Knitting Tip: Intarsia in the Round

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.

Intarsia 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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I can’t resist a pattern that’s both useful and a little silly, and that’s exactly how I feel about the Rybka pouch pattern from the delightfully named Rat and Sea Witch.

I know you’re going to ask, because I did, too. Rybka means little fish in Polish. (And because you’re also probably going to ask, Rat and Sea Witch comes from people’s attempts to say the designer’s name, Ratasiewicz, which if you say it fast kind of sounds like rat and sea witch.)

It’s easy to make a little fish bag in different sizes to suit your needs. The pattern has specific instructions for an Airpods Pro case and a pencil case, but you could change the length easily to hold more stuff, and change the size in general by working with a different weight of yarn.

The pattern calls for sock yarn and mohair held together to make a fingering weight gauge, but you could try it with heavier yarn and see what size bag you end up with.

Whatever size you make it, this looks like a fun project for holding trinkets or everyday items. The mouth of the fish is the mouth of the bag, and it closes with a drawstring that is also the strap. I wonder, too, if you could make one of these with a small clasp frame that could be the fish’s mouth and then you could just work I cord straps that would attach to the sides of the fish.

I could also see stripes, or fish of different colors to use up your yarn leftovers. How about a sunglasses case with a little loop to attach to your bag? Once you start thinking about all the ways you could use a fish-shaped bag in your life, I think you’ll see that you probably need more than one.

If you make one of these I would love to know how it went!

You can grab a copy of the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Rat and Sea Witch]

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