Knitting with 3 colors

From “Weekend Knitting” I am attempting the Backgammon Board. It begins,
"The board is worked in St st, using separate yarn butterflies or yarn bobbins for the different-colored points, and carrying the background color behind from edge to edge. Secure the floats of the background color behind the points by twisting the colors around each other every 2-3 sts."
Does this make sense to anyone?

Absolutely, and once you do it, you’ll get the idea. The thing with working with more than one color (and not stripes) is that you can get tails or loops hanging in the back of your work and this is bad for 2 reasons: you can snag it when you wear it, or in this case, use it, and it will affect the tension of the other other yarns where they are actually knit in. See the big spaces of red between the blue and gold “points”? If you don’t carry the yarn in back, you’ll get big loops/tails going on between them. So-- you carry it in the back like this: every 3 stitches, twist the unused colors around each other behind the work to catch them to avoid these loops/tails forming. Look at the bottom of this page for a drawing of how stranding is done: http://www.vogueknitting.com/node/304 .

So this means these twists show up in the back and not the front? Does all this mean I’m not doing the intarsia with a bunch of tails to weave in? Isn’t this kind of like dropping a stitch and it will all come apart?

Go to this site, and in the first paragraph, click where it says “watch Ann demonstrate the technique here.” You’ll see a great set of videos that demonstrate how to knit with two colors (per row) without floats in the back.

Actually, you’re going to do both (intarsia and stranding). You make up 24 bobbins for the intarsia piece of it, 12 in the denim and 12 in the pistachio. But the problem is that the colors come into the rows farther along than your yarn is, and that’s why you need to strand. Meaning this:

Look at the chart on pg 52, the very first (bottom) row. You’ve already knit 6 garter rows in poppy. Now for the first color row-- they want you to knit 3 sts in poppy in garter. Now, attach the denim and knit 3 sts. Before you knit the next 2 in denim, BEHIND YOUR WORK, cross over/wrap/twist/whatever the waiting poppy yarn with the denim yarn. Now knit those last 2 sts in denim. Now you have a bunch of sts in poppy. But see how when you come back on the next row that the denim comes in 5 sts earlier, so that you’ll have 10 sts in denim in that row? So-- knit the first 3 sts of that bunch of poppy. Now cross over/wrap/twist/whatever the denim with the poppy, BEHIND YOUR WORK. Now knit 2 more sts of poppy, and then wrap/twist/whatever again. Then just keep going in poppy until you come to the pistachio on that line. Now when you come back on the next row, your denim will be right where you want it and you’ll be able to pick it right up.

This won’t be the cause of dropped sts (I’m not saying there’s nothing else that will cause you to, like the cat jumping up on your lap:)). Oh, and yes, afterwards, you will weave in the ends for the bobbins from the 24 points.