WIP- New Fair Isle Jewellery #2

The Fair Isle practice continues here at Louise Dawson Design! As you may know, I have previously hand knitted a fair isle jewellery collection in Shetland wool. I loved using the Jaimesons 4ply to make these, but I'd like to make more complex designs and I've now chosen to make a new range using Susan Crawford Fenella 2ply.  In this post I shared with you the start of some Fair Isle brooch designs in this beautiful 2ply British wool

I used one of the knitted samples to make a round brooch using a cover button but I thought that this hid the fair isle design too much, so I've knitted the same design and made it up as a small square brooch. I'm much happier with this, I think there is more scope for trying out different designs within this shape.

I'm so enjoying making up my own fair isle designs using knitter's graph paper and coloured pencils!

I'm trying out lots of colour ways to find out what works too. I've just ordered a few more colours in the Fenella to add in too- it's such a beautiful yarn, I find it hard to resist!

I'll continue to share my fair isle progress- I'm aiming to create a whole new fair isle collection

WIP- New Fair Isle Jewellery

I thought I'd show you a little look behind the scenes at what I'm working on at the moment! I'm already thinking of Winter designs and adding to my Fair Isle Jewellery range that you can find in my Etsy Shop. I made these pieces using 4ply Shetland wool, which is beautiful and is traditionally used for Fair Isle Designs. However, due to the small scale of the jewellery pieces I felt I couldn't knit as detailed pieces as I would have liked, so for the new designs I'm using a 2ply yarn!

Working out some new designs on knitters graph paper

A friend told me about Susan Crawford Vintage yarns and the Fenella two ply. The colours are inspired by a vintage colour pallette and it's a British grown, spun and dyed yarn too- soo lovely! I've just got a small selection of colours to use at the moment but I'm sure I'll be investing in more of the range!

At the moment I'm just experimenting to see what works. It's more tricky than I thought to select colours that work together in the pattern and It's quite a challenge to fit lots of Fair Isle detail into such a tiny piece. As you can see, once I've used the knitted rectangle to cover the button some of the Fair Isle detail is lost, so I will be working on this!

It's fascinating to see the stitches on the page come to life in knitted form and I'm really enjoying the experimentation. I'll share more as this project progresses!