- Let's knit two color fair isle.
Today we're making a cowl.
(jazzy piano music)
Welcome back to another Yarnspirations tutorial,
I'm your host, Kristen Mangus of GoodKnit Kisses.
Let's get started.
In today's tutorial you'll need a bulky
number five weight yarn, we're using Patons Alpaca Blend,
color black cherry for contrast A
and color birch for contrast B.
The basic two color fair isle
requires no new techniques beyond the basic knit stitch,
so when we're working in a circular fashion
all you need is the main knit stitch
in the body of your work
and then you may need a brim or edging for hats and cowls,
but basically all you need to know is the knit stitch,
and we'll be holding yarn for our accent in the back.
Now, it develops a color stranding in the back
with some floats, but I've got a technique here
where there's not these long floats of color
that your ring or anything else can get caught up in.
So I'll be teaching that to you in this tutorial.
You're going to need your yarn,
I've got one ball of Patons Alpaca Blend color black cherry,
it's a bulky five weight yarn,
and then our accent for contrast B is color birch
from Patons Alpaca Blend.
You'll also need a stitch marker
and your tapestry needle for weaving in the little tails,
and then we need our circular knitting needle.
Today I'm using a US 11 or eight millimeter circular needle
with a 24 inch cord,
so be sure and get your supplies together
and go click on the link in the description below
to get your pattern.
Let's begin.
Let's start by casting-on.
We're going to make a knitted cast-on today,
and because my needles are a little dark for this yarn
I'm just going to switch them to something lighter.
So make whatever cast-on you'd like,
I prefer the knitted for this particular pattern.
I'm just gonna start by making a slip knot,
however it works for you,
and slip that onto my needle
that I normally would hold all that knitting in,
and then we're going to insert into the first stitch.
Okay, so we're knitting directly on here
and we're not actually gonna be moving
anything over to our other needle.
Gonna go ahead and yarn over,
just like you're pulling through a knit stitch,
and then you don't drop it off, you just twist around
and pick it back up with that same needle
that had that first stitch on it,
so we drop it off on there.
So now we have two stitches on our needle.
We're just gonna continue across.
Insert into there, yarn over as a knit stitch,
pull through, twist, and insert our needle, and drop it off.
Let's do that again one more time.
Insert,
yarn over,
pull through, twist, insert.
There we go.
So I've got four stitches on here.
You're gonna continue, and when we meet back up
we will join it in the round.
For our cowl we're gonna cast-on 84 stitches.
Pause your video, and I'll see you soon.
Now let's connect in the round.
On this particular cord length
it's actually too long for this demonstration purposes,
but I also want to show you how to make a magic loop.
So the magic loop, all it is
is that you're squeezing it together between two stitches
that are further away from where your needles are
and you just pinch the cord and then feed it through,
and this is the extra cording,
so that way I can get my knitting in the round
and work with something longer.
So if you don't have the right cord length, that's okay.
If you do have the right cord length
it might be a little tight when you first start,
and then after you get a few rows of knitting
that in the round will work much better.
So in order to connect it
we're just going to push our stitches
to the ends of our needles here
and have your stitch marker ready,
and I'm just gonna pick off that first stitch on that needle
and then I'm gonna pick off that next stitch
with my needle I just took it from,
took one from, we were just trading, okay.
And then I'm just making the first stitch on both needles,
the one from the opposite,
and then right before I start knitting
I'm going to throw on my stitch marker
to indicate my first stitch of the round.
So now this is where you can start your knitting.
Let's work our ribbing.
We're going to knit the first stitch, just as usual,
pull that through and drop off the old,
okay, that's the first stitch.
Now we're gonna put our yarn to the inside,
or the front of our work,
and pick up that stitch from the front leg and purl.
We're gonna yarn over
and push through that stitch to the back,
and if you need a slower video on the purl stitch
click on the link in the description below
for a slower video.
And we're gonna put the yarn to the back again,
and we're going to knit.
So this is a one by one ribbing,
and we just alternate moving our yarn
to the back or the front, and knitting or purling.
