For anyone interested in colour work who hasn’t seen this yet. Knit Lab have some very interesting stranded knitting designs available to buy. I have just bought the Experimental / Ornamental set which combine stranded knitting with increases and decreases to bend the pattern lines. I am looking forward to having a play with these.
On Saturday the 4th of October I had the pleasure of helping Jill Brownjohn and Rosie Sykes run a workshop on the Patchwork Knitting of Horst Schulz.
We had 11 participants, a mixture of beginners and those who had been to the workshop Rosie led last year, and the ones Horst taught a few years ago. It was a really nice number, and having three of us doing the teaching meant that we could be running several different things at the same time, giving people a choice of what they would like to try.
Here are some of the early arrivals before we got started (as with all the other pictures, click to see a bigger version).
I’m afraid a lot of my photos are a bit on the blurry side, the weather was rather dark and grey outside – a great day for being inside and doing lots of knitting. So here is Rosie talking at the start of the day.
We covered a variety of the modular shapes used by Horst Schulz, and also various of his joining techniques. Jill also talked about combining machine knitting with modular knitting, and I talked about shaping within modules, using the techniques I used in my Patchwork Sweater (I really must come up with a better name for it).
Here is Jill, showing her bag made by machine knitting strips and then joining them using one of Horst’s techniques.
And here Jill is again, talking about a waistcoat she is part way through working.
As well as showing the modular knitting we had been working on, we were fortunate enough to be able to show to everyone some pieces made by the other workshop participants – some of whom are very prolific! This is from Patricia Werner’s Dazzling Knits
It was wonderful to see the different directions everyone had taken using the same basic ideas. One of the things I love about going to knitting groups and workshops is to see the creativity of all the participants, and to see the fantastic range of things produced when everyone is starting from the same basic starting point. Everyone has different tastes and interests and sees things slightly differently, and it is such a delight to see so many different approaches and what everyone brings to the process.
Here everyone is winding down at the end of the day and just finishing things off in time to pack up.
I had a really great time, and hope that all of the other participants had as much fun as I did. It was wonderful to spend a day with so many enthusiastic and talented knitters. I had such a fantastic time that I was totally exhausted when I got home and slept for 13 hours that night! I am looking forward to the next meet-up and to see what everyone has been making.
On a completely unrelated note, I have become completely addicted to Fantastic Contraption over the weekend. Marvelous for all you armchair engineers 🙂
It has been an exciting few weeks on the knitting front here, and I’m afraid I have suffered from the problem that when you are busy doing things the time to write about them just seems to disappear, or I am available but just too tired to make any sense. Anyway, things are a little quieter now (we wont mention the City and Guilds homework that I am still behind on) so I will do a spot of catching up. I am going to try and keep things in the order that they happened, otherwise I will be confused (it doesn’t take much).
I have been composing this post for some time (I told you I was a little slow) and was all ready to tell you all about the progress on my Kool Aid socks. They are becoming quite well travelled, although sometimes they don’t make it out of the bag. However, on Sunday I began to have worries about whether I would have enough yarn, and when I weighed what was left discovered that I had knitted exactly half of my ball. Unfortunately I am only half way down the foot of the first sock. Oh blast!
I haven’t been doing too well with these socks, since they are on their second incarnation already. Oh well, at least it gives me a chance to practice the cast on and a slightly different heel again. The Supercook socks use the same base yarn, but I used 2.5mm needles, and had plenty of yarn left over. I was slightly concerned that as it is quite a fine yarn I would get a more hard-wearing sock if I went down a needle size or two. So I started the Kool Aid socks on 2mm needles – I think that may have been a step too far. This time I think I will try 2.25mm needles. I haven’t actually undone them yet. I was concerned that I would undo them in a fit of pique and then think of something I should have measured which would be useful for the re-knit. I will bite the bullet soon.
Anyway, here is a picture of the sock disporting itself at the old alma mater before its untimely demise.
On a more chirpy note, my stitch samples for City and Guilds class were all fine, so I am inching my way slightly closer towards finishing. I have been playing with potential button holes, and think I have just about made a decision. Soon I will be on to the even trickier decision of buttons themselves.
On a completely un-related note, The case of the disappearing teaspoons: a longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute gave me a good chortle today.
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