Someday I’d like to visit are the tiny, rocky, windy, treeless islands north of Scotland. Fair Isle is one of these isolated places and in my imagination, it is a cold and bleak place surrounded by the gray and threatening North Sea, full of cliffs and crags and low scrub and sheep. So, I wonder, how is it that the most beautiful kind of knitting color-work in the world is named after it? I imagine it happening by accident. Some fisherman’s wife earning extra money by spinning yarn and knitting shawls to sell has a bunch of leftover natural colors and begins to knit. She might as well use up all these odds and ends, right? And her husband could use an extra warm sweater on his boat. The old one is just a bunch of patches barely held together by original bits. She could hold two strands together but that uses up a lot yarn. Maybe she could run a strand along the inside to make a smooth warm extra layer, but she would have to knit it in every few stitches to hold it in place. And a simple “lice” pattern was born:
Warm, thrifty, and as a bonus, decorative. Probably all the other fishermen laughed at the poor man at first but the other wives, seeing an outlet for their creativity and their leftovers tried the same thing, found out it was a lot of fun, and soon this type of knitting became more and more elaborate and so we now see things like this:
and
and
and
and so many more examples that take your breath away. It’s a rich area of knitting to explore, with endless combinations of design and color limited only by your imagination and skill.
If you want to get started, I recommend Karen’s Headband class this Sunday from 1:00 – 3:30 as a simple way to learn the knitting skills required. From this
you can get to this:
Do a simple Ravelry search for stranded knitting and let your mind and needles soar.
