Fair isle sweater

 Hello again!

Yesterday I wrote a little about the sweater that I'm currently working on. Here it is!

It's halfway done by now, all it's missing is the main body.

As I mentioned, this project came with a lot of hurdles, and the hardest part isn't even over yet. 

I first got the idea for this when I was browsing Pinterest for some clothing inspiration and I stumbled upon lots of very cute sweaters. Buying them brand new however is rather expensive, so I'd thought that I'd just make my own one, where I could even tweak it a bit to fit my tastes perfectly. 

I was inspired by the picture of the sweater shown above, so I quickly did some research on how one would proceed to make something like this. I tried to reverse engineer the color chart of the sweater, and ended up with the chart on the right. Of course, I wouldn't be able to make it look identical to the original sweater, since that was probably made by knitting, and mine would be done with crochet, where the stitches are a little bit tilted. 

Fair isle crochet seen from the other side

While doing my research online, I found out that there are numerous ways to do color work in crochet, from fair isle to intarsia. In the end, fair isle seemed to be the best fit for this project, and it is also most commonly used when making sweaters. And so I started to plan the layout of my sweater, orienting myself on an Youtube tutorial for knitting fair isle sweaters, and a sweater of this sort that I already owned. I also noticed that there were surprisingly little resources for sweaters of this kind using crochet. I found one tutorial on Youtube, but I didn't quite like it, since the colorwork only extended to the parts of the arms, and the rest was in one color. I should later learn the hard way, why this was the case.

 And so I planned the whole sweater using the instructions from the knitting video, measured the lengths of the different parts I'd need and calculated how much yearn I'd need. I decided to use a size 3,5 Polyacryl yarn from Schachenmayr, and ordered it from German online shop for wool supplies. 

It all arrived within a week and I was so excited that I immediately got started. However, I soon realized something. When knitting fair isle sweaters, one knits the whole body first, and then cuts two slits on the sides to sew the sleeves onto. The technique one uses to cut holes into knitted fabric is called steeking. It turns out that steeking isn't really a thing with crochet, something I should probably have realized earlier. While there are some ways to cut into crochet fabric, I only found little resources about it online, and it seemed to only work for horizontal cuts. For arm holes however, one would need vertical cuts. 

This is where the hard part began. I pondered a lot on how I should proceed and ended up with the following:

I made a chain loop on each side of the upper part of the sweater and sewed the sleeves to those. This way, both parts were connected a little by their corners. The next step will be doing the crochet in rows instead of rounds, always doing a little slip stitch at the end of each row, to connect it to the sleeve. 

This however means, that I will have to crochet from left to right half of the time, which is an absolute nightmare. We will see whether I manage to gather up the motivation to pull through with this. I'll keep you updated on this fun little project!

 -Tournesol 🌻