Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Dabbling in color work

Ah, the irony. A sheep picture knit in cotton. I'm such a hipster. The chart looked easy enough, and I even got to combine stranded knitting with intarsia (explanation of techniques below). It seemed ridiculous to assign each leg its own skein, so I tried stranding at the bottom and then intarsia at the top. I was being pretty sloppy: I made two color changes in the wrong place, I didn't follow all the instructions about when you twist and when you don't, the fabric is twice as thick where the legs are, and I haven't woven in the ends because I can't find my tapestry needles. But. As an experiment in color work, I consider this a success because
  1. I used both methods,
  2. I used scrap yarn (conveniently pre-wrapped in tiny leftover size skeins),
  3. I am not intimidated, and
  4. I have the seed of an idea for an intarsia project.
Furthermore, I abandoned my usual Combined knitting and very carefully knit the "proper" way that everyone else was taught the first time around, and I didn't get confused.

*In stranded knitting you carry two yarns at all times, and the wrong side of the fabric has horizontal stripes of un-knit yarn. Fair Isle sweaters are made by stranding. Intarsia assigns each block of color a tiny skein, so you knit with one skein until a color change, twist it once around the next skein to attach it, and then drop the old skein to knit with the new skein.

1 comment:

sulu-design said...

Ahh... it seems like you're finally able to take a breath and work on something other than printing for a while. Enjoy!