Knitter’s Toolbox: The Bobbin

When knitting with the intarsia method, you’re knitting only a few stitches out of the many in a different color. In complex intarsia, you’re knitting a lot of those few stitches, and with a lot of colors. My Phoenix Jacket currently has 29 bobbins and six skeins attached. When you haven’t knitted with that many bobbins all going at once before, you don’t realize that the style of bobbin means a great deal. With the wrong style of bobbin, your bobbins begin to look a little like this after three rows of knitting:

The rows also get impossibly time-consuming to knit, because each time you come to a new bobbin, it’s gotten tangled in the yarns surrounding it… or it has become unsecured and has unwrapped down to the floor, not only wrapping around other bobbins, but the skeins strategically situated on the floor. After three rows of knitting, you stop and untangle the mess. It looks a little better, but it promises to become a headache the minute you pick it up again:

Yeah, that doesn’t look very orderly to me either. 29 bobbins in less than 100 stitches of knitting gets a bit crowded. Those bobbins that are squares or have odd angles like to catch especially. The easiest time I’ve had is with the round ones. What are those, you ask? Excellent, excellent question.

They’re Bryson’s EZ Bobbins. The size small comes in packs of 10. They’re plastic, disc-shaped like a sewing machine’s bobbin, but it goes a step further. It has a flexible plastic “cap” that folds down and locks the yarn onto the bobbin. Even wrapped two or three times, it won’t unwrap.

I went out and bought 30 more of them — everything the store had in stock. My favorite part about them? They lock together, allowing you to force them to lay in a neat nice row, in the order in which they need to be worked. This is what my knitting looks like now:

Just thinking about it makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

…

Let’s just not mention the ends that need to be woven in, yeah?