You're just gonna do that all the way around
until you reach this last stitch,
so pause your video and I'll meet you back up
when you completed that round, see you soon.
A quick tip on magic circle,
when you're coming to that last stitch
you are going to find
that you've got all this extra cord now,
so I would go to the back of the needle
that has all those extra stitches on it
and then go ahead and feed through your cord there
and pull through all that slack
to get it ready for the next stitch,
that way you've got as much stitches as possible
that you can work before you have to move that cord along.
Okay, continue knitting along,
and also on this particular video
if you're working on the cowl
you'll notice this is very small.
It's because I'm actually working a hat at the same time,
and this video will be the same for that.
It may not be up at the particular time of this video,
but you can click on the link below and check back anytime.
See you soon.
All right, I'm coming to the end of my round one,
and I've got this last stitch
but it may be hiding underneath your stitch marker
because these were very close before,
so just move that stitch marker aside, purl the last stitch,
and then you'll just slide the stitch marker over,
just slide it on over like this.
Okay?
And then now you're ready to move on to the next round.
So make sure and get your stitch marker
and don't let it trap in when you go to the next round,
otherwise it's gonna be stuck on there,
like where you wrapped that around
and it's in the back or something.
All right, so we're gonna continue moving on
and we're going to knit purl in a round
until you have four rows of rib stitch,
and pause your video, I'll meet you back up
when we get to that point, see you soon.
Hey, so now you're just going to knit
the next two rounds all the way around,
so you're not gonna be purling at all from this point out,
and you will be getting it set up
to work your first set of fair isle.
So, knit the next two rounds
and pause your video and meet me back up
when you've completed that, see you soon.
All right, let's work on our fair isle.
This is a four stitch repeat in the round,
and then it's actually a four round repeat,
or four row repeat, in height.
So we're gonna be working around with the fair isle,
or color stranding, and then drop our secondary yarn
and work just with our main yarn for one round,
and then the next round on the third
we'll be shifting it over and then repeating again
with just working with one color on the fourth row,
so second and fourth rows is color A only.
So the first one we're gonna go in that first stitch
and pick it up.
Now, you can pick up the stitch
however you're comfortable with knitting the first one,
but I wanna show you a special technique here in a second,
so let's go ahead and pull up this first stitch here.
Okay, so now you've got the first one in.
Let's insert in the second stitch
and have a little chat about how to hold your yarn.
Now I've got this really long tail,
don't worry about that for now.
I've got in my right hand, I'm English style knitting
and I usually throw it over like this.
If you are a continental knitter
you are holding it in your left hand.
Now, if you can knit with continental and English
this is perfect for you,
or if you wanna try it you can totally do it
in this technique here,
and it works really fast once you understand it
and get going.
This technique is holding the accent yarn continental
and holding your main yarn English style.
So, for the next stitch after you make that first one,
we're just going to yarn over as usual with English style
going around and knitting one with A.
Then the next one what we wanna do is trap in or catch
this B yarn behind A,
because we're gonna be working for three stitches in A.
So, I'm just going to go underneath
B back here, held in the back,
and then I'm gonna wrap around with A
and then pull it on through, and what happens is
you'll see that this B kinda slides off the needle,
and it doesn't actually go through with A,
and then we just let it lop off in the back
and you can see it hangin' on.
Then we're just gonna catch it in there
by knitting one more in A,
and you see how in the back it's now caught
and we don't have a long color strand,
and we are totally set up to yarn over with B.
So instead of dipping underneath our needle
we're actually going to be wrapping around the needle
and then pulling it on through,
and now you have your next stitch.
So that is the next one for your repeat,
so we've already done one entire repeat
and we're gonna move on.
So go into the next one and we're gonna knit one with A,
and then before we knit with A again
we're gonna dip underneath that strand of B,
yarn over with A and pull through,
and now we're gonna catch it in totally
by knitting one more stitch as normal with A.
Do you see how that is?
So you can actually throw both of these,
you just need to keep your ball in the back
for your accent out of the way,
and then this, if you'll dip underneath that yarn back there
it will do that trap in method,
whether you hold 'em, one in each hand,
or you try and throw it and manipulate it.
