Welcome to this Arnall-Culliford Knitwear tutorial on planning where your yarn needs
to be next in intarsia. This tutorial is part of our Little Lessons Intarsia series
to accompany the patterns in the Modern Daily Knitting Field Guide Number 16: Painterly. This
lovely book is packed full of designs by the master of colorwork Kaffe Fassett, and these
tutorials will give you all the skills you need to tackle any of the projects with confidence.
So when you work in intarsia, you have a piece of yarn for each patch of colour in the pattern,
and when your colour change is happening in a vertical line or in a
diagonal where the yarn just moves by one stitch in either direction, it's ever so straightforward,
because when you work across one row, you will leave each color at the edge of the patch,
and when you come back in the other direction, the yarns will be exactly where you need them. But
when your pattern is such that your yarn change isn't happening either directly on the vertical
or on the diagonal such as here on row 11, sorry not row 11, row 12, then I will show you what you
need to know. So on row 11, it's a right side row. We work across in yarn two, and yarn two ends up there.
We work across with yarn three, and it ends up here, and yarn one ends up here.
Then when we work back on row 12, yarn one is all ready happily to work in this direction, that's
fine, but when we come here, we want to use yarn two, but yarn two is back over here on stitch five and
not here on stitch ten where we need it. And if you strand your yarn across there you do just risk it
puckering or whatever, so what we're going to do instead is, having identified that we've got one
of these points where the yarn change isn't happening directly above itself or just on the
diagonal, as we work across row 11, we're going to be extra clever and we're going to carry yarn two
behind yarn three, and we're just going to hook it in as we go. Yarn two is going to come along
here hooked in, and be ready here for where we need it next. So now I'm going to show you how
to do that in your knitting, how it actually looks, and we're going to work along the first
section, and it's this pale green color that I'm going to need. Okay, normally, I'd drop it there, but
when I come back the other way, I'm going to need it across here at the end of those blue stitches.
So, pull from the tangle, and do our intarsia join as normal -- oh, where's our blue, there we go --
intarsia join as normal, and then we knit the first stitch in the blue,
and instead of just leaving the green there, I'm going to pass it over,
and then under, while I use the blue yarn
to work these stitches. So it's come from under, and I'm putting it over,
and then for the next stitch, I'm putting it back down underneath.
So we've hooked in like a snake that green yarn at the back of the work,
behind the blue stitches, so all of those stitches we've just knitted were in blue
as they were meant to be, but we've just tucked and caught in the pale green so that it's in the
right place ready to work the next row. And then we do our intarsia join as normal and carry on.
Here's the next section, we're in the same situation. We've got the pale green
and the vaseline green color, so we do the intarsia join on the first stitch.
Through the intarsia join on the first stitch, and then we bring the old yarn above,
and then over to below, so it's passing over
the working yarn, and then it was below so it's now going to come back up,
and now it'll go back down again, and we're just snaking it over and above the working
yarn, and we can just pull the stitches apart make sure it's not too tight or anything.
And we'll leave the pale green yarn just sitting where we need it ready for the next row.
Now we work our intarsia join as normal
and continue on.
We're now working back along our wrong side row, and I've worked the stitches in the first color,
and this orange stitch is now due to be worked in the pale green, and here we have the pale
green yarn, just pulling it from the tangle, we have the pale green yarn, and because we'd
hooked it in at the back, it's sitting in just the right place to use it to work across the top here.
Don't worry if it looks like you're getting some loose gaps here.
Once we've tightened up that join when we come back across, and we've woven in the end of the
orange, that's going to all be perfectly neat and tidy. There's a separate video on weaving
in your ends in the same series, so do check the notes on the video to find the link to that.
And there we go.
I can work across the row. Note I'm not bothering to pull the yarn right out of the tangle, I'm
just pulling enough to work with, doesn't matter at all what's going on with the rest of the ends.
Okay, and here we come again to that point where the pale green yarn would
have been sitting down here, but because we caught it in as we worked across the green,
it's actually just here ready and waiting where we need it, and it just keeps your tension that
bit more even to have popped it ready in the right place. Okay, tighten that up as we go.
Intarsia is definitely one of those techniques where it doesn't necessarily look great on your
needles at the moment at which you're doing it, and there is a lot of big, big,
big improvement, a lot to be gained by doing a bit of neatening up as you weave in your ends.
You need to join in a new ball there, there's that,
and there's the green at the right spot ready to finish off.
I hope you've found it helpful to see how you can work out when your yarn's going to end in the
wrong place, and how you can carry it across to put it in the right place ready to use on the next row.
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