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Saturday, March 12, 2005

Knittapalooza!!!

This weekend has been a blast! Friday morning started off with a twined knitting class in which i learned that being ambidextrous would be very advantageous in knitting! Beth Brown-Reinsel is an awesome instructor. Even though there were about 20 other people in the class it was like having a personal tutoring session. She is so helpful and so amazingly talented!
Double ended knitting is really neat, it creates this dense fabric and these cool little patterns. I had read a few patterns and articles that talked about two ended knitting but I could never really understand it. The class was definitely worth it, quite inspiring.
The second half of the day was a latvian wristers class. Wow. Its two ended knitting with color and all these crazy scalloped edges and herringbone braids, holy cow! I was using more of my brain than i usually do! This is what I ended up with, my fair isle definitely needs work (its so tight and puckers so much i can't even get it over my hand!) But you can get the general gist of things from this picture.

Thankfully, tomorrow I am taking a fair isle class, maybe i'll make a new wrister after tomorrow's class :)

Lily Chin was teaching classes at Knittapalooza this weekend as well. I didn't sign up for any of her classes but it was amazing watching her knit and crochet, she is so fast! And she's quite nice, I even got a picture with her.


Today's class was by far, my favorite so far. It was an aran from the neck down class and I learned so much I can't even believe it. The class was all day and we learned all sorts of neat aran techniques. My favorite part was learning how to do double knitting to create an elasticy neck band. I finished the front and back of my mini-aran and hope to work a bit on the sleeves tomorrow. We learned how to do short rows to create a nice neck line. I can't wait to knit a sweater from the neck down!
Here is my mini-aran.


The day ended with a fashion show, dinner and giveaways. I was crossing my fingers for the $100 rowan gift certificate, but no such luck. What a day! It was amazing. I can't wait to learn fair isle tomorrow. There are so many talented knitters at knittapalooza, what a treat!
More tomorrow...