Now my confidence in knitting is growing, and I'm finding my way through various stitch types, I still struggle with one thing - Colour work.
Colour work, particularly Fair Isle or Intarsia knitting techniques allow you to bring in a second (or more) coloured yarn for your knitted stitches, allowing you to produce amazing patterns like the one to the left.
Most Fair Isle patterns follow a sequence of stitches that build up the design as you knit, on both the 'right' and 'wrong' sides of the work. Keeping tight sequential patterns in colour work allows the 'floats' (those wonky bits of thread that appear on the 'wrong' side as loops of yarn) to stay relatively close together and short, so your designs really pop, and in some cases the back of your work doesn't end up looking like a plate of spaghetti.
The main appeal for me is that I absolutely love pixel art. I was a kid when the first 8 bit computers arrived, and 8 bit gaming consoles / home micros are still a huge obsession of mine. I love the cleverness of pixel art as well as the simplicity, but for me there's always two games / sets of sprite designs that I'm always drawn back to again and again.
"Manic Miner" and "Jet Set Willy" are two of my most favourite games of all time, penned by the insane genius Matthew Smith, I still play these on a regular basis and I still draw on them for inspiration whenever I start to think about working up some neat Fair Isle designs.
I've set myself a personal challenge this year, to knit my own "Ugly Sweater" in time for Christmas, hopefully something I can knit and wear to upcoming staff parties etc. I usually buy a new ugly sweater every year but since learning to knit and crochet, I've avoided big projects like larger wearables, sticking instead to making beanies and hats (which my wife detests and swears she'll never be seen dead in public with if I choose to wear them!)
My idea is to make an ugly sweater that is an homage to Manic Miner / Jet Set Willy, so over the weekend I began to experiment with making some swatches, digging out my graph paper to draw out the charts for this project. It's going to be a mix of 8-bit designs and the more traditional fair isle "christmassy" charts (like the one at the top of this article). The uglier the better.
The first thing I began to realise is the sheer scale of knitting an ugly sweater. I'm not a big guy by any means but I estimated I'd need to cast on around 150 stitches to work the body "Bottom up". Even if I opted for a relatively simple two colour design (or if I was going for a real and proper ZX Spectrum colour set, I'd stick to 8 colours) that's a lot of yarn to wrangle, and potentially a lot of tangles, twists, swearing and annoyance.
Working the swatch, I also realised that Fair Isle colour work is unforgiving. You make one mistake in the colour you're knitting or purling into a stitch and you are buggered. There's no 'undo', no CTRL-Z, no way to back out that stitch and put it back. OR IS THERE? If you know a way, I'd love to hear about it!
So this ambitious project is still in tickover stage. I was knitting tired last night, kept making stupid mistakes, kept getting both yarn balls tangled (a good tip I did begin to use is to keep both balls of yarn on separate sides and NOT crossing them over each other, that way you do avoid some of the tangles) and in the end I unpicked everything (which is why you don't see my attempts posted on here).
The other thing I very quickly realised is that a single knit stitch doesn't really lend itself well to being a single pixel so I need to consider perhaps doubling up each stitch, working 4 stitches (2 rows, 2 columns) to each pixel to bring the design to life a bit and stop it being lost in my inconsistent tension while knitting.
BUT I shall persevere. I'm going to have a go at creating this as a swatch again this week:
I love the Manic Miner walk cycle (again a tribute to Matthew Smith's genius that the walk cycle is just four frames yet still looks so smooth in action) so it's definitely going to have to be in my design somewhere. Maybe I'll start simple with just a single Miner Willy worked up in 4 stitches per pixel and see how that goes.
UPDATE!
Since I typed this article, a very kind Twitter follower has informed me about TINKING and LRUPING (these are basically 'taking back' a mistaken stitch, yes folks it seems there really IS a CTRL-Z for knitted and purled stitches. MIND BLOWN!!
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