Actual Knitting Progress.

I'm really enjoying the East Meets West Bag so far. I think I may have FINALLY figured out how to keep a fairly even tension in Fair Isle. I've always used two hands to hold the yarns, but it's never really given me results I'm overly happy with. So, I tried to hold both yarns in one hand and I'm much happier with the results. Here's a little bit of the first five rounds (keeping in mind that each round is 450 stitches, I think I'm doing pretty well).

It's quite apropos that the beginning colors were orange and black since I was working that part on Halloween.

So, how am I holding the yarn? Well, I'm a continental knitter and I usually wrap yarn around my pinky twice and then over all the fingers and control tension by the index finger and the pinky curled in. So, at first I tried wrapping both yarns together around the pinky and separating them with the index, but they seemed to keep getting pretty twisted and I couldn't seem to maintain an even tension on both yarns, especially when I did five stitches of one color before doing a stitch of the other. So, I then tried wrapping the secondary color around my pinky, putting it over the fingers and under the index finger. Then I wrapped the primary color separately around the pinky and put it over all the fingers.

It seems to be working out pretty well. I can use the index finger to tension the yarns appropriately and I think I like how the floats are on the back, not too tight, not too loose.