I signed up for Stitches when it was first announced, then picked up Sally Melville’s Color book a few weeks later when I needed some help working the front of the Green Lantern sweater. I wanted to make sure I was doing it right at the color changes, which I wasn’t happy with in my swatching. The book helped tremendously, and I also used her advice on the duplicate stitching on the Green Lantern.
I started thinking maybe I should pick another class for Sunday morning instead since I figured I knew how to do it now… but I am so glad I didn’t. I learned a lot and even taught Ms. Melville a new trick!
She has you pickup from a small homework swatch and start knitting, and takes you through the various ways you will encounter the yarns crossing as you knit intarsia. Sometimes the next color is far away and you need to span the back of your work a bit, and she shows you how to handle that, and how to maybe catch floats if you need to. She also shows you how to weave in stitches on the back if you decide to not go for a “pure intarsia” work. She shows this technique for both right- and left-hand yarn hold, and when you are working on the front and back of the work. (This last bit ended up as a refresher for me from Beth Brown-Riensel’s Norweigan Purls class, which I took a few years ago at TKGA and which contained so much info, some of it leaked out. It was great to see how it works again.)
After this class I feel a lot more confident in my intarsia, that I know how to handle each of the different ways the yarn might present itself and make the public side look great. I don’t know how much I will use the technique, but with the book and the notes, I am sure I will be able to produce something nice.
So, what did I teach Ms. Melville? I shared my technique of doing the duplicate stitch upside down to bridge the edge of two colors meeting underneath, as I did on the Green Lantern. She hadn’t thought of that before and thought it quite clever.