Wednesday, May 24, 2006

"A" is for Intarsia

Dear Cynthia,

Though I like the look of intarsia work......I had forgotten the part about all of the "butterflies" hanging from the back. This is working out just fine, but I don't think I'd want many more than the five strands I'm working with. I used the technique from the Spring 2006 Interweave for estimating the amount of yarn to put into each "butterfly" -- determine the number of stitches which are going to be made with the strand, and then wrap the yarn around the needle that many times loosely. (Of course, I'm a doubter, so I added significant extra "just in case"...)

Anyway, The Blue Blog's idea for printing out knitters' graph paper and then printing a letter onto the same sheet of paper worked like a charm. I did a quick search on "knitters graph paper", input my exact gauge, and presto, it printed out a page, almost exactly to scale 1:1 (though I have to say, a little bit scant, but for this it really doesn't matter much). Then, I found a font in Word which I liked, printed off a letter of size huge (something like 650, or maybe 400??). If I was to do it again, the only thing I'd do differently is to print the letter in a much lighter shade than black, so that I could see the graph paper lines behind it...

Well, it's rainy here today, and my three-year-old got up in the middle of the night to go potty and was dry this morning, so we're going to celebrate by making chocolate chip scones.

Warm regards,
Laura (YarnThrower)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know exactly what you mean about the butterflies. I've done intarsia with >5 butterflies and some times I think I spent more time untangling the things than knitting the sweater. Your sweater looks good.

sheep#100 said...

My alpaca prize arrived. Thank you.

There was a card with a picture of a frog on it. Is this someone's idea of funny?

:o)

Designated Knitter said...

I'm glad it got there!!

I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to understand the "funny" part! I got to the UPS store to send it off, and realized that, as usual, I hadn't planned ahead for a note or anything, so I grabbed a card that looked cute....which happened to have a frog on it! Your comment was puzzling to me for HOURS, and finally last night....frogging...duh!!

Hope you enjoy the yarn, and that no frogging occurs!