Sounds like some terminal disease, doesn’t it? The doctor says I have Intarsia. For the non-knitters, it’s a way of knitting with multiple blocks of color where they aren’t stranded across the back of the work. All of the multi-color blocks I have knit so far have been done using stranding, which I discovered today is also Fair Isle. I’ve been Fair Isle knitting for months and had no idea. Unlike Fair Isle, Intarsia involves lots of yarn bobbins, which thankfully Granny sent me this summer.
I’m now 3 squares away from having Hannah’s afghan ready to join. The plan is to make a kid’s size afghan using 27 LTKA squares and 3 “special” squares from other sources. I’ve finished all the squares I picked from the Learn To Knit Afghan Book, so I decided to start on the initial square. Originally, I had just planned a two-color design with a large block H in the center. But I found a Celtic Alphabet cross-stitch pattern generator online, and decided to use the Celtic H instead.
I laid the pattern out in my knitting journal, cast on 40 stitches, and began knitting the background. Seven rows in, it was time to join the new color, and it occurred to me that I have no idea how to do it. Googling intarsia instructions brought up a link to KnittingHelp.com with a how-to intarsia video (it’s under the knitting with two colors section). My biggest concern was how to start the new color without leaving a hole, and the site also has good video directions for joining yarn in the Knitting Tips section.
I did have to frog the square, however, when I realized that I had purled the first row, so that the H was going to be backwards. But it was practice.
