My father introduced me to the concept of intarsia as a knitting technique. I had done other forms of colorwork in crochet, but I liked the idea of individual balls of yarn for each section of color, eliminating the need to carry unused colors underneath my stitches or stranded across the back of my work.
When I decided to adapt a cartoon image into an afghan for my son, I avoided visible yarn strands in the way that made sense to me, not realizing that the technique was anything unusual. Because it was an afghan, I did not want there to be a wrong side, so I hid the vertical strands of yarn inside the first stitch in a new color after each color change.
Although most crocheted colorwork relies…
