Intarsia is a crafting technique that juxtaposes individual blocks within a single design unit. The term 'intarsia' comes from the Latin word 'interserere' meaning "to insert". Originally, intarsia was developed as a woodworking technique in Siena, Italy in the 13th century. Inlays of ivory or wood were inserted into wooden wall murals, tabletops and other furniture.
Today, intarsia is uses different types of wood, allowing the natural grain patterns and colors to create the values in the pattern. Each piece of wood is individually cut, shaped, and sanded before being assembled into the main design. Sometimes, areas of the pattern are raised to create more depth. Finally, a layer of finish is applied to complete the project.
Marble intarsia has colored stones inlaid in white or black marble. This method gained popularity in the 15th to 17th centuries in Florence and Naples, where it was used to create ornate and complex flooring.
Nowadays, intarsia is also a popular knitting technique used to create patterns with multiple colors. Fields of different colors and materials appear to be inlaid in one another, but are in fact all separate pieces, fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Unlike other multicolor techniques, there is only one "active" color on any given stitch, and yarn is not carried across the back of the work. A separate piece of yarn is used for each of the areas of color, land linked together while working across the row. This frequently leads to a vast number of pieces of yarn dangling from the work, and loose ends are woven in at the end. Intarsia is most often worked flat, rather than in the round. However, it is possible to knit intarsia in circular knitting using particular techniques.
Common examples of intarsia include sweaters with large, solid-colour features like fruits, flowers, or geometric shapes. Argyle socks and sweaters are normally done in intarsia, although the thin diagonal lines are often overlaid in a later step, using Swiss darning or sometimes just a simple backstitch.
Knitting in intarsia theoretically requires no additional skills beyond being generally comfortable with the basic knit and purl stitches. Materials required include multiple colors of yarn, standard needles, and bobbins. Bobbins serve to contain the inactive yarn and help keep it from getting tangled. The simplest intarsia pattern is for straight vertical stripes. After the first row, the pattern is continued by always working each stitch in the same color as the previous row, changing colors at the exact same point in each row. To make more elaborate patterns, one can let this color boundary drift from row to row, changing colors a few stitches
earlier or later each time.
Intarsia patterns are usually given as charts that look like needlepoint patterns.
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