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.