Before I start talking about how to knit intarsia, I want to emphasize that the method I'm showing is from the book Intarsia: A Workshop for Machine and Hand Knitting by Sherry and Keely Stuever. There are actually several ways of doing intarsia; from what I can tell Kaffe Fassett
endorses more of a free spirited approach where sometimes colors are stranded instead of interlocked and the millions of yarn ends are worked more like you would in stranded color knitting. I think the Stuever method produces more even stitches and the reverse of the work is much
neater looking.
It is important to remember that to knit intarsia flat you have to read the chart from two different directions depending on what row you're on. The right side of the knitting is worked by reading the chart from right to left and the wrong side of the knitting is worked by reading the chart from the left to the right. Some knitters do intarsia by knitting back backwards to avoid having to purl and read the chart from both directions but I
actually like working the wrong side as it is easier to see which yarns to grab every time I get to an interlock.
Another important point is that every time you get to a new block of color, you start a new yarn supply. If you are knitting a vertical line in black on white background, you will have two white yarn supplies on each side of the black line. As I said in my last post, I simply cut about 2-3 yards of each color for each yarn supply and let it hang loose on the back of the work and pull each color loose out of the tangle of yarns when I need it.
To start a new color yarn you simply lay the yarn end on the front or right side of the work (whether or not you are working the right or wrong side of the project). Bring the old yarn OVER the new yarn and start knitting with the new yarn. Ignore the tail until you get to the next row.
Here you can see I added the blue yarn on the previous row and I'm to the point where I added the second blue yarn. You can see the tail under my thumb on the right side of the work.
Here on the reverse side of the work I've pulled the blue yarn tail to the back of the work right through the center of the two needles. The blue yarn is now connected to the work and you don't have to worry about holes.
Each and every time in intarsia you get to a color change you have to do an interlock. The new color you're beginning to knit with always comes UNDER and to the RIGHT of the old color. In the photo above I'm about to start purling with the green so the green yarn has been pulled under and to the right of the blue yarn.
After I knit the green I need to find the right blue yarn on the back of the work to interlock with the green. This can be complicated with the yarn tails and more than one section of the same color so I turn the work around to figure it out.
That's pretty much it - I've shown a method to add new yarns and a method to interlock the yarns at every color change. Next week I'll show how to deal with all the yarn ends.
