How to Knit With Two Colors: Fair Isle / Stranded Knitting

hey guys today we're going over fair isle knitting fair isle knitting is basically just two color knitting putting different colors in your knitting for this one I did three different colors I've got gray red and blue but it's basically the same concept you're using multiple pieces of yarn and knitting them to form a pattern and it can be difficult sometimes the ironic thing about fair isle knitting is that it is not very fair so you have this beautiful nice pattern inside but on the flip side you're always gonna have a stranded side with these different stranded colors criss crossing over each other so this is why it's also called stranded knitting because no matter what you can have the most beautiful pattern on the front side on the back you're gonna have this stranded bit unless you're doing reversible knitting which I do have a tutorial up for reversible knitting a reversible scarf in that way you can alternate your colors and on both sides it's gonna be beautiful stuck in it stitch and you won't see this backside because it'll be hidden inside that is a totally different tutorial though so check that out if you want to in this one I'm just gonna be showing you my tips for how to do a fair isle knit and how to manage the different colors of yarn and not get to tangle it up on the backside there is another method of doing two color knitting and that's block color knitting that's where you have a whole section of like one color and then a whole another section of another color and your yarn it's pretty much totally separate there's no Criss crossing of the colors except for on the edges to keep them connected and I have done a tutorial of that before it was a American flag tutorial that I did a long time ago everything I did was a long time ago now but that's up there if you want to check that out it's just kind of a different way of switching colors besides doing fair isle knitting all you'll need for this tutorial are obviously your knitting needles and a pattern to follow and then at least two different colors of yarn so I'm just going to show you this project that I'm working on here where I'm at now in the pattern is it's calling for another set of two stars to go right here so on this new row that I'm starting I'm going to be knitting and then introducing the red back to it to build up two of these stars and right now I'm gonna be using blue and red there is gray in here but I've faded that out here on the bottom I might show you how to put back in the gray but it's basically the same process so as I'm knitting I don't really have any huge tips or tricks with fair isle knitting the one thing I will say though is that if you end up with a big mess of like tangled yarn which is never inevitable then I say you're on the right track you're gonna have some messes of knitting especially depending on the amount of colors that you're using or you just things are just gonna get technical no matter what so I encourage you to just embrace the tangled yarn and kind of tease out what you need as you go along to it I'm sure there are better ways of keeping track of things but I just embrace the mess so for here I've knit sort of my two blue bits here for the border and now the pattern that I'm following is calling for another piece of red for this stitch right here so to do that my red right now is currently you flip it on the back it's about three rows back it's right here so we're going to bring this back up and use it to knit the next stitch the only trick you need to follow is two things you want to make sure that your second color is in the back still so we don't want the blue to be in the front otherwise it would cross over on my good side we want to keep it on the back because we want it to cross over along the back and to do the red you just put your needle in through the stitch and you bring up the red yarn from the back and you'd knit it like normal the one thing you do want to do is keep a lot of slack you don't want to pull it too tight especially right now because the red is about three stitches gone you don't want it to be too tight right here because otherwise it will pin your work together and it won't look as good I mean it'll look good because it's tight but it'll create kind of a fold in your project so I've done that red and now it's time for another blue so I'm just gonna take my blue yarn bring it around underneath the red and just knit it again and then I've got another blue stitch to knit and then it calls for another red stitch so put the needle in and then bring the red underneath and just knit it like normal and you just want to be aware of how things are looking on the backside and one thing you can do if you notice that the red is being pulled too tightly or something is you can actually take this big loop that's on the back and just pull that out to give it some more slack if you want or you can pull it tight if there's too much slack so then my pattern is calling for the blue again so I'm just gonna knit three blue and at this point when you're knitting different colors like one after the other one after the other like switching the colors a lot then you don't really need to worry about making things too tight because the stitches are all are barely traveling far along the back it's they're maybe just