Mosaic

What started my fascination with the much maligned knitting technique, intarsia?

Sometime in the late 1990's I bought a used copy of Kaffe's Classics, a purchase influenced primarily by my desire for two patterns?the Foolish Virgins jacket and the Mosaic waistcoat?although almost every pattern appealed to me to some degree. Although, I had been knitting for awhile, I'd never seen Fassett's designs before and didn't know anything about intarsia, but I vowed that I would learn and make at least one of these sweaters. I was still several years away from being able to consider cutting holes in my knitting, and at the time it made more sense to me to knit a sweater out of hundreds of little scraps on yarn.

Mosaic appeared to be the easier design to me, so I figured I'd give that one a shot first. [It's really sweet how naive I was]. The design on this sweater is based on an ancient mosaic Fassett saw in Italy. Through use of shading and perspective, it appears to be composed of interlocking ribbons of color.

The first hurdle was finding the yarn. I was soon to find out that the yarn called for in the design, Rowan Donegal Lambswool Tweed, had been discontinued. [This was the first of many times that Rowan has broken my heart]. However, it hadn't been off the market long and was still not too difficult to come by with just a little persistence. I managed to compile all the original colors in Lambswool Tweed in a relatively short period of time and almost all at the original list price. I wonder how much more difficult and expensive it would be now.

But at the time I was lucky and dumb and still believed in miracles so all doors were open to me and all things were still possible. I bravely set out to knit my first intarsia sweater. I looked for what little I could find on the technique and didn't come up with much, but that didn't stop me. I found almost no information about how to weave in the ends, so at first, I didn't. I would just stop using one color and start using the next and would periodically go back and figure out my own solution. Eventually, I figured out a series of techniques for joining and weaving in ends, strictly through trial and error.

I got almost all the way done with the back before the thing happened that led to the great and rapid weight gain I've talked about before. Of all the sweaters in progress that would no longer fit my new super plus size frame, this was the one and upset me the most. The pattern was only written in one size and the chance that I would ever be able to locate enough additional yarn to increase the size anyway were dwindling. I shoved the whole thing in a box and forgot about it for a year.

But it was still lurking, waiting for me. When I was ready, it was one of my inspirations for losing weight. After I was sure it would fit me again, I dug it out of it's box and finished it in a surprisingly short amount of time. Well, almost finished it, I never did find buttons I was happy with.