Intarsia knitting is a colorwork technique that involves incorporate areas of color into your knitting. It is all about blocks of color that are limited to certain parts of the fabric.
The key is that when you change colors, the yarn is not carried across the back of the work as is done in stranded knitting (also known as Fair Isle), but rather twisted around the main color at the edges of the secondary color.
It’s a simple technique, but it does require a bit of forethought because you need a different strand of each color to work within your design. For a small area of color, you can just cut long strands a couple of yards each, but for a bigger area of color, you might need actual balls of yarn to work with.
Starting a new color of the yarn is similar to joining a new ball of yarn at the edge of a piece of knitting, as you might have done when knitting stripes.
This may all seem a little complicated, but itโs worth it! These techniques allow you to create all sorts of wonderful and complex pictures in your knitting.
Intarsia Knitting on the Knit Side
To begin intarsia on the knit side, work the first stitches in your background color, pick up the second color and knit the next stitches with it, then start a new strand of the background yarn on the opposite side. If you’re following a chart, this will work in the same way. You will now have three strands of working yarn.
Intarsia Knitting on the Purl Side
On the purl side of the work, it’s possible to twist the yarns as we change colors to ensure that the different pieces of knitting stay together as we work. If you didn’t do this at all, you’d have three separate pieces of knitting on your needle.
Some tips
โข Keep your tension even as you work the color changes. This will help to avoid gaps in the fabric.
โข Make sure that you bring the new yarn up from underneath the old yarn each time to create a twist in the yarns that prevents holes.
โข Go back when you are done with the contrast color to even out any loose stitches and securely weave in the contrast color where you started and finished with it.
Other great intarsia knitting tutorials that you might enjoy
How to knit intarsia in the round