Learning with Mittens

I haven't put the finishing touches on the projects I wrote about in my last post but I have begun another pair of fair isle mittens. It was really interesting to experiment with what did and didn't work with the last pair but this pair I wanted to be able to just sit down and knit, so before I begun I sat down and planned out which colours I would use for each part using what I had learned from my trial and error pair of mittens. This is what I learned:

1. Fair isle depends on contrast to be seen, there are some pairings of colours that look lovely together but were too close to each other for the pattern to stand out. I consistently underestimated how much contrast I needed.

2.  Fair isle is a good opportunity to use bolder colour combinations than I would normally have thought I liked, especially in smaller motifs.

3.  Some motifs are spread over enough rows that they start with one pair of colours, change in the middle, then return to the first set at the end. I found that it works best to have either the two main colours or two contrasting colours be of the same family (for example red and maroon) for the design to stand out instead of getting lost. I can see that this wouldn't be the case in all designs but for some of the smaller ones I was using it's hard to see the stitch pattern as clearly when the same design traveled through different colour families.

I had a ton of fun with the first pair and am really looking forward to see how my current pair will turn out as I use what I learned last time.