these simple, stretchy legwarmers have 1x3 ribbing most of the way around, with a line of solid intarsia hearts up the sides.

the intarsia sections are knitted flat-but-joined, so when you get to the end of a row you’ll wrap the yarn once, turn the work, and go back the way you came on the wrong side. when you get back around to the end of the row, you’ll combine the wrap with your last stitch, make a new wrap, turn the work, and go back the other way on the right side. i think of it as “seaming as i go,” and find it helps to put the wrap on the wrong side of my marker so that i don’t accidentally knit past it.

this means that the “end of the row” moves around according to the shape of the intarsia section, because it’s always at the color change. this is accomplished by either knitting a stitch past the previous end of row, or turning the work a stitch early, and dealing with the previous row’s yarnover towards the end of the next row.

if you’re not familiar with intarsia, the basic idea is that every block of color keeps to itself, with no stranding or overlaps, but they’re locked together by twisting the yarns over each other each time you switch colors. also, every time you change colors in a row, you need to have a separate source of yarn. so even though the heart looks like one solid shape, at the top where it goes to two humps there are actually two sources of CC and two sources of MC.