Fair Isle and Nordic knitting pattern generator

Squares from two threads

In stranded colorwork a knitter carries two colors across a row and picks one for each stitch, so every motif is a picture on a grid of small squares and no color runs further than a few stitches. Fair Isle, from the Shetland island of that name, stacks narrow bands of such motifs, each one in two colors, with lines of dots or stripes between them: the OXO band of crosses and rings, zigzags, eight-point stars, small hearts. The Norwegian village of Selbu gave its name to a style built on large eight-petal stars and roses, which became the Norwegian sweater and the pattern of the winter Olympics. Christmas knits add firs and snowflakes.

Ornamatic draws generic versions of these knits. They are not copies of any particular sweater or chart.

How the generator builds them

Every picture is a bitmap, and the rows of pixels are drawn as joined rectangles, so there are no seams between stitches. Fair Isle chooses a motif for each band from a library of seven, flips its two colors from band to band and separates the bands with a line or a row of dots. The Selbu rose is an eight-point star with a two-color center and a small cross between the roses in a half-drop. The forest alternates rows of firs with rows of snowflakes, shifted by half a motif.

The tile is a whole number of stitches in each direction, so the pattern repeats without a join.

What you can adjust

• Sweater — Fair Isle, Selbu rose or forest.
• Bands or Size — how many bands in the yoke, or how large the rose or the forest.
• Variation — which motifs go into which band.
• Colors — a ground and up to three more; any palette.

Export and use

Download the seamless tile as PNG or SVG, or copy a ready CSS background. The patterns you create are free to use, personally or commercially.