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
- I used both methods,
- I used scrap yarn (conveniently pre-wrapped in tiny leftover size skeins),
- I am not intimidated, and
- 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.
Ahh... it seems like you're finally able to take a breath and work on something other than printing for a while. Enjoy!
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