I need help! I am making a Christmas stocking (that is the easy part for me) but I am having alot of trouble changing my yarn to put an angel on the stocking. I did fine on the pattern I made on the top of the stocking with red and green yarn. Now I am using white, blue, and green (the background) to make an angel. Where I am switching colors I am having problems with it laying nice. 
Please, any advice?
Thanks,
Terri
When doing stranding it’s important to make sure the floats are not pulled too tight or you’ll have puckers.
It also helps to not let floats go longer than about 5 stitches.
Terri,
Are you using an intarsia technique, or is it stranded?
Please explain the intasia technique. Those are new words for me.
Thanks.
thanks. I will try being more careful of my tension and number of stitches. Does working in the round vs back and forth have a lot of affect on changing yarn/colors? I have made alot of hats “in the round” changing colors and never had this problem.
Intarsia is only used in flat knitting (there is some very esoteric way to do it in the round, but it is not commonly done). It is used to make color blocks or pictures. So I thought maybe you were doing it to make your angel. Say you were knitting the background in green and making a white angel with yellow hair and a peach face. You would knit across with your green to where the angel was and then drop the green and add a ball of white. Knit across the angel and drop the white and add a separate ball of the green on the other side. Then you purl back with the green to the angel, drop the green and pick up the waiting white and “draw” some more angel in. Work to where the green is waiting, drop the white and pick up the green at the other side. You then add in a ball of yellow or peach as needed in the same way.
You could also use duplicate stitch (a technique often used by knitters, that is kind of like an embroidery stitch, that fits right over the knit stitches and looks like it was knit in as you went) to work in some of the details.
Your other question about working in the round in stranded knitting…Yes, it can be easier to do in the round because you are always doing it on a knit row and from the front instead of having to purl and not being able to see what you are doing on the purl pass. Some people make steeked sweaters for that reason. A steek if you don’t know is usually made with a number of stitches that are added so that you can cut them to add armholes or create a cardigan from something that was knit round and round.
Actually you can do Intarsia in the round, it’s just a real pain in the errrr, donkey.