Fair Isle

Fair Isle is a knitting style used to create patterns with multiple colours. It is traditionally a hand knitting technique but can be done using a knitting machine as well. Though colloquially this technique is known as 'Fair Isle', technically it is called 'stranded knitting' with 'Fair Isle' being a specific type from Fair Isle, one of the Shetland Islands.

For each stitch, there are two available colours of yarn; one is drawn through to make the stitch, and the other is help behind the piece, creating a 'float'. Traditionaly, these patterns had no more than 3 consecutive stitches of any colour to avoid long floats that can catch easily. On the below image you can see how the floats are formed by the colour not knit into the front side. Note that each row is limited to 2 colour maximum.

To create Fair Isle patterns on our knitting machine, we can use DesignaKnit. Fair Isle is one of three stitches (the others being slip and tuck stitches) that may be automatically controlled by the carriage; it's quite low-effort to produce some really beautiful, impressive things that it would be very hard to knit by hand.

Bird's Eye

Bird's Eye is a pattern that can be added to Fair Isle pieces to control the length of floats. This is useful when creating pieces where the reverse side will be exposed, such as jumpers, to reduce the chance of catching threads.

Dithering

Dithering is an intentionally applied form of noise commonly used to convert a grayscale image to black and white, so that the density of black dots in the new image approximates the average gray level in the original. This can be used with Fair Isle to convert greyscale images to stitch patterns and add more depth and detail.