Intarsia Revisited
This is part two of Intarsia How-To, in response to several questions and comments. Thanks for those!
Two common ways to prepare yarn for intarsia work are bobbins and yarn butterflies. Here’s an empty bobbin, a bobbin with yarn wound around it, and a yarn butterfly. The slit in the bobbin is so narrow, the yarn cannot unwind by itself. You unwind as much as you need, knit, and wind the extra back up. The bobbin hangs neatly at the back of your work.
The yarn butterfly is a sort of center-pull skein that you wind between your thumb and little finger. Take the last few windings around the middle, and tuck the yarn under itself to tie in place. To knit, pull the other end from the butterfly.
Kary asked: How do you know how much to wind on the bobbin? If you want to count stitches, you can estimate how much yarn to wind Figure out about how many stitches you can make with one inch of yarn, and calculate how many inches you need for the stitches, plus about 8 inches for yarn tails and peace of mind.
I am not a fan of bobbins. I don’t like the weight of them hanging near my knitting needles and dangling around, bumping into each other. It throws off my balance.
Furthermore, being a lazy knitter, I don’t want to wind a bobbin, only to have to unwind it again so I can knit. And of course, the bobbin will probably run out of yarn, six stitches short, which means I have to add another length of yarn for the last six stitches, making two more ends to sew in.
I like to knit straight from the skein when possible. For smaller areas, I make yarn butterflies. If the design has two of the same color area, I often knit from both ends of the skein.
This can be a terrible, tangly mess, but with some planning, it is possible to knit neat and successful intarsia straight from the skein. Here’s how. Put the yarns in a basket or box, roughly in the order that you will use them. Work a couple of rows to get the colors established.
At the beginning of a knit row, make sure all the yarns come straight from the skeins, without crossing, as in the first photo.
Knit across, changing colors correctly as shown in Intarsia How-To. They will cross each other as in the second photo.
So here you are at the end of the knit row. Grab the right hand needle point in your left hand. Rotate the other end of the needle toward you (clockwise) and around so that this becomes the left hand needle.
Purl across, changing colors properly. As each new color taken up, the old color will untangle and hang free of the previous yarn. At the end of the purl row, all yarns will be uncrossed, but they will be twisted by half a turn.
Now you’re at the end of the purl row and the yarns are spiraled halfway around each other just once. So, grab the right hand needle with your left hand. Rotate the other end of the needle away from you (counterclockwise, anticlockwise, widdershins, whatever you call it), and around so that it becomes the left hand needle. Voila! The yarns are all straight again!
If you live in a house where you can knit whole rows without having to put your knitting down, you can go on like this for hours: crossing them all on the knit row, uncrossing them on the purl row. You have to switch the needle around correctly for this to work.
Sarah asked, “How do you add in a new color?”
When the intarsia chart indicates a change, start knitting with the new color, leaving a three inch or so tail of yarn. Finish the row.
On your return row, at some point, you will be using the new color again. When you’re finished with the new color, drop the yarn.
When you change to the next color, reach under the new yarn you dropped, as well as its tail, and pick up the next color. he next color will then cross both the tail of the newly added color and the newly-added color coming from the bobbin. Look at the photo, where the hot pink is crossing the blue yarn and its tail (circled in red).
Darn the new tail back into its own color area.
If the yarns get messed up as you knit, just wait until you’re ready to start a knit row. Then, with the knit row facing you, untangle the yarns so you can start fresh.
Color Weirdness
I posted earlier this month about how some workshop leaders have steered students away from using yellow because it is supposedly “difficult.” Woolwinder and Furrworld commented, saying that they had never heard that about yellow. I’m glad this folly hasn’t gotten all the way around, and hope I can stem its further spread by addressing it in my next INKnitters article.
Using and enjoying color is a problem for so many people, because they have 1) had creativity squashed out of them from an early age by peers, parents, and teachers; and 2) had foolish sayings and pronouncements drilled into them before they knew better.
