After a lot of experimental swatches, and lots of sage advice from my gorgeous wife about keeping my tension correct (not easy when you're knitting a LOT of stitches on too short a needle, DOH!) I think things are finally under way. I'm working from a basic sweater pattern, and started on the back panel which you can see being worked up from the bottom up to the left there.
Using the Fair Isle technique, I'm working with two contrasting chunky coloured yarns to try and bring the design together and for the first few 'actual' rows I've gone for a simple repeating (OK completely random) pattern as a bit of a border before the real and actual Manic Miner design.
Progress is slow, I was warned that knitting a sweater is not an undertaking for the beginner or faint-hearted but I'm stubborn and now that I'm slowly getting the hang of colourwork I'm letting my ambition outstrip my abilities.
A couple of new things I've learned though (again, handy tips if you're a beginner trying out colourwork for the first time:
1) Needle ends aren't enough to contain some chunky wool so I ended up with a couple of dropped stitches where the yarn went over the end of the 'nub' on the end of the needle. DISASTER! Thankfully I stuck a couple of stitch markers on the ends of my needles and that seems to have stopped things for now (pro tip - use the right LENGTH of needle for sweaters if you're going for 140 stitches or so)
2) Colour work gets tangled really easily when you're working two balls of yarn simultaneously, so get used to using one colour as the TOP length of yarn and the other as the BOTTOM. This helps loads (also helps if you've got enough room to place your yarn balls to the right and left of you).
3) Carrying colours across rows is vitally important if you're going to avoid loads of long (potentially tangly) floats on the 'wrong side' of your work. If you weave the yarn you're not using into the stitches of the colour you are using, and 'carry it along' the row, you will save yourself a lot of pain and heartache later on. This is something that most fair-isle knitters do instinctively but definitely one of my favourite new tips for knitting colourwork.
4) Always, always plan a fair isle design out on gridded paper first because you are going to find it nigh-on impossible to follow if you try to match up two random front / back pieces with different patterns on them (but I haven't done this, as it's an ugly sweater it really WILL look ugly!)
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