I want to knit a scarf with squares of two alternating colors, like a checkerboard. I would use stockinnette stitch and I would be knitting flat. What knitting style would be best for transitioning between the different colored squares: fair isle, intarsa, or mosaic, or something else?
Fair isle and intarsia have some problems when making a scarf:
- fair isle will create a quite ugly wrong side that will be visible
- intarsia will give you a lot of yarn balls to handle, especially if you have a bit more checker squares than just a couple
I have not done mosaic, so I edited this post and took away my assumptions. Someone with knowledge about mosaic knitting has to comment about it.
Have you considered double knitting? With double knitting you will have a two sided stockinette and each side is the others inverse, which is OK for a checker pattern.
1 Like
Another method to avoid having the messy back of the work on view, besides double knitting, (which would be quite time consuming, especially for a scarf - it’s doable, but you need to take into consideration how thick it will be and how soon you want it done!) is to knit the scarf twice as wide as you wanted it then seam it. I’d recommend using yarn on the lighter side though so it’s not too thick when folded over.
As for the colour changing, if it were me I’d carry the floats and do a little twist when changing colours. Probably not the best method for black and white, might not be so bad for other colour combos.
1 Like
I’m not really experienced in intarsia, but…
couldn’t you strand yarn between the corners of the checks each time you started a new row of checks? then you’d just have a few short strands between corner stitches. and you would only need one ball per column of checks, rather than one for every single check, and only have that number of ends to weave in at each end of the scarf. if you planned it out well i could see that working, though you’d still have to strand some longer strands vertically up the edges somehow.
maybe i’m missing something though. and still, neither intarsia nor stranded color work are particularly reversible so you’d still have to solve that problem–unless of course you don’t care… i have seen some non-reversible scarves…
you could also do a tubular scarf in the round with stranded colorwork if you like circular knitting. it would be similar effect as double knitting, but to my mind simpler and easier.
otherwise, you could knit each check separately and sew them together using a reversible stitch, even perhaps using the tails to sew up somehow. though to me that sounds very laborious, if you enjoy sewing it might look cool.
1 Like