Knitting with multiple balls of yarn

Hi everyone. I found this amazing 80s Kaffe Fassett book in a charity shop, and really want to have a go at one of his super colourful patterns. I’ve selected one (see pic below), but I’ve never knitted with this many colours before so I’m struggling to work out which technique to use. I’ve learned all my knitting off YouTube but I really need some advice on how to approach this so that I know which techniques I need to learn!

My main starting question is: would you do intarsia or fair isle (or something else??) on this?

Thanks in advance!

Rachel

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Fabulous find! I’m maybe not the best person to respond but I would do a combination and weave in ends as I worked. On the rows with the coloured “flames” I’d certainly use a bobbin for each, and one continuous strand for the top part of those sections, what I’d call the background colour. Looks like you have 4 rows of different single colours in between each of those “flame” sections.

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I’m not the best person to respond either! What a challenge though! Is it worked flat or in the round as this makes a difference if you need to carry yarn or have a bobbin yarn waiting in the right place for you to pick up.
I’ve seen clever methods of carrying bobbin yarn for intarsia across a section for working in the round which, like many things, looks complicated but once done a few times probably turns out to be easier than it looks. It might be a technique to have a look at if you are considering working in the round.

If you have many balls or bobbins being used at once my tip is to be really conscious of which way you turn the work if working flat. The first turn crosses all the yarns over but instead of moving and untangling them all, if you just make sure you turn in the opposite direction at the end of the next row they magically untangle…you have to have a bit of faith in it!

Having boxes or bags each ball can sit in and move freely without rolling around is another tip.
And smaller bobbins of colour can be prevented from unravelling by fastening the yarn with a removable stitch marker, the ones like a blunt safety pin.

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Wow, like so many Kaffe Fassett patterns, that is a stunner. Not an easy project by any means.

The Ravelry tags indicate both stranded and intarsia. Fortunately it’s knit in pieces which simplifies the techniques. You can see the blocks of color which will be worked with stranding (the teeth), then those colors twisted with a new set (as intarsia) for more stranding. It’ll take some thinking before working a section and lots of organization. For the most part the sections will need fairly small bobbins or balls of a color.

It’ll be great to see this as you progress and finished, of course.

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Thanks @Shintoga @Creations @salmonmac ! Really helpful - I will do as suggested. I did read something elsewhere online suggesting that bobbins with Kaffe Fassett can be a nightmare due to the sheer number of them, so someone was suggesting just cutting 2-foot lengths so you can untangle with your fingers as you go, and just rejoining the same colour of you run out of any colour yarn too soon. But the flipping method sounds like a good antidote so I will experiment with both! I think on a close inspection I can see that he’s only working with 3-4 colours at a time in a section, which makes this slightly more manageable than the 12 balls I’ve got sitting in front of me…

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4 colours sounds manageable. I’ve knky done a swatch with 4 at once but the careful flipping one way then the other worked great for me on that.

Here’s an interesting article though, about ditching bobbins and embracing the tangle.

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