when i get home i should take pictures of my cursed half-fairisle-half-intarsia-in-the-round sweater knitting approach (my non-knitter housemates dont appreciate how cursed it is) (main color is knit normally in the round, contrasting color is knit back and forth intarsia-style, so areas with contrasting color are knit in normal fairisle on half the rounds and on half the rounds i knit only the MC stitches and slip the CC stitches onto a DPN, then flip the work and knit only the CC stitches and slip the MC stitches, then slip everything back onto the circular needle and keep going)
@juneberryjammin @shrewreadings SO
im making another one of This:
which has a bunch of colorwork, obviously, but also these massive swathes of Nothing, and i really do not want to carry the white floats around all of those. what i did for take 1 was to just... cut the yarn and tie it off every time, which was a massive pain in the ass and makes the inside look messy. for take 2 i decided to do Something Else
see, if it were knit flat, you could pull this off pretty easily -- just make a little ball thing of white yarn for every patch of colorwork, and knit back and forth intarsia-style. unfortunately for me it is knit in the round. so you can knit one round with the white yarn starting at the leading edge of the colorwork patch, but that moves it to the trailing edge, and since you're not knitting flat it never gets moved back. Ploblem
so heres how My Technique works: half the rounds are just business as usual; white yarn is attached at the leading edge, i work it + the green yarn across in the usual fairisle way (but at both edges i wrap the white and green yarns intarsia style, which helps with the tension)
the OTHER half of the time the white yarn dingleberry is dangling off the trailing edge:
step 1: knit (from the right side) only the stitches that should be green this row according to the chart; slip the others onto a DPN
step 2: flip over and purl the white stitches off the DPN; slip the newly knit green ones
step 3: flip it over again and slip all the newly-knit white and green stitches (and continue knitting the next green-only section as usual)
you dont ACTUALLY need the dpn for this, i just had a hard time keeping track of what stitches i'd slipped without it
has anyone... seen this done? before? i couldn't find any evidence after cursory googling but i can't possibly be the first person to try this
My elderly Irish neighbor taught me to do this exact same thing, minus the dpn (though I think the dpn is a very good addition). She never called it anything special - just said that was how you did "intarsia in the round." Her definition of "instarsia" seemed to be "any large block of color that isn't double-knit or just changed at the start of a row/round." (E.G. even if you knit that octopus sweater entirely fairisle style with big huge floats she would have called it "intarsia with fairisle details")
I kinda doubt she came up with the idea herself, given how she talked about it like it was a known Thing. I showed her an article in a magazine once that was about intarsia, and it of course specified that intarsia only works on flat knitting. This prompted my neighbor to scoff and deride the writer of the article as not knowing what she was talking about. She then demonstrated the Proper Technique For Intarsia In The Round, which is how I learned it.
I didn't realize it was an unusual technique until some fifteen years later when I joined a local stitch 'n bitch and horrified everyone, lol. Very cool to see somebody else had the same brainwave!
:0 fascinating!!
