Friday, February 29, 2008

Jester Hat: Fruit of the Bobbins


Jester is the intarsia hat that I knit as a sample for KnitWhits. The hat will be felted into its final form before it is displayed.

This is a fun hat to make and a good way to practice your intarsia technique.



I used bobbins to keep an ample length of each color dangling as I knit.






It looks confusing at first, but it's actually much easier to detangle than if I had sixteen balls of yarn attached to my work.







To avoid holes when changing colors, I flipped one color over the next, twisting the two strands one time. (Since this hat will eventually be felted, small holes are not a big deal.) The yarn is not carried across the
work.




This is different than two-handed fair isle, where each hand is controlling a separate color and both yarns are carried all the way across the work. I'll post another sample hat soon that uses the fair isle technique.



3 comments:

z's momma said...

What a cute hat! And that's beautiful intarsia work (I love how the wrong side looks beautiful too).

knitseashore said...

Thank you for posting about this technique. I hope someday to make those beautiful floral sweaters and had wondered about having so many bobbins. But it seems to work out just fine. Is there a trick for knowing how much yarn to put on the bobbin for each area?

OceanKnitter said...

No real trick for winding the yarn onto the bobbins. I just wind as many yards as will fit comfortably. With wool, it's easy to spit-splice another few yards, if needed.