The magazine cautions that you should practice before you do a project, and I very much agree. The writer warned against getting the stitches too loose, but I was making them too tight at first.
Look, no floats to snag anything! Have a look at the closeups, front and back of the work. You're carrying a thread vertically, and if the design works with that, you don't have floats.
I played around with different kinds of patterns. It's great to get to use several colors vertically, not so easy with conventional fair isle. I found I could make a vertical line, but wasn't crazy about how it looked. It seemed to help to use a heavier yarn than the background yarn for things like a vertical bar.
I could make a horizontal line, but that gives a float. Sometimes you do need a horizontal line in a design, but it's tedious to adjust the tension of the stitches when you put the needles back in work. Go experiment and see what you like!
I decided it works very well with skip-one kinds of designs and diagonal lines. Since it's hand-manipulated, I liked it best with the bulky and mid-gauge machines, because bigger stitches work up faster.
Saturday, I promptly got busy making a crib blanket with the technique. I had some leftover sport weight pale pink and some white, and some rose colored worsted weight yarn. I did horizontal rows of the pink and then the white, and zigzag columns of the hand-manipulated fair isle technique.
I put a picture frame edging around the blanket. I have done these for years, but haven't seeen other people doing them. It's doubled with mitred corners, a fold on the outside edge and sewed to the inside.
Here's a picture showing a little of the back. It looks very nice on both sides, eliminates all rolling, and squares up the blanket, but you have to do a lot of sewing, around all four sides on the knit side of the blanket and then all around the purl side as well. You have to kitchener the beginning to the end of the edging, too. I spent far more time sewing up than knitting, but I like to sew and I like how it looks!
I like this generous-sized blanket a lot, and now I have my demonstration for Knit Natters this weekend. I'll do the demo on the LK-150, which is so nicely portable.
I can't think of a single word to say except WOW. Wish I could move to Texas and join your group. *sigh*
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