Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

Yesterday I showed you swatches from Gayle Roehm's "Challenging Stitches from Japanese Designs" class. Today I present the swatches from its sequel, "Even More Challenging Stitches from Japanese Designs." In this class, Gayle labeled the swatches with numbers instead of letters. Swatch 1 from "Even More Challenging Stitches from Japanese Designs"  This first swatch is a "basic" Japanese lace pattern -- that is, it has action on both right and wrong sides. Although it is a stockinette-based lace, the increases and decreases push the wales in different directions to create a surprising amount of movement and texture. Swatch 2 from "Even More Challenging Stitches from Japanese Designs" Gayle called swatch 2 a faux paisley. Like the dogwood lace swatch B in yesterday's post, the chart has large open area of white space that are disconcerting to the uninitiated. The top of each paisley also has a strange maneuver that i...

Last month I gave a short talk about Japanese knitting for Atlanta Knitting Guild. Pam is leading the guild on a knit-along incorporating techniques from around the world. Ideally we would have had either Gayle Roehm or Fleegle come talk to the guild about Japanese knitting. Since I had taken two of Gayle's classes, I filled in. This led me to pull out my notebook of class handouts. When I took that first class at STITCHES 2009 , I was not in the habit of keeping my swatches. Rather, I learned in class, ripped back, and reused the yarn. I also put all the handout pages in one page protector. Now I know better. Now I put each page in a separate protector and I put the swatch in with the page, so I can see what it was I did. After giving my presentation for AKG, I decided to knit the missing swatches and revisit what I had learned. If you have a chance to take a class with Gayle, I recommend it. Over the past five years I have gathered about half a dozen Japanese stitch dictionar...

Most weeks I follow the nightly news fairly closely. The last few weeks have been an exception, since I was traveling over the holiday. And this week I haven't followed too closely, as I've been catching up from being away for nineteen days as well making preparations for the upcoming end-of-year holidays. Like most Americans, I heard about the horrible mass shooting in San Bernardino on Wednesday. On Thursday, I skipped watching the evening news since it appeared the entire broadcast was still covering that story. And then this morning, my dear friend Andy sent me an e-mail. One of the people killed in Wednesday's massacre was someone I knew . In this picture of the speech team (scanned from my yearbook), my dear friend Andy (left), myself (center), and Hal (right) are leaning against the tree. Coach Phillips is on the far right, next to Hal. (If anyone knows whatever happened to Jim Phillips, Andy and I would both love to know. It may be a cliché that coaches make...