skipping one over the other one over the other so you don't need to worry about pulling things too tight at this point so for the rest of this row my pattern just calls for three stitches of blue and then one stitch of red and then three stitches of blue then one stitch of red three stitches of blue one strategic red all the way to the end so the only thing that is has the I guess the chance to become too tight is the red skipping over these three stitches so as I go along I'm just making sure that I'm knitting the red with enough slack I'm not doing things too tight and then every once in a while like I'll stop after this last blue turn the work around just quickly and glance at what it's looking at right now so here's my row of red right here and it's pretty good it's not there's not too much tension it's actually kind of perfect amount of tightness and looseness if I wanted to I could pull these bread loops a little bit just to make sure that there's enough slack but I think it looks pretty fine so I'm finishing my row here with my last bit of red right here and then I've just got two stitches of blue left to knit so get those finished and now I can turn the work around once I'm all done with that I like to spread everything out and make sure that I've got enough tension and enough slack between the colors so that nothing is being pinched too tightly on the backside you can do a little bit more inspection just making sure that there's nothing being pulled too tight along these new strands of red that's being carried over and I especially check right here where the yarn is jumping up multiple rows so right here this is making a big jump so you want to make sure that there's enough slack there and it's not pinching the fabric so I'm actually gonna pull this a little bit more so I'm gonna take some of the slack from these guys down here and just kind of carry it over to this side right here just pull that out a little bit because when someone's wearing this and it's stretching you want it to be able to stretch basically so to do the purl side of the knitting your goal if you're following a pattern you're gonna want to follow the next row up so my next row up calls for a couple long bits of blue and then two stitches of red and then I think you have five stitches of blue than to have red and seven of blue to the forehead 5-it blue to a friend so it's a lot of blue and not a whole lot of red so there are gonna be bigger spaces between the colors so that's where I'm gonna want to make sure definitely that nothing's being pulled too tight so to start out I'm gonna take my blue and it's just for this border I'm just doing a garter stitch on the border so there's two stitches of the blue and this is where the most important part comes in with the backside you don't want to leave your yarn in the back no matter what this stitch is you're doing you always want to make sure that you pull it back to the back side because if you leave it back there it's gonna be pulling across the front of your work and it's gonna ruin your project so always make sure whether you're doing a knitting stitch or purl stitch you pull this yarn back to the front where it was so I think I got my point across so now I am purling with this same blue so I just bring it to the front so in this case it's not that big of a it's not hard to remember to bring the the blue to the front because I have to purl anyways so I got five stitches of blue and now I'm gonna do my red so leaving my blue right here in the front I'm going to pick up my red and bring it underneath the blue so this is where things get tangled can you tell this is just a headache so I just leave I drop my blue and I pick up the red and I bring it underneath and I'm going to knit two stitches of red with this so or purl two stitches of right oh so there's one and there's two cool so I'm going to drop my red just where it is I'm not going to bring it to the back or anything like that leave it there and then pick up my blue underneath the red and start knitting again so this calls for five stitches of blue two three four and five and then next up is two stitches of red being paroled so again I drop the blue where it is and I pick up the red this is where all that tangled yarn comes into play I pick up the red and I bring it underneath the blue so the red right now is five stitches behind so for this one I do want to make sure that there's a lot of slack for here so how I do that is I just purl it like normal but very loosely not pulling anything too tight so I make my pearl and then I just double check to make sure that the red right here it has enough slack to stretch and it's not gonna be pulled too tight so I think that looks okay do one more red and then we're ready for the blue again the blue doesn't have to have so much slack because it's got only two stitches at red between it so I'm not gonna worry too much about having it too tight or too loose my pattern calls for a big leap here so there's seven stitches of blue for this pattern which is not the best idea I think the main tip is not to have a huge gap between your colors so seven stitches this is pushing it because the red is gonna jump over these in skin if a huge bit of yarn that's leaping over those and that poses the threat of making it too tight or even if it's not too tight it's just gonna have a huge