Approximating the Ising model on fractal lattices of dimension below two

22 pages, 10 figures and 3 tables; v2: references addedWe construct periodic approximations to the free energies of Ising models on fractal lattices of dimension smaller than two, in the case of zero external magnetic field, using a generalization of the combinatorial method of Feynman and Vodvickenko. Our procedure is applicable to any fractal obtained by the removal of sites of a periodic two dimensional lattice. As a first application, we compute estimates for the critical temperatures of many different Sierpinski carpets and we compare them to known Monte Carlo estimates. The results show that our method is capable of determining the critical temperature with, possibly, arbitrary accuracy and paves the way to determine $T_c$ for any fractal of dimension below two. Critical exponents are more difficult to determine since the free energy of any periodic approximation still has a logarithmic singularity at the critical point implying $\alpha = 0$. We also compute the correlation length as a function of the temperature and extract the relative critical exponent. We find $\nu=1$ for all periodic approximation, as expected from universality