Sunday, February 7, 2010

Intarsia. Not for the faint of heart.

Well. the baby raccoon hat is done, scary eyes and all. This was my first intarsia project - made my own chart and everything - see previous post. Mostly, intarsia is not hard - unless you have 7 bobbins of different sections of color on the same row all at one time. Knowing me, you might not be surprised that I did a complicated pattern for my first time out. I did cheat a little, however. The center nose stripe and the nose are done in duplicate stitch.

I might change the eyes to buttons, but the scary embroidered circles are growing on me. It is sized for a 9-12 month old. The ears are gathered and tied, and are possibly the sweetest part. And the whole thing is only 5.5" tall. That is a lot of detail on a teeny hat.

Lesson learned: though the technique of intarsia is fairly simple, your first project using it should be uncomplicated and larger for goodness sake. Seven bobbins on something only 37 stitches wide is ridiculous.

Cute, though, isn't it?

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