I've been neglecting a lot of my other knitting projects lately in favor of working on the baby blanket and making little critters, but my brother reminded me that he really wants his scarf, so I dedicated this weekend to working on it. To refresh your memory, the scarf is an intarsia project that is going to say "smokinskip" on it. I had made some pretty good progress on it, but this weekend I decided the M looked messed up so I frogged it back to the beginning of the M and started over. Yuck.
When I knit the S, I knit the piece flat and wrapped the stitches at the sides to keep it looking like it was knit in the round, and I stranded the yarn behind the S, catching it every few stitches to keep from having long floats in the back. This produced kind of a bumpy finished product, which I didn't like (but didn't hate enough to rip out), so I tried a new method with the M.
I knit the M completely in the round and started a new strand of purple yarn with each row - weaving the ends into the black as I knit, leading up to the color block and after the color block. Then I just stranded the black yarn behind in one big long float. This produced a much nicer looking intarsia block, but I'm a little worried about the long-term consequences of having those giant floats in the back...
Here is a close-up of the S compared to the M:
Here is a picture of the back of the work: On the bottom is the S, all neat and tidy, and on the top is the M, pretty damn crazy looking....
I am starting on the O now and doing it the same way as the M, but I'm thinking about stopping and doing a test block to see what happens. If the S gets de-bumpied in the blocking process, I will probably go back to doing it that way (or some variation thereof). I will also get a chance to see how the floats are going to behave after blocking on the M, which should be interesting.
Yes, I think that is what I will do before I go any further....Labels: intarsia, smokinskip scarf
