The Beginner’s Guide to Intarsia Crochet: Free Crochet Tutorial

Have you looked at all of the beautiful crochet color work out there, but don’t know how to do it or are even scared to try? Well, you’ve come to the right place! Today, I am going to teach you all about how to do intarsia crochet, one of the crochet color work techniques that you can use to do all types of crochet patterns. This crochet tutorial is great for beginners and will walk you through steps like how to change colors, do flat intarsia crochet, and use two or more colors in your project.

What Is Intarsia Crochet? The Definition

Before we get started, I bet you’re wondering what exactly is intarsia crochet? Intarsia crochet is a crochet color work technique that allows you to crochet with two or more colors in your row and throughout your crochet pattern. If you’ve ever seen a crochet pattern that uses multiple colors to create a picture or graphic, then it probably used intarsia crochet! A lot of my patterns use this technique or tapestry crochet, which is another crochet color work technique. Check out my Beginner’s Guide to Tapestry Crochet here!

Intarsia Crochet Tips

Before you start doing intarsia crochet, there are a few things to know! Here are some of my intarsia crochet tips:

1. Breathe – A lot of people have shared their fears about doing color work, and I’m here to help make sure it’s as easy as possible. The idea of working with more than one color can feel intimidating, but trust me it’s so much fun and you’ll pick it up in no time! Just take a breath, and let yourself have fun jumping into this new color work adventure.
2. Bobbins – As you do intarsia crochet, bobbins will be your friend. Bobbins are segments of yarn wound into a ball or around something like a clothespin. You create these to help make it so you don’t have to carry so much yarn. You’ll space them apart at the points of the pattern where you switch colors, so that you won’t have big loops of it in the back of your work. If you didn’t like the idea of carrying yarn with tapestry crochet, then you’re going to love how you don’t do that with intarsia crochet. 
3. Floats – Floats are the name for the strands of yarn that are carried behind your work. If you don’t have huge portions of one color before you switch to the second one, then when you switch colors you’ll have a strand of yarn on the back of the work. The tutorial shows you exactly what these look like. If you want to do bobbins instead, then you don’t have to use this technique often.
4. Secure it – One thing that I make sure to do when I’m doing floats on the back of my work, I will crochet a stitch around it so that it secures the float. That way I don’t have a huge piece of yarn draping in the back of my piece. Don’t want anything getting caught! I show how to do this in my tutorial.

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Need a Practice Pattern?

While you work through the tutorial below, you can follow along with my Pumpkin Coaster free crochet pattern that I have here available here on my blog! The tutorial uses this pattern to illustrate the different intarsia crochet stitches and techniques. It’s a great intarsia crochet beginner pattern. You can get the pattern at this link: Pumpkin Coaster Free Crochet Pattern

Intarsia Crochet Tutorial

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Intarsia Crochet Patterns

Now that you know how to do intarsia crochet, it’s time to put those new skills to use! Guess what? I have lots of patterns that can use this technique! Below are some of my favorites:

• Pumpkin Coaster Pattern
• May Flowers Blanket
• Kaleidoscope Quilt
• Falling Leaves Beanie
• Pinewood Pillow
• Llama Wall Hanging

I hope this tutorial was helpful for you and opened up a whole new world of crochet color work and intarsia crochet patterns for you! If you make anything with intarsia crochet, I’d love to see it! Tag me on Instagram and Facebook @eclairemakery, and I’ll share it.

Happy stitching!

~Claire

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