The fantabulous Mary Jane Mucklestone has created our final design for A Year of Techniques: the Oorik tank top.
Oorik is sized from baby to toddler, to make an achievable first steeking project. Image © Jesse Wild.
Oorik (meaning small person in Shetland dialect) is a Fair Isle tank top (US vest) knitting completely in the round. The arm and neck openings are created with steeks, thus allowing you to always be working with the right side of the fabric facing you. This makes it easier to avoid mistakes in the colourwork, and there's no purling to do in the Fair Isle section.
Steeking is definitely a technique that many knitters (even very experienced ones!) find intimidating. The thought of taking your scissors to something you've spent hours knitting is completely counter-intuitive. But take heart, in the right yarn (and real Shetland wool from Jamieson & Smith most definitely is the RIGHT yarn!), steeks are a breeze. You don't even need to do anything special to them, although the photo tutorial in the pattern includes full instructions on how to work a crochet steek reinforcement, you could just cut them open and call it done.
We had fun playing with alternative colours. Image © Jesse Wild.
Mary Jane has put together 3 different bands of Fair Isle colourwork, in combination with a subtle colour palette, to make this lovely kids' top. I think it has a marvellously vintage feel to it, whilst looking perfectly at home in 2017.
We have a selection of shades of Jamieson & Smith 2ply Jumper Weight, available in the online shop, as well as the Gaulmogot shade of Shetland Supreme, which is used as the background colour in the sample tank top. I played around with parcel tags and some different colour combinations when we had our photo shoot, and the following are shown in the photo above...
Turquoise colourway (top): Gaumogot, FC34, 9144 and 66;
Sample colourway (middle): Gaulmogot, FC15, 9144 and 66;
Green colourway (bottom): 203, FC15, 29 mix and 28.
Sizing information and yarn quantities can be found on the product page for J&S 2ply Jumper Weight in the Yarn section of our online shop.
Massive thanks to Mary Jane for bringing her excellence at Fair Isle to our collection - Oorik is such a cute pattern!
That's it! All 12 patterns from A Year of Techniques have now been released, and print copies should start landing with UK knitters today, all things being equal! Thank you all for the kind messages, posts to our group, photos on Instagram, and for all your enthusiasm for this project. There's still plenty of knitting to be done, and 6 more video tutorials to release, so I hope you'll stick around and share your projects over the coming months. This has been. So. Much. Fun!
March 2022 Update: We are now managing whoelsale distribution in house. Our books are currently available from Purlescence (UK), Modern Daily Knitting (USA) and Strickmich (EU).