My first foray into the world of Intarsia

It's been a few days since I had any crochet news - I am still recovering from an impromptu family 'holiday' to Chessington World of Adventures. It was a full on couple of days in which I did more walking than I've done in a very long time, drank more Cola than I thought humanly possible, and got absolutely no crochet done whatsoever! Now I am catching up on laundry, resting my aching muscles, and hoping our bank account recovers quickly! :D It was worth it though. Look how happy he is!



Since getting back, I had my first attempt at Intarsia. I have decided - I hate intarsia. I was watching the tutorial videos linked in the Star Wars blanket pattern by Ahooka, (last mentioned here) and I noticed that the edges of the motif always have little 'bites' out of them if you use single crochet intarsia. I hate it. I would like a smoother edge, similar to what you get with a C2C blanket. So I tried my first design for the blanket in the C2C style... I got about one third of the way up the edge of the motif before realising that this was impractical - The square would work up to be about 45 cm long on each edge!! That's fine if you're only doing a few designs, but my partner has expressly told me - "As many designs as possible". Using C2C and a 4mm hook, the blanket would be at least 3 metres along it's shortest edge. While it would be a lovely snuggly blanket, it's really too big! So then I tried double crochet intarsia. This made the square smaller than the C2C did, but it was still almost 30 cm along each edge. Still too big. And so I had to resign myself to single crochet intarsia. And I hate it.



I probably didn't start with the easiest pattern for my first try - the number of colour changes along a row gets to be quite high in some places. I think at one point I was working with six balls of grey and six balls of black, all at once! And I didn't do a very good job of keeping the balls separated, so the strings all got tangled up towards the end and I got quite frustrated. But the tutorial said to start with a pattern that only used two colours, just to get the hang of the colour changes at first. I don't think I've done too badly for my first time. It helped to have a symmetrical pattern, so that it didn't really matter which direction I read the pattern. I do need to get the hang of reading the pattern in the right direction for future squares though. My Jabba will come out a bit squiffy looking if I don't get the hang of it!

At least you can sort of tell what it's supposed to be....right?