Bumpy Sweaters?
September 11th, 2004 at 12:00 pm (bjerk, hardangervidda)
Michelle asked in a comment:
… Mine seems lumpy in the fair isle parts. Has that ever happened to you? Is that normal? Most important, is there a way to fix it? It’s my first fair isle so I expected a bit of lumpiness but I’m hoping it’s not permanent lumpiness.
Michelle is talking about Bjerk, which is also in the same book as Hardangervidda. Like Hardangervidda, it has a higher proportion of stockinette to it than fair isle. In Bjerk, there are quite a few three color rows, and that is a lot of yarn to be carrying along the back of your sweater. If you have a lot of twisting of your yarns, you could definately get some lumpiness.
Another thing to look out for is the tension of your floats on the back of the work. I can’t claim I’m very good at it yet, but I’m getting better with practice! If you’ll look at this picture of Hardangervidda you’ll see how the fair isle part is drawn in a bit more than the stockinette portion below it:
I’m hoping that blocking will help some of this out, as I don’t feel that the draw in is too drastic. The best advice I’ve been given on this is to spread out the stitches on your right hand needle before you switch back to the next color. This way the float is long enough. On really really long floats, you might twist your yarns to catch the long float as you go. Somtimes I do this, and sometimes I don’t. Maybe I’ll be brave and take a picture of the inside of the sweater :)
For Bjerk, I think I’ll duplicate stitch the third color. There really aren’t that many areas for that third color and the floats required to do so are really long.
