I’ve always loved fair isle jumpers. They’re the ones with the stranded colour work around the shoulder, sometimes on the sleeves and around the bottom on the rib. Northern Europeans seem to love them. In Australia, if you’re seen wearing one, you’re likely to be mocked.

“Did your mum buy you that jumper?”

If you think of those Christmas jumpers, chances are they are fair isle knits. The fancy designs of multiple colours stranded closely together and usually associated with après ski wear.

These knits require a level of skill to do because you’re grappling with different colours you need to carry along at the back of the work. Also you knit with different colours at the one time. For example I have one yarn in one hand and another colour in the other. It’s called “combination” knitting and let me add, I don’t do it well. It’s fiddly and my tension is all uneven.

The worse thing about this knitting is that you need to focus on it because you’re not only reading a graph of where the colours go, but you can’t even watch television when you’re doing these patterns.

Mindless knitting it is not. You need absolute focus.

Miss a stitch and your pattern looks out of kilter.

So as you can understand, at times when our focus is as short as a goldfish, you can appreciate how long it would take to knit something like this because you have to devote focus time to that alone.

As you see your work unfold and the pattern start to show, you become confident and quicken the pace. That’s when mistakes can happen. Meanwhile, when you turn your work over, you’ll see a mess of yarns carried across rows which results in a bulky feel to the jumper in your hands.

With this knitting, it can get confusing and tangled however I needed to challenge myself with knitting to keep me building up on my skills and it’s the reason why I decided to learn how to do these knits better. I still have a long way to go.

(One of the things on my bucket list is to attend an immersion knit camp in Scotland so my skills can improve drastically).

Last year I decided to knit a fair isle jumper but start from an easier pattern. I found the patterns by knit designer Jenn Steingass and knitted my first jumper using some stash yarn. I loved the process however I found the top part (the colour work) taking a long time for reasons mentioned. In fact, this section of the work took longer than knitting the body!

I’ve noticed a bit of a pattern when it comes to how and why I knit.

I love to plan a project from start to finish. I love the entire creative process. This means I deliberately buy new yarn specifically for the project. If I use stash yarn, just scrambling to use up yarn from previous projects, I just don’t seem interested as much. I wonder if this is a flaw in my creativity. After all, a measure of creativity is how you can pull together a work from different materials. I seem to just want to have those materials ready for THAT specific project. Does this mean I am NOT inherently creative because I don’t have that innate talent that comes from within – I just follow recipes, patterns, copy?

You have no idea how many times this thought has concerned me over the years as I look at creative people who seem so at ease and confident with their craft. For them, it just seems to work. For me, I’m constantly trying to make it work.

It reminds me of the movie Amadeus. Salieri, in his chair at the insane asylum shaking his fists to the heavens and asking God why all the talent went to the young, giggling buffoon Mozart.

Well anyway.

Where was I?

The thing is, I need to use my old yarn somehow. I have plastic boxes underneath the beds and in cupboards filled with yarn awaiting projects. Yet, I still go and buy more. There’s something about yarn, you can never have enough.

I’m knitting this stranded colourwork pattern at the moment called Avena by Jenn Steingass. It’s the second pattern of hers I’ve knitted and bought about four patterns from her website. I love all her designs because they’re striking.

This one stood out for me because it looks like wheat. I love bread. So to me it’s a winner already.

However I changed my preferred colours of burgundy, reds, greens slightly and instead bought a mustard yellow and sage green yarns so that it looks like fern leaves changing colour.

Upon hindsight, I realised I’m knitting dying leaves. Maybe I’m getting ready for autumn?

Once I finish the pattern section (I only have about 5 rows to go), I can start on the rest of the body which will be all smooth sailing (famous last words). It means I can watch tv and knit unlike the patterned section so I can organise my programs I want to watch on tv and do some mindless knitting.

I’ll post photos once I finish it but here’s what it “should” look like.