Intarsia

Intarsia is a knitting colour work technique. It differs from fairisle in two main way - number of colours per row and floats. In fairisle, we are only able to knit with two colours per row as both yarns are threaded into the carriage and when a colour is not being knit it is carried across the back of the work. this creates floats. With intarsia. there is only one "active" colour on any given stitch, and yarn is not carried across the back of the work meaning that we can knit with as many colours per row as we like and there will be no floats.

used to create patterns with multiple colours and . This means that we can create swatches with more than two colour per row, unlike in fairisle. Another difference to fairisle, is that there is only one "active" colour on any given stitch, and yarn is not carried across the back of the work; eliminating any floats.

This swatch is knitted with fairisle, leaving many floats across the back.

Intarsia eliminates these floats, giving a neater reverse side

Knitting Intarsia

In order to knit intarsia, we have to use an alternate carriage, pictured below.

We also don't

The Intarsia Carriage is an alternate carriage for the machine that allows multiple colours to be used in a single row, without having floats along the back like in Fair Isle. It produces large blocks of colour (if you want to use fine detail, Fair Isle is normally a better bet), though requires considerably more manual effort than the digital fair isle. Below is an image of the intarsia carriage, and a sample of knit made using it.