it was taking forever to knit! In the end it is so worth it! I LOVE this project and will be wearing this frequently.