I've been playing with colours

and this is what I have come up with. I had a play with the original Debbie Bliss fair isle, but while designed to be knitted flat it was not designed to be easy to knit. By that I mean the yarns were often worked to one end, in a row, only one yarn used in the next row and then both yarns required on the 3rd row - but one was left at the wrong end. I hate cutting and joining unless there are good reasons. That bugged me, so I set out to fix it.

I've only got 7 colours in this, and have 9 to play with, so have to fit in two more. The original blanket repeated the pattern, using the colours not quite reversed - but mixed up. So I will play with that. I'm not entirely happy with the rust and purple line.... nothing is final yet.

So I reworked the pattern, first with colour pencils , then in photoshop. I made sure I kept pairs of working yarns in two row sets, knit there - purl back. I did leave a few single rows where those colour yarns were not needed beyond that row.


I used Photoshop to draw a grid, which I selected and transformed(dragged) to make it more knitter proportions. That is the stitches are wider than taller. I then copied the grid onto a few layers, and build up a few options on each layer. This is the one I like best. Using the scan of the balls of yarn I set each yarn colour as a pattern. I used to magic wand, and holding down shift to select several squares I filled each square with the yarn colour (pattern). Relatively easy - I wonder if Fair isle designers do this? That could explain some of the ones that are almost impossible to knit. I would usually knit and play - but this is Gill's blanket. And I know from our discussion that there were colours she liked next to each other. Using photo shop made me learn a bit more about the program, and let me play very quickly once set up.