Intarsia (knitting) - Technique

Technique

Knitting in intarsia theoretically requires no additional skills beyond being generally comfortable with the basic knit and purl stitches. Materials required include multiple colours of yarn, standard needles, and bobbins. Bobbins serve to contain the inactive yarn and help keep it from getting tangled. Unlike the narrow, wooden ones used to make bobbin lace, modern intarsia bobbins resemble translucent plastic yo-yos that can snap tight to prevent the yarn from unwinding.

After winding a few yards of each colour onto its own bobbin (and possibly several bobbins' worth of some colours), the knitter simply begins knitting her/his pattern. When she/he arrives at a point where the colour changes, the knitter brings the new colour up underneath the old one (to prevent holes) and starts knitting with it. If flat knitting, at the end of the row, the piece is turned round just as with regular knitting, and the knitter returns back the way she/he came.

The simplest intarsia pattern is for straight vertical stripes. After the first row, the pattern is continued by always working each stitch in the same colour as the previous row, changing colours at exactly the same point in each row. To make more elaborate patterns, one can let this colour boundary drift from row to row, changing colours a few stitches earlier or later each time.

Intarsia patterns are almost always given as charts (which, because of the mechanics of knitting, are read beginning at the lower right and continuing upward boustrophedonically). The charts generally look like highly pixellated cartoon drawings, in this sense resembling dot-matrix computer graphics or needlepoint patterns (though usually without the colour nuance of the latter).