Last week I went to the monthly meeting of the Huddersfield Knitting and Crochet Guild group. This is a group our weekly Knit Night group set up after we had a mass KCG joining session early last year. We’ve had a monthly KCG meeting ever since, with far more folk joining us than usually come to Knit Night. The content of the meetings varies from presentations to workshops, to group projects. Last week was a presentation about Fair Isle knitting, with a slide show of pictures and patterns from the national KCG collection, led by our lovely member Barbara (you’ll love her blog), who manages the KCG pattern archive at Lee Mills. We also got to examine some garments from the KCG collection, presented by Angharad, and had a ‘show and tell’ of members own Fair Isle knits.
The slide show was very interesting, tracing the history of the popularity of Fair Isle knitting from when Prince Edward (later Edward VIII) wore a Fair Isle jumper to play golf at St Andrews. Fair Isle knitting has had regular peaks of popularity ever since, and is currently popular once again. Through looking at the patterns we were able to see how, sometime around the 1950s to 1960s ‘Fair Isle’ became synonymous with any knitting worked in stranded technique, and not just with the particular aesthetic style of the colourwork knitting of the Shetland Isles. This was a tragic development which has led to much confusion. Happily it is becoming much more common to describe anything but ‘true Fair Isle’ knitting as ‘stranded’, which describes the method of knitting with more than one colour of yarn held at the same time.
Looking at the garment collection was my favourite part of the evening. The knits were all lovely, and it was fascinating to examine their construction and the colour schemes used in them. This was the first time I’ve seen an example of a ‘peaked’ pattern – a Fair Isle pattern used to graduate shade between dark and light backgrounds:
I particularly loved the children’s garments, which included this gorgeous jumper with a Fair Isle collar, something I’m now determined to do in a design myself:
And this cardigan has pockets, made with a method I also intend to use in some future design(s):
It was fun identifying motifs I recognise from Fair Isle books in my library, including some I’ve used myself, such as the dotted chain from April:
There were also loads of patterns that I am familiar with in this adorably quirky hat:
If you want to knit your own Fair Isle, you may be interested in buying my latest book, Stranded Knits, which includes a few ‘true Fair Isle’ designs, and has clearly illustrated tutorials for stranded knitting techniques. The Fair Isle cardigan, Hedgerow, is particularly popular, and there is currently a KAL for this design in my Ravelry group.
The Huddersfield KCG group meets at Brew every 3rd Thursday of the month from 7.30pm (meeting starts at 8). Our next meeting will be a Tunisian Crochet workshop.
