A Bluestocking Knits

This is that lovely Blue-faced Leicester wool that I got for a song at Tuesday Morning a month or so ago.  I decided that it wants to be some Fair Isle mitts, so I'm currently swatching.  These are all on 3mm needles, so a bit less than the 4mm/US6 the ball band recommends — gauge about 6.5 sts per inch.

The wool is very pleasant to knit with — smooth and soft, with just a bit of sheen.  The colorwork looks great even without blocking.  The first time I put my hand in the swatch, I said "Oh!" out loud, it felt so good.

Swatch one is a riff on a riff of the colorwork of the Muckle Mitts, a simple zig-zag with crosses — I used the blue and the mouse as background colors, and the cream and the beige for the pattern.  I like the way this turned out — and first one out of the gate, too! — though it's a little blue-heavy, using about twice as much as any of the other colors.

Swatch 2 is less successful.  I wanted to do a simple OXO Fair Isle, but it doesn't really read at this scale, I guess.  Three rows of the second background color didn't work at all, so I changed the first chart, at the bottom, to just one row of the second background color, at the top — it works a bit better, but still not really.  On the whole, it does have a slighly more balanced use of the four colors.  To my eye, though, the band of the mouse-brown across the very middle probably should be the cream, too.

Swatch 3 is not much of a winner, either.  I like the pattern itself, which is cribbed from some Lion Brand scarf that keeps popping up when I Google "free fair isle chart", but these colors don't have enough contrast to bring it out.  I'm afraid I wasn't very careful with the tension, either, which the longer floats definitely require.  I added in some single stitches in the bottom third, to get the floats shorter, but it doesn't really speak to me that way. 

So No.1 it is!