53

I am driving to “The Soo” (Sault Ste Marie), Michigan on Friday for 2 days of teaching.  This makes me happy!  I’m teaching “Spinning With Commercial Yarns” on Saturday, and “Shaping With Stitch Patterns” on Sunday.

The latter of those two workshops is a new one for me.  To prepare, I started knitting swatches in November.  And I couldn’t stop.  Well, I could stop, and I did stop, but only after I’d knitted 53 swatches.  Here’s what that looks like (yes, I'm still using the crappy camera, not the new one):

In the process of knitting all those swatches, I immersed myself in the nature of knitted fabrics.  I played with several stitch patterns that I’d previously not tried, and I systematically explored stitch patterns that I’d used but not really understood.  It was a fantastic journey into knitting.

I prepared 15 pages of notes for workshop participants.  That’s a lot.  I included a number of stitch patterns and pictures of some of my swatches.  For those pictures, I used my flat bed scanner.  It works reasonably well, although I typically needed to lighten the jpgs so they would show up reasonably well in b/w print.  Here is a picture of what is called “Escalator Pattern” in Mary Thomas’s Book of Knitting Patterns.  It’s a charming broken welt pattern that is very easy to knit, yet creates an attention-getting effect.

In future blogs, I plan to share some of the “ah-ha!” moments that came to me in the knitting of 53.  Stay tuned.