Fair Isle Girl

"My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished two bags of M&M's and a chocolate cake. I feel better already." Dave Barry

What a thoroughly lazy weekend! I've been practically catatonic today, alternating between napping, eating, reading (Jane Green, Swapping Lives) and knitting a little. Hubster and I pulled ourselves together to eat lunch at the Blue Ribbon Diner here in town (Hubster insisted on calling it breakfast because we were out in the world on a Sunday morning at the un-Godly hour of 11) and dart into the grocery store for some weekly staples. Then back home, back into the pajamas, and time for a nap. After all that work I was far too exhausted to cook, so we've ordered in pizza. Any muscle tone I have will need to be coaxed back out of hibernation tomorrow.
On the upside, I am now a Fair Isle knitter! And it is good and I am pleased. I went to a class yesterday at my LYS and learned basic Fair Isle on a hat. I was the only student and really showed myself up by having to cast-on three separate times. I normally use a long-tail cast-on, so the first time I ran out of tail, the second time I cast-on using the tail, so I ran out of yarn again and finally, on the third try, got it right and ended up with a huge amount of tail, but didn't care. Far too much talk about tail but there you have it. After my twice bungled cast-on, I knit up three rows and then we got down to it- Fair Isle, two yarns at once, if you can't handle the heat don't play with the big boys, knitting.
And I lurve it. Probably because it was only nine rows of Fair Isle and only two yarns and a simple pattern, but it is, so far, my favorite technique I've learned. AND I learned to feed the yarn from my left hand, a really basic Continental method, and once I finished with the FI pattern I knit this way for the rest of the hat. Wha-hahahaha.
I dropped one stitch- that I remedied-
and otherwise it's all done and looks, I think, respectable. I had several pattern options-snowflakes, hearts, arrows- and I chose shamrocks, and I must say, when I first finished the Fair Isle part, I couldn't distinguish any shamrocks. Just lots of green yarn looped in with some gray yarn. Then, I had the hat laid out on my lap and from a distance I saw them- four leaf clovers! I was actually so excited I yelled and Hubster, sitting two feet away at the computer, jumped and swore he lost a year on his life and I said it wasn't all that loud and he gave me A Look and I gave him A Look right back, then showed him my shamrocks. (It was, truthfully, a ridiculously loud yell for someone who wasn't in imminent danger but I was Just So Excited).



It's not easy to see the green yarn on the gray yarn but, I promise, them there's shamrocks. Again I say, Wha-hahahaha.
Also, I finished my lighthouse pattern dishcloth Sat'd morning before class because I had to get my knit-on (warm-ups, you might say) and it turned out fine, too. The light coming from each side of the lighthouse should probably be symmetrical but I think my way, i.e. a couple flubbed stitches way, gives it more personality.