I wanna show you how fast,
you can rewind and make that go slower.
I'm gonna show you how fast it is for me once I get going
and you can see how this can very quickly
work your color stranded work.
So that is four stitches there.
So I'm knitting one,
I'm catching it in the back,
I'm knitting it again to finish trapping that,
and then I'm yarning over and getting a knit stitch,
and so I have just worked through two of these repeats here.
So you're just gonna continue all the way around
until you get to the stitch marker,
and then drop accent B and work with only A for one round.
All right, pause your video and I'll meet you back up
after you've done those two rounds, see you soon.
So your knitting should look like this,
it's gonna start looking like little Vs.
If they're pulled out
they will be kinda open at the bottom,
but once your knitting kinda comes down
and gets a little more weight on it
they'll look like little closed up Vs, or little hearts,
and you're just gonna continue knitting this
in the four round repeat.
You're going to work six repeats of these rounds
and then work one more of that round seven
to kinda mirror this beginning one,
so it's basically about seven and a half.
So on the cowl you're going to have this brim here
and then you've got your seven repeats,
so we've got one, two, three, four, five, six,
it repeats, and then the seventh round,
and so it's almost seven,
and then you need two more rounds of just the simple A,
and then you're gonna do a section of ribbing again,
so knit purl, knit purl for four rounds.
So, you just need to,
it's basically gonna mirror this up,
we're gonna have two rounds of solid
and then the four rounds with the ribbing,
and then I will show you how to cast-off.
So pause your video
and we'll meet back up for casting-off the cowl.
See you soon.
We're ready to bind-off, or cast-off
and we're gonna cast-off purl-wise instead of knit-wise
so it's a little different.
I want my chain that will appear when I make the bind-off
to appear on the inside,
and it rolls onto the inside
and it won't be rolling outward,
I don't want it to roll outward, so,
and I want it to appear to match
this knitted cast-on a little bit more.
So, let's begin by, we're going to purl
the first two stitches here.
Here we go, make sure our yarn is forward on it,
and you can go ahead and take off
your stitch marker if you like.
We're going to purl the first stitch,
and make sure that you're doing this loosely,
we don't want a tight bind-off, or cast-off on here.
So we purl the first two stitches,
and then we take the first stitch that we did
and go up and over that second stitch,
and that's nice and loose, and then you do it again.
So we're just gonna purl that stitch
and then take that first stitch up and over
to bind that off,
and we just continue doing that loosely all the way around,
and pause your video and work on that
and I will meet you back when we're ready
to finish the last stitch, see you soon.
Alright, we're down to our last stitch
and we're just gonna work that just as we have been.
Gonna knit that very last one over.
All right.
And then we're gonna go ahead and cut our yarn,
elongate that stitch and cut our yarn,
and I'm just gonna pull it on through.
And then we need to connect these points here,
so let me move my things over.
All right, so, we wanna get our tapestry needle out
and connect it to the tail that you just cut
and we wanna connect these two pieces here,
so we're just going to,
you can study your stitches a little bit
to see where you should add that in.
If you flip this over you can see
where the chain is that I was talking about earlier,
so now you have this chain on the inside of your work.
Do you see that?
And so you're just gonna insert into these stitches,
kinda flip it over,
and it's actually easier to see on the back
and go through these two bumps here,
and this is part of that chain,
and go around,
and then back through,
and then back through again,
and then that will close up that loop there,
and then you can just start weaving in
through this back here where we've got a rib,
so I'm just gonna go into one of these ribbed columns
and go around all the sides of these ribbed columns.
Woops, go around and through
and then pull that on through,
and it helps it remain stretchy,
and then it can go back up through here
and get in a few more stitches here,
and pull it on in, and then that should be nice and secure,
and I like to go back through maybe one more time
and let my tail be on the other end when I cut it.
So now got that cut,
and then you just need to do your beginning tail,
same kinda thing, and then the ones on the inside.
Well, I hope you like making your fair isle cowl today.
On behalf of Yarnspirations and GoodKnit Kisses,
I'm your host Kirsten, wishing you happy knitting.
Bye-bye.
(jazzy piano music)