My first tammy ~ and my own design !   This little tam I made for my girlfriends’ birthday, last year in September .  It’s significance is huge because  it launched a sort of knitting rennaisance in my life.  I had been for the first time become aware of traditional Fair Isle knitting, and had just checked out in the library a heap of books on the subject, including a few of Alice Starmore’s .  I have just bought my first knitting book,  the reprint of Alice Starmore’s  “FairIsle Knitting”.  In the years before this project I hardly knit much, save for a flurry of projects in my first years of spinning, however, in all the years not knitting,  I yearned and yearned.  Yearning has became the word which best expresses my feeling about knitting (when I was not knitting), and from which I entitle this blog  ‘Yarnings’ . This here little Tam O’ Shanter was my first stranded color knitting ever, and it has lured me down a one-way road into  yarn and needles and  designing the next Autumn or Spring sweaters for my nieces. Knitting has  grown in a very short time into a passion which has overtaken all else.

I used the charts provided in Alice Starmore’s “Book of Fair Isle Knitting”  which are for the most part, traditional motifs.  I used Jamiesons Shetland Spindrift yarn ~ so light and fluffy, I absolutely fell in love with Shetland wool !

Finest yarn I knit to date.  Ever !