Fair Isle is Fairly Easy

This is the first hat that I ever made. I got the pattern from an amazing book called Just Hats by Lion Brand Yarn (they have a Just Scarves version too).
As I understand it, there are two ways of knitting with more than one colour to create patterns and pictures. One of them is intarsia, which I haven't gotten to grips with yet. It's one of my New Year's knitting resolutions to conquer this style.
The other is known as Fair Isle, named after the Scottish island that spawned it. The name originally referred to the designs created by the Fair Isle people (something like these), but has come to mean the technique used. Technically, the method is called stranding, and Fair Isle is a form of stranding. But let's not get into semantics here (we can leave that to this excellent article).

The idea is to knit with the different colours, simply stringing the yarn not currently in use across the back of the work. For example, if my main colour is black (as on this hat), and my contrast colour is white, then when I am knitting with the black, I have to string the white yarn across the back. The back looks like this:

There are two things to remember when doing this. The first is to make sure that you string the yarn loosely. If you don't do this, you will end up with a piece of knitting that is pulled together by the yarn on the back, and that will ruin it. The second thing is to catch the yarn in the one being used every 3 stitches. By this, I mean that if you have a large section of white, for example, every 3 stitches you should catch up the black yarn in the white, so that you don't just have a huge string on the back. If this doesn't make sense to you (it took me a while to get hold of the idea) don't worry. Get hold of one of the many fantastic knitting books that are bound to be in your local library, or in your bookstore. Other options are to Google for it (this is what I do) or find a knitting group that meets near you, and get someone to show you.

Anyway, I was rather pleased with the outcome, and am using the same technique (although not technically Fair Isle) to construct my TTC subway map scarf. The only problem with this is that the back of the piece tends to look a little shoddy, so I'm going to have to sew some fleece or something onto the back of that. I'll show you when I'm finished.
My suggestion, then, is to keep Fair Isle for things like hats and sweaters - pieces that only show the right side.

As usual, if you've got any great tips, advice or questions, drop me a line at salvatordarling@gmail.com, or by commenting on this blog.