This project is my ‘first’ Brittish Fair Isle project, resulting from my year long quest to find soft yarn for Fair Isle projects for a warm weather climate.  After gaining a bit of confidence with purling in two colors with my mitten project (below), I decided to advance to a whole sweater knitting in flat rows using the same book, this time with Rowan’s wool cotton.  After testing Rowan’s wool cotton, 4 ply soft, felted tweed, and yorkshire tweed amd scottish tweed, I thought the wool cotton was the nicest, comparable to the feel of cotton, but with just enough give to make it have the feeling of wool when you knit with it.  Its pretty slick so I found some rosewood needles that grab the yarn a bit which helps to create a firmer fabric.  After getting half way through the back, purling in two colors felt very natural by that point.  The hardest part was finding the right combination of needles to keep the one color and two color sections on gauge.  I ended up needing to step down by two needle sizes for the plain color rows, I think possibly partly because my larger needles were a bit smaller than standard size and I seem to knit more firmly in two color sections, more loosely in one color sections.   After testing all these yarns for fair isle flat row style, I give two thumbs up for the wool-cotton by Rowan, and baby cashmarino by Debbie Bliss – with one caveat, to get the best results I found in my case that results are much better when using wooden needles.