(st)EEK! It's Scary!

For a long time now, it's bugged me that my colorwork sucks as bad as it does. So many patterns I'd love to knit. Abalone! Roscalie! Henry VIII! Not to mention those gorgeous things Eunny Jang has been designing for IK. But they all require a knitter with better color chops than me.

For most of this year, this hole in my skill set has been on my mind enough for me to have planned a way to get over the hump. Step one involved buying some practice yarn. Yeah, right. Like I couldn't use up some leftover skeins in my stash. I just use any excuse to buy yarn, and needing to improve my colorwork was a perfectly workable excuse. (Past excuses have included things like, I can't remember where I put my ~insert knitting tool here~, and It's cloudy and cold and I need a pick-me-up, and the ever-popular, I've been working too hard and now I deserve a treat. So you see, any excuse with a real project goal attached is a step up from my usual excuses.)

I found some gorgeous variegated wool at, where else, Nana's Knits, and decided to use it against a black background to make a felted fair isle bag. Why felted? Because felting hides a lot of sins, including inconsistent gauge and bubbly fabric. Bless me, father, for I commit these sins on a regular basis.






















The lovely Trish at Nana's was surprised to learn that I have trouble carrying with my left hand. What she doesn't realize is that I'm so strongly right-handed that it's a miracle I can type. And drive. And button my shirts. I had tried and failed to figure out a lefty knitting method that would work for me and feel comfortable. This was really the root of my fair isle failures.

So Trish loaned me these two doohickies. The one on my naughty finger lets you strand two colors over a single finger at once, running one through each of those corkscrewy bits. The red one on my index finger lets you strand up to four colors at once by running a strand through the pegs under the swivelly silver pin.

These are really cool gadgets. I have to say, they worked much better than my former technique of picking up and dropping colors as needed. The fabric evened out almost immediately. I like the red one with the silver arm a little better because the corkscrewy one had a habit of rotating on my finger.

This past summer at Stitches, I took a class on continental knitting in the hopes that it would help my left hand be a little less clumsy. By the end of the class, I could actually work a knit stitch with only minor contortions and minimal bad language. The purl stitch still eludes me, but guess what? Don't need to purl when you're working in the round. Yay for working in the round!

So I pulled out my Stitches notes and switched from the finger contraptions to good old-fashioned two-handed carries. And it was awful at first, but within about two rounds, I discovered that my speed was picking up, and my floats were a bit more even. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not anywhere near where I want to be. Even a casual glance at the picture up top will reveal how uneven my stitches still are. But it's getting better, and my hope is that by the time I get to steek this fabric to stitch the bag together, I might actually be classified a beginner rather than a totally lame wannabe.

The pattern is sort of my own concoction. I'll save that happy little story for another post.