My Intarsia Journey And How You Can Learn From My Mistakes.

Hello Everyone,

I hope you are all well and are enjoying this beautiful weather that we have been having recently. Apart from knitting I’ve just been spending my time in the garden trying to grow some plants, its my first time growing plants from seeds - it is actually quite exciting.

Anyway there has been a change of plan for this week’s blogs post. This week’s post was meant to be about my trails and errors of me making my knitted letters inside frames and the post after that was going to be about me learning intarsia and as you can see from the title I have changed my mind. For me a lot of the trials and errors for my knitted frames involve the issues I’ve had with intarsia. If I kept them separate the trial and error blog post would be quite short and boring. So I’ve decided to scrap that idea and just have my intarsia blog which will feature some trails and errors of me making my knitted letters inside frames. So this week’s blog post is going to be about how I learnt to do intarsia as well as telling you about the many mistakes I made and how you can hopefully learn from them.

My Carriage:

If you didn’t already know this (the picture below) is my intarsia carriage. I have a brother kh981 knitting machine therefore I have a brother ka-8210 intarsia carriage, if you are a machine knitter with a brother machine, you might also need this carriage as I know that it does fit a lot of different machines, I’ll add a picture below of the manual it came with which explains which knitting machine it can be used with.

For any non-knitters or knitters who haven’t heard about intarsia my understanding is that it allows you to create motifs and patterns in your knitting. I am no expert so this isn’t a proper explanation but this is how I understand it and what I use it for. I don’t have an electric machine and using a punch card is often limited to just knitting two colours, so for me intarsia lets me knit patterns/designs in my knitting which involves me choosing which colour yarns are knitted per needle. This will become clear later on when you see the pictures. Intarsia to me also means that there are an unlimited number of colours that I can use, meaning that you can add more detail to your knitting designs although so far what I have knitted is just two colours. Because of this you might ask if you’ve only done two colours why not just use a punch card, and you would be right to think this. But the size of knitting/fabric needed to fill my frame is more than 24 needles wide and most punch cards work on a 24 needle repeat and for my knitted frames I just wanted a single letter/initial in the middle.

My intarsia carriage.

Knitting machine that this carriage will also fit.

My first trail at intarsia:

I’m not going to give you a detailed explanation as to how to do intarsia knitting as it may be slightly different for different carriages and I learnt from the manual it came with. But I do want to show you what I did and what I didn’t do so that you can learn from my mistakes which will be best shown via the pictures below.

As you can probably guess my first attempt of intarsia didn’t go great which I think is expected I had never seen or used a carriage like this before so I didn’t expect it to go amazing straight away. My main issue was I was confused about how the yarns wrap around the needles it’s quite hard to explain so I am hoping you can see it from the photos below and their captions. As it was my first time I just used scrap bits of yarns, so please don’t judge my colour choices. I think by just practising and re reading the instructions I eventually got the hang of it, I’m pretty sure I had to read it a few times. The best way I can explain it in the way that the yarns wrap around each other is lay yarn one across the needles required then let it drop down the side of the last needle needed, then pick up the second coloured yarn and place it over the spare needle (un yarned) next the first coloured yarn needles, make sure this yarn lays on top of the first colour yarn that is hanging down, and repeat that for all colours required across the length of the knitting. I hoping you get this from the photos below throughout the blog.

Not the first few photos but this is the correct way to knit intarsia, the next section of the blog post is how I made my knitted letters for the frames and the way that I knitted them isn’t technically intarsia as intarsia isn’t meant to have floats but I will explain that further.

Here is an example of how i kept confusing which yarn goes over which. It makes the edges of the two colours look very rough.

Here is an example of how i kept confusing which yarn goes over which.

Here it is on the machine.

This is when i figured out how to do it properly it looks a lot cleaner, with the definition between the two colours.

Straight clean line defining where the colours start and end.

My manuals diagram of how to lay the yarns on the needles.

