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Knitting Tip: Intarsia in the Round

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I’ve been working on a project — which I’ll share with you as soon as it’s done! — that is a mostly plain hat with some colorwork. I’d been resistant on working the colorwork section, and once I started knitting it, I realized why: it needed to be worked as intarsia, which you can’t really do in the traditional way in the round.

working intarsia in the roundIntarsia is also known as picture knitting, and it involves working a section in one color and another section in another color without stranding the yarn behind the work. So if you have a background color and an accent color, you have one ball of yarn for the background, another ball for the accent, then another ball of the background color to work on the other side.

The trouble with this when working in the round is that your accent color yarn ends on the incorrect side for using it to knit with on the next round. There are a couple of ways you can deal with that:

  • Cut the yarn of every round and start a new strand.
  • Leave a really long tail so you can knit the next round with the tail from the previous round (you’ll still have to start a new strand every two rounds this way).
  • Work back and forth rather than in the round for that section, which requires joining the rounds together (described in this fun pattern from Knitty).
  • Strand the yarn all the way around the work so that you can use the same strand throughout. Make sure you work really loosely if you do it this way.

Check out this great article from Abfabulies for the pros and cons of a couple of these methods, as well as great pictures of what the methods look like on the front and back of the knitting.

I ended up doing some kind of crazy hybrid of stranding and cutting, but when I write the pattern I think I’m going to suggest another method altogether: using duplicate stitch instead.

[Photo via Abfabulies.]

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Embellish Your Knit Dishcloth with Flowers

One great thing to knit when the weather is warm (or honestly any other time) is dishcloths and washcloths. They are fun and easy projects and a great way to play with new skills. Pretty washcloths make cleaning a tiny bit more fun, and they’re great to have on hand as a quick addition to a store-bought gift. 

The Daisy Delight Dishcloth from Yarnspirations is a fun one for using leftover bits of green in your cotton yarn stash. What looks like the bottom in the picture is actually the left side as you knit it, and each little color section is worked with its own ball of yarn, intarsia style. 

That’s a little fiddly for a washcloth, but the effect is cute, and it’s a simple way to learn the basics of intarsia knitting (as well as reading a chart) if you don’t already have those skills. 

One the knitting is done, you add the flowers with a bit of lazy daisy embroidery, which is really easy to do even if you’re not that into embroidery. You could also potentially add flowers in duplicate stitch if you’d rather. 

This may be the most work you’ve put into a dishcloth, but isn’t it adorable? It would be fun to use as a hand towel through the spring and summer, and if you already have some leftover green yarn from other projects it should be pretty easy to do. 

You could also take this same concept and make it different colors. All dark green stems with stars on top might be reminiscent of Christmas trees, or brown with daisy stitch on top in different colors could be trees in the fall. 

However you stitch it, this looks like a fun little project for knitters who are comfortable with intarsia and reading charts or who are ready to try those skills. 

You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

Book Review – Dishcloths for Special Days [Knitting]

Book Review – Holiday Knit Dishcloths