Fair Isle Knitting -- your very first motif

There are books with patterns for Fair Isle that you can use to make samplers.  Look for them on Amazon and then compete the price with Barnes & Noble.
This week I'm going to show you a chart for a motif that is pretty common in Fair Isle work and next week I'll show you how you can modify it to get the sort of shaded look Fair Isle often has.

			X	X	X	X
		X	X			X	X
	X	X					X	X
X	X							X	X
	X	X					X	X
		X	X			X	X
			X	X	X	X

Notice that this chart has runs of color no more than 7 stitches long which, as I said, one website says is true for all real Fair Isle motifs.
Notice that you will have to use all the techniques on the video because of the 4-stitch runs at top and bottom of the motif.
If you were going to make a band of these across a sweater, you would want to make sure that you cast on a number of stitches divisible by 9, and then you need to cast on one more stitch.  Plus you want to make sure the number of stitches is divisible by 2 so that the front and back of the sweater are the same width.
That number of stitches will let you join the band of motifs evenly.
I have a very simple sweater pattern from an old, out-of-print needlework book that I learned to knit from.  I cable on 280 stitches and then knit in the round, just like for Fair Isle.  The above motif would work on that pattern.
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