For example, have you ever heard this bit of idiocy? “Blue and green should never be seen.” Please, don’t tell the bluebonnets and forget-me-nots!
This saying is really a political warning. I think it started in Scotland, one of the places where Catholics and Protestants were at odds. Blue was associated with one group, and green with the other (I don’t know which was which). Parents and peers told children that blue and green should never be seen, because they didn’t want Catholic kids and Protestant kids to be friends.
Unfortunately, the slogan made it into the mainstream, where the political associations of blue and green weren’t as well-known. So hundreds of kids thought it was incorrect to wear the colors blue and green together, or to use them together in decorating. All because of a mistake! It’s enough to drive a person distracted.
Here’s another pronouncement that I heard about ten years ago, from a well-known knitting and art-wear designer and workshop leader: “You can’t make art with blue.” Her justification is that blue is too common in our decorating and clothing to be valid as an art color (huh???). I say, maybe she can’t make art with blue, but the rest of us can, and should.
Snowman Latched
Thanks to Bob Dollar, Nero Wolfe, the Dallas Cowboys and the Texas Longhorns, the latch hook snowman rug/wall hanging is completely latched. I listened to tapes of Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole (Bob Dollar is the main character), and a couple of Rex Stout novels, featuring the fat and sedentary detective, Nero Wolfe. I took the rug to my parents’ house the last few weekends. We watched Longhorn and Cowboy football, while I latched. What a great way to escape from real life!
Now I need to get back to work. I have my articles to write for INKnitters, and I want to finish a book proposal I started about a year ago. And there are teaching proposals to prepare! Also, I need to do quite a bit of administrative work: filing, bookkeeping (Sallee, I can imagine you smirking), cleaning up the debris from several months of projects.
Quick, I need some sand to bury my head in! Or better yet—don’t I have a couple of felt Christmas ornament kits, which I must, must, MUST finish this year?
Now, a few comments about this rug kit. I enjoyed it, as you know. However, I am disappointed (not surprised) at the quality of the yarn. It sheds a lot. For all the work involved, I would love to have had wool. That would have probably more than doubled the price of the kit, though. It will be okay as a once-a-year display.
In this close up, you can see how the printed canvas doesn’t line up with the colors as latched according to the chart. The colors on the canvas were very helpful for about five rows, and then, because the print was slightly skewed, I couldn’t quite figure out the correct colors for latching the right side of the canvas.
I followed the chart, and quickly saw that the print on the canvas was compressed. By the time I reached the halfway point, the white dots in the background were two rows higher (according to the chart) than shown on the print. Well, it was a good thing I read this one sentence in the four-page instructional brochure.
All that considered, the snowman wall hanging is a hit with my girls. They love the colors and the shading. My two-year-old Ella asked me to put in on the floor so she could sleep on it. It’s cuddly.
Playing is So Important!
Yes, we were playing buttons again. I get a little desperate for change sometimes, after sorting through the button pile for ages. My eye fell upon my double-honeycomb swatch. “Look, Ella,” I said, “we can snuggle the buttons into the little nests on this knitting!”
She was not interested, and took away the buttons I kept trying to snuggle into the cable sample. Finally I put the sample where she couldn’t see it, filled each compartment of the honeycomb with a button, and took a picture. Wouldn’t have considered it yesterday, but today I can see button-enhanced cable knitting in my future.
Speaking of playing, I got these goodies from Lion Brand to play with for my next INKnitters article. I’m writing about yellow, which is a happy, lovely color. Unfortunately, I have heard of teachers who discourage students from using yellow in their knitting (or quilting), saying, “Yellow is a difficult color.” We’ll see about that.
I had to replace my computer’s hard drive, which has cost me a lot of time reinstalling everything. Luckily, I was able to back up all the information on the old drive, but the programs themselves mysteriously failed to restore to the new hard drive. My advice to all: back up your computer frequently, and save all your original program disks with any installation notes.
