xmas jumper | From the Purl Side

I finally sucked back my trepidation and started the xmas jumper the other day but am having some serious doubts as to whether I should continue!

Maybe some of the more experienced Fair Isle knitters among you could weigh in? This is the current wobbly state of my stranding technique (worked inside out!):

Which I was thinking wasn’t TOO bad, as I assumed it would block out, but then to be sure I tried blocking one sleeve (was working 2 at a time which probably wasn’t doing me any favours!). This is what I am still left with on the worst, if inner part of the arm sleeve:

What do you think? Will this even out eventually, or should I just throw in the towel? Maybe I am just not advanced enough for this and should switch these bits to a colour pattern with less long floats like a simple double lice stitch or something?

Help! Am despairing. :-{

Should I continue on, or frog?

I have been thinking more and more about holiday knitting over the past month and realising that when you are knitting gifts it is a real balance between starting early enough and fitting in time to get things knit up for yourself!

Those of you that have been following along for a while know how much I’d love to be able to knit a full colourwork jumper, but that my skills have been sorely lacking. I have been slowly working through projects to try and get comfortable enough with the process to go large scale…

However, I had a bit of a freak out a few weeks ago when I realised that if I didn’t start my xmas jumper NOW It would be another year I’d missed the boat. In a panic I downloaded a pattern I have been wanting to knit for ages now, the beautiful, snowflake-y Boreal by Kate Davies…

…and dyed up some fat aran yarn:

I thought some of you might get a kick out of these ‘monster skeins’ of aran! They are just 2 hanks skeined together as I got tired of skeining a gazillion hanks the other day, so I twisted these together, as they are for us and not the shop! The blue/purple SW Merino on the far left is for my partner’s jumper (which I really need to get started on as well), and the grey/red BFL/Alpaca are for my xmas Boreal. The red never seems to photograph well with this camera but it is a lightly variegated pink red/yellow red that I think will add some interest to the top bit…if I manage to knit it!

Fingers crossed.