Having Cuddly Hubby home has been fantastic! We are still unpacking. Essentially, we've combined two households. The theme in our home right now is abundance. Too many pillows. An extra bed. Boxes of coat hangers. Books! (There is a younger generation whose reading collection is entirely digital. They shall never know what it was to curse your literacy every time you moved.) Extra bottles of personal care products and cleaning supplies. If you have a bottle of something and a spare in each household, when you combine households you now have one active bottle and three spares. Cupboards are not designed for this. Eating ice cream every evening has been a requirement because, I kid you not, we had too much high-quality ice cream (Ben & Jerry's, Jeni's, Daddy O'Brien's) and were running out of room in the freezer. These are the sorts of problems I am delighted to have. I haven't had much time for crafting. Instead I'm mostly cleaning, organizing, sorting, donating, recycling, and repairing.
I did, however, manage to fit some classes into my schedule. If I don't have time to craft, I'll at least make time to learn!
At South Carolina Knit Inn I took Barbara Bensons' "Mosaic and Lace" class. I have Barbara's Mosaic and Lace book. Barbara was a member of Atlanta Knitting Guild before she moved out of the metropolitan area. I took the class mostly because I wanted to be able to say I learned the technique from the person who developed it. Also, sometimes taking a class forces me to spend a few hours with a technique I've been meaning to explore but never seem to find time to sit down and try.
Barbara is an excellent teacher. She has worked out a swatch for the class that takes you through all the basic and some of the non-basic moves in mosaic and lace knitting. This technique involves not just holes but color. Decreases affect where colors begin and end. The little strings in my swatch are attached to tags that describe what Barbara was demonstrating in each of those rows. I can see why Barbara has continued to explore the potential of this technique, as there is a great deal to survey.
I also signed up for Kim McBrien Evans' "Boob Camp (Sleepover Edition)" class at STITCHES at Home. This was a four-session class over two weekends. Fitting a sweater over a full bust is not one of my challenges. However, there are students who ask me questions about this. And I would like to be able to design sweater patterns in a size-inclusive way. Plus, Kim has an intriguing vertical bust dart method that doesn't interfere with a stitch pattern or stripes the way horizontal short-row bust darts can.
Kim's class was among the best I have ever taken on fit and sweater design. The first session covered measuring yourself accurately. Subsequent sessions discussed both types of bust darts as well as how sweater shape and sleeve type affect placement. There were lots of style and design questions as well, so plenty of discussion of how to create garments that are flattering on your body, whatever that body might be. Empowering!
We spent time doing the math. If these are the measurements, then these are
the stitches and rows, then here's what the shaping looks like, then this is
what the instructions should say. The class was technical. Fortunately,
STITCHES records their classes and leaves them available for a couple weeks.
Although it was eight hours of instruction, I went back and re-watched the
entire thing, double-checking my notes as I went. I wanted to ensure I fully
understood the material and felt I could apply it to my knitting as well as my
students' knitting.
In fact, Kim's class was so good, I signed up for "Out on a Limb" which she taught at Virtual Vogue Knitting LIVE! In that class, Kim covered how to shape armholes. I have notes from that class as well. The downside of the Vogue class was that it was well-attended and not recorded. We were a bit pressed for time on covering all the material and answering questions. Still, I'm very happy I took it.
Thus, I've taken three excellent classes this month from instructors I
highly recommend. Abundance, indeed!
Comments