A Snake in My Knitting Bag
My two-year-old Ella and I ‘play buttons’ a lot. We pour the big jar out onto a blanket, sort the buttons, pick out our favorites, and make up stories about them. The biggest ones are the daddies, the middle-sized ones are the mamas, and the small ones are the children. She said, “Mama, I pickted out your favorite buttons.” Sweetie!
I usually sit down with some knitting or notes, because Ella goes off into her own button world, where she doesn’t need me.
So there I sat, playing buttons, when I noticed a box that had been sitting there a while. I could quickly clean it out and clear a spot on the floor. My red bag was on the top, full of knitting magazines I need to read. But what was that smell? Ugh. It was the smell of something dead.
I moved the books a little, and saw a scaly, flat, smelly thing in the bottom of the bag. “What’s the matter?” my husband asked. “There is a dead snake in this bag,” I told him.
He took my bag outside and dumped it. Oh, it was about a foot long, probably a young Glossy Snake or King Snake, broken in two. I must have left my bag outside long enough for it to get in. When I picked it up, the magazines and papers trapped it inside. Poor baby!
What?! Did you think I meant a knitted snake? I did knit one many years ago for my brother. Mom, do you know where that snake is? Maybe I will post a photo of it later.
The last few days, I have been preparing teaching proposals for the brand new DFW Fiber Fest (late April 2006) and the Wool Festival at Taos (October 2006), and Stitches in 2006. I’m developing a new workshop called “Cables, Bobbles, and Braids,” and I have started knitting the class samples. This is one.
Among other things, I plan to teach how to design a cable sweater and how to design a cable of your own! Should be good!
Construction Site Crochet
We were at our new house site. The foundation guys were finishing up for the day.
“Eva. see what he’s doing with that cord?” I said.
My daughter looked. “Yeah,” she said.
“What do you call that, when you do it?” I asked.
“Crochet?” she said.
“Bingo!”
It’s not finger crochet, it’s more like arm crochet.
Now you know. Burly construction guys crochet power cords. It’s quicker than winding the cord into a roll, and I bet the crocheted power cord stays neater than a rolled power cord.
Intarsia How-To
Intarsia How-To
In intarsia, you knit areas of color, guided by a graph. Depending on how big a color area is, you can use a ball of yarn, a yarn butterfly that you wind on your fingers, or a bobbin. I’m going to call them bobbins, since that is the traditional yarn-holding method for intarsia.
Intarsia is usually worked in stockinette stitch, and the color changes are done with the yarns on the purl side.
Each color change in a row requires a separate bobbin of yarn. Here’s what I mean.
For this graph, you need three different bobbins of blue and two different bobbins of yellow:
Rows 1-3: blue bobbin
Rows 4-7: blue bobbin, yellow bobbin, blue bobbin
Rows 8-12: blue bobbin, yellow bobbin, blue bobbin, yellow bobbin, blue bobbin
Rows 13-16: blue bobbin, yellow bobbin, blue bobbin
Rows 17-19: blue bobbin
Ooooo, I know it’s tempting to strand the yellow across those three stitches of blue in the middle, so you won’t have to wind two separate bobbins. Don’t do it! Stranding and intarsia don’t mix well. They stretch differently, and you’ll get stiffer, solid areas surrounded by stretched-out areas.
The color areas are knitted more-or-less independently, so the key is to change colors so that you don’t get holes where the colors meet. If you want to knit along, cast on 6 sts with color A, and then cast on 6 sts with color B. Turn and knit across the 6 sts of color B.
Alright, here you are, all finished knitting color B (pink in the sample). (I went ahead and knitted a few rows so you could see the color changes better.) You want to change to color A (white in the sample).
Drop color B to the purl side of the work (away from you). Reach under color B to pick up color A. When you lift color A to knit, it should cross over the strand of color B on the purl side.
