fairest isle

It's finished! And I am ridiculously in love with it...

FO: Endpaper Fair Isle i-pod cosy

Pattern: Knit in the round, based on Eunny Jang's Endpaper Mitts fair-isle, and inspired by tragicheroine's iPod sock.
Yarns: Fortissima Socka, in colour 1012 (that's the hot pink), and Sirdar Town & Country 4-ply sock yarn, in colour 154. I used the teeniest scrap; you'd hardly notice I'd touched the skeins.
Needles: Ribbing done on 2mm needles, body on 2.5 mm

Here's the corrugated ribbing, and the attempted tubular cast-one. There's a row of weeny holes where the ribbing starts, and I'm not sure if that's inevitable with the technique, or whether I've done something wrong (most probable).
Time sucked: Half a day, more or less

And here's the earphone hole, at the end of the three-needle bind-off, because nanos, confusingly, have the Hold button at one end and the earphone socket at the other.

(I hate earbuds, can't keep them in my ears for the life of me, feel like a complete fool walking down the street trying to cram them into my ears every step I take. Am I alone in this?)

I know it's silly, but although I've knit far more mighty and far more practical projects than this - cardigans, socks, scarves - this tiny scrap of experimental faux-isle makes me prouder than almost anything I've done. Perhaps because of the number of new techniques I've crammed into this miniscule project, perhaps because of its perfect dinkiness - the pattern just the right size for so small an object - or perhaps just because I like shiny consumer electronics.

Next up: learning to fair-isle properly and to strand my yarns in a consistent fashion, instead of at random. But first, the move. The move!

all isles excelling

Isn't the way that Eunny Jang writes about knitting so seductive? I'm a slapdash knitter myself, possibly happiest when mindlessly zipping around stocking-stitch socks while watching television, carrying on a conversation with my girlfriend, and possibly reading the Times Literary Supplement at the same time. Fecky attention to detail makes me, like Laura Ingalls Wilder, feel as though I am flying apart. Moreover, proper attention to detail involves maths, an implacable enemy that cannot ever be underestimated.

And yet, Eunny makes the poetry of detail, the pride in precision seem like a reflection of the works of the Almighty himself. Thus, although, like Felinity, I had been intimidated away from fair isle by Debbie Stoller's dismissive description of it in Stitch 'n' Bitch, Eunny's rhapsodies about "just a little hit" for her Endpaper Mitts had me seduced. I don't really need another pair of fingerless mittens, but the tiny detailing of the project sounded wonderful.

And then, I came across this truly ravishing fair-isle iPod sock, based on Eunny's chart, but with lovely little details such as the corrugated rib and black side seam. Mmmm, I thought. Such a strange coincidence that precisely this electronic item of desire was delivered to my door last week...

...and that, although I had bought a silicone case to protect it, I quickly discovered that silicone cases and knitting households are almost entirely incompatible. Silicone picks up fluff like nothing on earth, and my lovely consumer electronic looks like something the feral cats outside dragged in. (There really are feral cats outside this flat.) I'll just swatch for the cosy, I thought, I don't need to learn all that fancy two-handed throwing yet, just see whether or not it works at all as a concept...

but when it comes to something as microscopic as an iPod nano, a swatch is more or less the size you need.

No, it's not perfect: the pattern doesn't quite match up, I'm not convinced about the corrugated rib, I didn't manage to figure out how to put in those side seams. But look! how utterly dinky, what fairy tininess is in this project:

Teeny teeny tiny, the perfect size for trying out testing new techniques: in one inch, we have a tubular cast-on, corrugated rib and stranded knitting, all new to me before midnight last night. Such a delicious little project. I foresee many, many more.