Intarsia for my knitted letters inside frames:

Now this section isn’t technically how you should knit intarsia which I was nicely told by two lovely people over on Instagram. It kind of is intarsia as I used the carriage and the same process for how you knit intarsia the only difference is that these have floats on the back of them and intarsia isn’t meant to have floats. You are meant to have separate yarns/sections for the different colours/areas of knitting. However I didn’t really know this and for my Christmas stockings I used punch cards to make designs and they have floats so I just thought this is how you do it. I didn’t see the point of having lots of different threads per section of knitting/colour so I thought I would just use floats to connect the corresponding colours. For example instead of having the same coloured yarn separated into let’s say 3 sections I just connected these three sections by having just one ball of yarn creating a float in between the sections of knitting. So to many knitters out there the pictures below are not intarsia but really I think they are because I have used an intarsia carriage and really I think knitting is what you make of it, which is the beauty of it. I love that I have been able to join two methods together to create something new that works for me, I love happy knitting accidents. I think what I am trying to say is knitting is what you make of it, do what you want and knit how you want, However if you do want to knit intarsia properly make sure it looks like my first trail ones and doesn’t have floats like mine have. My intarsia might not be correct but I think it helped me to understand the pattern I make making more, the floats helped to make my design flow, as they all interlink and connect.

My floats/ how i do intarsia.

My matching knitted letter, scrunchie and hat in the colour aspen.

My intarsia tips and ways that you can learn for my mistakes:

· Obviously my first tip is no floats! - I personally don’t mind them as it works for me but it isn’t technically right. My intarsia knits go inside a frame so the back isn’t seen, so for me it doesn’t matter that I do have floats, I also quite like the zigzag effect that a lot of my floats have created. However I think if I was making clothes or something that could be stretched I definitely wouldn’t use my float method as when stretched there is a slight gap between colours which isn’t apparent if you have knitted intarsia correctly.

· Use the sinkers provided – my intarsia carriage was brought as a Christmas present and it came with a few missing parts/accessories. Luckily after posting about it on Instagram I was recommended to ask on the knitting machine sales UK Facebook page (if you’re not joined definitely search it and ask to join, it’s great for if you need any spare parts or tools) and ask there if anyone had spare of the parts I was missing. Luckily a lovely lady on there was able to help me out and send me one of the parts I was missing, she also told me I didn’t need to other part which was a needle/threader used to thread the sinkers. However I did need that threader, I use very thick yarn so it wouldn’t thread through its self and I couldn’t use a normal needle I needed the curved one. So if you have these two parts make sure you use them as the sinkers help weigh down/tension the yarn. As you wont thread up your yarn the usual way the yarn will come from the floor so the sinkers are a way to tension the yarn. But without the threader i couldn't use the sinkers.

· Weigh down the yarn – if like me you can’t use the sinkers make sure that you still tension the yarn, the way I did this was just to hold the yarn as I run the carriage across, don’t tightly hold the yarn so that it can’t move, I just let it run though my fingers but still hold it as to begin with I didn’t and I found that it caused the needles to drop stitches and when I tried to pick them back up the knitting was tight. There will be pictures of this below, to show you want I mean.

· Weights – this is more of a general tip always make sure that you use your weight to help your fabric. For me I like to use a cast on comb at the beginning but still use the smaller claw weights higher up the fabric to help support at the sides.

· Learn which yarn sits on top of the other – I tried to explain this before and it is probably better to see in the photos. This process that I’m going to explain works with both floats and no floats. (To explain colour 1=red, colour 2=blue colour 3 =yellow). First take the red yarn and place it over the needles required and let it hang/fall over the last needle needed. Then take the blue yarn and place it over the empty needle next one that was last covered in red yarn, (not the one that is actually red) make sure that the blue yarn hangs over the red. The red yarn should hang down and the blue yarn should lay across it/in front of it. Then drape the blue yarn across the needles required and let it hang off the last needle. Next take the yellow yarn to cover the next set of needles, making sure that its sits on the needle next to the blue yarn and it crosses over its hanging blue yarn.

· Square paper – for me this is essential for drawing out the designs that you want to knit. I had this paper for when I did weave at university but I found it helpful for when I was planning out my punch cards and found it helpfully again for these designs. it can require some maths and be complex at time, but it is worth it for helping to map out patterns.