Hurray, now you’ve finished the knit row, and you have purled color A, and now you’re ready to change colors again. Drop color A to the purl side of the work (toward you, this time). Reach under color A to pick up color B. When you bring it up to purl the next stitch, color B should cross over color A.
Oh no! I’m getting ready to purl the white yarn, but it’s not crossing the pink! If I don’t fix this problem, I’ll have a hole at this color change.
Here’s the back of my finished sample. Crossing the yarns produces the dotted line of white on the pink side, and the pink line on the white side. You can see these lines, even when I change colors on the diagonal. When you add another color, it’s the same thing: drop the old color to the purl side, pick up the new color from underneath the old. The colors should cross.
Because stockinette stitch looks like a series of little ‘v’s stacked on top of each other, you will always get the little color jags when you change color on a diagonal. It’s especially apparent where the white changes into the plum, on the right side of my sample.
Another time you should use this color change method is on the first and last color change of a row, when you are knitting a stranded pattern on straight needles. It’s not necessary to cross the yarns in circularly-knitted Fair Isle. Back-and-forth stranded patterns are different. Do the cross-color-change at the beginning and end of the row.
Magazine Day
Yesterday was marked by three separate magazine encounters.
The fall issue of INKnitters arrived, and there was my article about Fire Ant Ranch, with lots of pretty pictures. In a box, set off from the rest of the text, I wrote about the 2005 Taos Wool Festival. Oops! Just a little late! But I hope it will pique peoples’ interest and move more knitters to attend next year.
My friend Joan from Canada had two copies of the fall issue of Spin Off , so she sent one to me. Inside was an article about fringed purses, using a familiar lazy fringe-making technique. The author mentioned a workshop at Alston Hall. Hey, I’ve taught there! Then I read my name—Thank you, Freyalyn, for giving me credit for the fringe technique.
Oddly enough, I had a letter in my computer, waiting for a final photo of my pink tassel, proposing an article on my fringe-making technique plus various trims and tassels that can result. Yep, the letter was destined to be sent to Spin Off . I’ll probably still send it. Hope they will consider another article about handspun fringe.
Then, late last night, I sent off the last photo for my article in INKnitters, winter 2005. Here’s another teaser picture. Can you guess what the article is about?
Talk Went Well
I arrived at Joy’s Fabrics a little after nine o’clock, to find Joy and her husband, George, already setting up for my talk to the Busy Bees Sewing Group. We brought in my piles of samples, and organized them for the program.
Before long, the ladies came in. They came from far and wide, including some from our little town of Dublin. We enjoyed coffee, Halloween treats, and chat, before the meeting started. They were a knowledgeable and attentive audience. Their questions and comments made the discussion lively and fun.
Best of all, I get to come back and teach a button-making workshop next spring! I will probably go back anyway, and join the group. I need to get together with others who like to make stuff.
Here’s the aftermath of the program—my wall hangings all on a rack, and people talking among the bolts of fabric after the meeting.
Many, many thanks to Joy for telling the group about me, to Freda for inviting me to talk, and to the Dublin Citizen for publishing an announcement about my talk.
Alaska Report Inspires Button Blanket
Each student in my daughter’s fifth grade class wrote a report on a state. Her state was Alaska, and she wrote about the usual topics. My husband let her in on many of his professional secrets of map-drawing. Naturally, I always try to get her interested in the things people make. Alaska’s earliest inhabitants continue a wonderful tradition of art and craft.
Since “visuals” counted for one quarter of the requirements for a grade of A, I thought it would be neat for Eva to craft something, rather than just relying on the usual pictures glued onto poster board. What could be better than a button blanket?! Northwest Coast Indians, including the Alaskan Tlingit, make and wear button blankets for ceremonial dances.
Eva designed a cat’s face in her interpretation of the style of a Tlingit button blanket. She sewed diligently until it was done. I knew it was important to collect mother-of-pearl buttons!
