Intarsia Knitting Tips & Techniques

Intarsia (also sometimes called picture knitting) is a technique used in one of our newest patterns from the Impressionist Collection: the Faded Flare Wrap by Heidi Gustad. This technique allows you to create areas of colour in any shape in your knitting.

The Faded Flare Wrap uses vivid, contrasting colours, intarsia, and fading between colours to paint a vivid picture with yarn. If you’ve never knit intarsia before, now is the time to start! Today, we’ll share some of our favourite tutorials and tips to help you successfully master this technique. 

As mentioned in the video above, you’ll need to make smaller balls of yarn to work the colour sections:

The key to successful Intarsia knitting is to interlock the strands with each other as you change colour to avoid gaps. Following the swatch chart found here on Heidi’s blog, we’ve knitted the first row of the Intarsia pattern:

When changing colors, there is a three-step method for crossing the strands to reduce gaps; the key is to bring the colour you just finished working with to the left, then bring the new colour up from underneath. 

It’s really that simple! The only tricky part is managing all of those yarn tails, but the more you practice, the easier it gets (we promise!). Once your swatch is done, the wrong side of your swatch will look something like this:

The important thing is to make sure that any gaps are closed up as you weave in your yarn tails, so pay special attention to those areas. You can refer to our tutorial on using duplicate stitch to weave in yarn ends, or check out this tutorial on the Hands Occupied blog. 

We can’t wait to see your finished Faded Flare Wraps and other Intarsia projects using our yarns! Please share them with us using the #ZenYarnGarden hashtag on Instagram, and follow @zenyarngarden to see more of our products and projects.

Like this post? Pin it!