big like thing of of red on the back and it's not gonna look good on the back which Faroe Island I think never looks good on the back but especially in this case it won't but for me I don't care so I'm just gonna knit these two reds make sure that there's enough of a leap for the red enough slack there to jump over the three blue stitches and there is and I'm going to go back to the blue here so knitting five of the blue it's probably aren't the best colors for a tutorial I'm looking at the monitor right now and it's like way too brilliant of a contrast like the red is ridiculous this is probably impossible for you guys to see but I apologize in advance so I did six on accident oopsie I'm gonna go back here pick this pearl back up each losing the stitch there we go and now I can do two Reds here to finish up so bring that over make sure there's enough slack one and two and I finish up with my blues so pearl for three stitches I think and then I knit for two now I'm just talking to myself and mumbling I'm so sorry there's one and two okay so now turning it over just to see everything that we've done that this is the best part actually about fair isle knitting is that you've done all this mess and you dealt with this nasty backside that's just awful and like you've got this tangled yarn here and it's just a mess but when you turn it over to see what you've done it looks wonderful so straighten that out and it does you can already see the flower that's starting to form we've got two rows of the red pattern that's starting to build itself back up and it looks nice it's uniform it's not too tight it's not too loose the red is showing through the blue nicely and it gives you the encouragement you need to go through the whole process again and and and do the next thing on your pattern so that's fair isle knitting there's not really any other tips I can recommend you follow it's it's just having the patience I guess to not go too crazy with the colors making sure you're crossing your colors under each other so that you don't end up with any holes or anything like that and then keeping your yarn as detangled as possible and when it gets tangled up not letting it drive you too crazy I will show you actually one more thing I don't think I covered it very well but the crossing under and over especially when there's like a big gap you don't want to form a hole in your knitting so what you always want to make sure you do is you're crossing the new color underneath the color that you're switching out so my yarn for the red is going this way to the right and over the top and my yarn for the blue is going from the left and it's coming under at the bottom so that just makes sure that you're not knitting like two separate things like you're not knitting a separate blue in a separate red you're knitting them together and in this part in my pattern it's calling for red and blue kind of intermittently it's pretty even across the board so when I do that I like to hold my blue yarn continental style and my red yarn the other style my mind is completely blanking you can tell I haven't done knitting videos in a long time um but I can hold the red yarn throwing there we go throwing style so I'm just throwing it from my right hand and when I pick up the blue my blue is just right there and I don't need to like rearrange anything I can just reach back up here so now I can do consonantal for the blue just switch right into it really easily you still want to make sure though that you have enough slack and you're not making things too tight but if you're switching colors a lot that can be kind of a quick and easy way to do your knitting so this time that is really all the tips I have for you just don't be too tangled make sure you're carrying the yarn behind the old yarn you're using don't pull things too tight it's okay to continental knit and and also just throw-in it at the same time if you want to mix up kind of the methods of knitting but other than that it's just having the courage to throw different colors into the mix if you want it to do a third color which I actually am doing with this project with the grey that will eventually come back into this you just do it the same way you just you add it in and you make sure you're not you're not doing things too tight you know making sure things aren't getting too tangled which they definitely will if you're doing three colors so that is fair isle knitting be sure to leave me your tips and tricks in the comments because I know for sure that I don't do it the best way possible if you have any tips for keeping your yarn sorted out and not tangled up or you have any tips for making the backside not look quite as nasty as it's inevitably going to look definitely leave those tips for me in the comments and I'll for sure look at them because I love fair isle knitting but I hate dealing with the mess of the back and then just the tangled yarn it just gets frustrating but other than that check out my other two color knitting tutorial that'll have up and I will see you next time

Channel: RJ Knits

Views: 129,783

Rating: 4.859745 out of 5

Keywords: knitting, knit, how to knit, fair isle knitting, diy, yarn, fair isle, two color, color knitting, knitting with color, how to

Id: q1OdRfNvTyo

Length: 19min 24sec (1164 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 14 2017