· 1 needle per square – with the square paper I like to use 1 square to represent 1 row/needle. This way you can really single out which needles needle to be which colours. When I first did an intarsia letter I originally planned out the pattern by splitting the letter into 1cm squares as I had already worked ouy how big I needed the fabric to be in cm and how that correlated with how many rows/needles needed for knitting. As you can see below this didn’t work for me by using 1cm squares it created this boxy effect where as I wanted more of a line. You can see this in the pictures below. After this fail I went back to the drawing board and decided to do I square to symbolise one needle and this worked so much better.

· Label your drawn out design – after I had figured out the whole 1 square equal one needle I then decided to write the needle number needed on the outside of the design. By doing this it make it easier for me to be able to see when which colours start and end per row based on the number needle that was written. I know that might not make sense so please look at the photos at the end.

· Don’t rush – I have found this isn’t a quick process, yes once you get the hang of it/rhythm you can speed up but it’s key to take your time. This isn’t like a punch card pattern where the machine does the work of selecting the needles; you have to do that yourself. Take your time to check which needles need to be which colours per row. I have tried to rush or not paid attention and made mistakes.

· Don’t give up – you’re not going to get your first pattern to work out first time, if you do I’m jealous it took me a really long time to draw out all the letters of the alphabet and I often had to redraw them to make sure that they looked and knitted right. I also had to work out how to get the thickness of vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines to be the same width. Yes it can take time but once you’ve got it/understand it, it might help you with future patterns. The drawings were the main reason that it took me so long to get my latest item on Etsy and for such a long blog break. Its ok if your design didn’t work out, mine definitely didn’t, just take a step back and reassess what you did and where you think you can go next/how to fix it.

· Trial and error – just like all knitting it is just about trial and error, it is the best way the learn, although hopefully because I have told you my mistakes you won’t have so many trial and errors. Since finishing uni I have learnt so much about knitting and taught myself so much, I feel like the more you do the more you understand things. For example I feel like I’m really in tune with my machine, as I use it most days I’m finding that I am really getting to know my machine, and spot any strange noises and usually able to diagnose and fix it myself.

· If all else fails you can just google it or YouTube, I’m sure that there will be some website or video to show you how to do it.

I’m sorry if this blog isn’t what you wanted that is if you wanted me to tell you how to knit intarsia. For me I am no expert so I don’t feel like it is my place to teach you how to do it, if I’m honest I just taught myself and made it up as went along. Which is evident in the fact that I have been told my intarsia is wrong. However I think that that is the beauty of knitting, you can knit what you want and do it how you want to and along the way you will come across what I like to call happy accidents. It doesn’t matter what or how you knit as long as it works for you. That is also the beauty of social media and Instagram, thankfully with the help of two lovely people I now know that what I thought I was knitting was in fact technically not correct and by looking back at my work I now know where I went wrong and how to fix it/do it properly. If any of those two people who informed me are reading this thank you.

Anyway I think I have written too much now so if you have made it this far then thank you and I hope if you are a knitter and haven’t tried intarsia before or are struggling with doing intarsia I hope that this blog post can help in some way and that you get to learn from my mistakes. Keep scrolling for more photos at the end.

As always thank you so much for reading,

Love Karmann Jean.

Ps. I’m not too sure what the next blog post will be about but there will be one in two weeks.

My contacts/links:

· Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/KarmannJean or search Karmann Jean when on Etsy.

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karmannjean/?hl=en or serach @karmannjean or #karmannjean when on instagram.

· Email: karmannbenson@gmail.com

· Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/karmannjean4/ or search karmannjean when on facebook (no space in the name and it is a facebook page not a person).

The zigazg effect the my floats make.

The gaps that are created between the colours due to the floats.

Diagram of the tools needed.

Diagram of how my manual explains which yarn should sit over which.

My explanation of how to lay the yarns.

Here i am writing which needle is needed.

Example of how i have created my patterns on square paper and also edited them after the first trails failed.

Example of how i have changed by designs, after the original design failed.

How i initially started my designs - one square equal one cm.

My first every attempt at a letter - 1 sqaure = 1cm.

My first letter was a K for Karmann Jean and then my brother wanted me to do a C next for Cameron, which was too wide.

How i have edited my letters, it might not be obvious straight away, but the two bottom ones the diagonal lines are a lot thinner than the vertical lines, where as the top letter has been changed, so that they are more of a similar size.