Following my modest triumph with cable stitch, I decided to go for broke and try a spot of intarsia. I was doing one of my regular trawls of Folksy for knitting goodies when I spied this delightful kit for a knitted and felted pencil case from Knitting Sundae.
I've made a felted pencil case before, but the challenge here was that the Neapolitan ice cream cone motif was done using intarsia. It was perfect because, although five colours was challenging, the design was quite small and all the mistakes would be covered over by the magic of felting.
I should say that the kit was a real bargain at £6 as it included a whole ball of Sirdar Peru plus small quantities of the four other colours of yarn required to make the design. It came beautifully packaged in cellophane wrapped with some fab ice cream cone ribbon.
The pencil case was knitted on 7mm needles and the colour pattern booklet was nice and easy to follow. The stupidest thing I did was to attempt to use all five colours directly from the yarn balls. I wouldn't care but I had even purchased some knitting bobbins expressly for the purpose of keeping things tidy when doing intarsia.After some severe untangling, I got the four small sets of yarn tidily hung on yarn bobbins and used the Sirdar direct from each end of the ball.
I did try hard to twist my yarns when changing colours but I did have to fix a few holes with a needle and yarn at the end before felting. The pencil case was knitted as two pieces, which I sewed together with mattress stitch. I then felted the piece three times at 40 degrees in the washing machine to get it to a reasonable pencil case size.
The kit even included the zip, which I sewed to the sides of the pencil case using ordinary pink sewing thread. With knitted things, I do think it's nice to add a cotton lining for a bit of extra fanciness and structural integrity. I used some lovely pink spotty fabric from Fabric Rehab to whip up a simple lining on my sewing machine.
I sewed the lining into the pencil case by hand using the method from Bend-the-Rules Sewing by Amy Karol where you sew the lining to the zipper tape and not worry too much about the inner recesses of the corners.
To finish, I added a sweet little polymer clay ice cream cone charm from my stash as a zipper puller.
I really enjoyed this kit and I now feel like I could tackle some intarsia soon without the safety net of knowing I can hide all my mistakes in the washing machine...
Melx
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