Weekend Knitting Madness!

Wow, what a wonderful way to spend the weekend. I took 4 days of knitting and knitting related classes at Madrona, and had a blast. I'm so very happy I decided to go and do the classes. I took all of Jean Wong's knitting classes. My brain is full of thoughts, ideas, things to try, things to do, wishlists of things I want to work on. It's tough to revert back to real life stuff, and limit the crafty/creative side of me to just evenings and weekends again.

Knitting Patterns
2 day course, all about creating a fitted sweater from your measurements. This class was amazing, the whole math (wonky math but still math) behind how to create a pattern, draw it up, figure out how to get the armholes to match the arms, and how to create different kinds of neck holes. Very very cool class, makes me want to go back to my parent's place and find all my drafting supplies and bring them back so I can design some more sweaters. I do think I will use much of what I learned. Learning the Japanese knitting notational shorthand was just a huge bonus!

Finishing
1 full day, Wow, 11 swatches later, this course was so cool. Learning how to do invisible bind off for 1x1, 2x2 ribbing was way cool. The Japanese short rows for shoulder shaping was awesome. I don't think I will ever look at short rows the same way. So many fancy, efficient, precise ways to finish sweaters. No more stiff seams for me!

Button holes
1/2 day, this was a very interesting class. I never really gave button holes much thought, but now I know how to do at least 5 different kinds of button holes, and how to make button bands look good on sweaters. Very very useful class, I hope she runs a Button Holes 2 class next year. I would definitely take it if she ran it.

So now the dilemna is if I should sign up for her 13 month course. It looks amazing, truely amazing, I had no idea she ran it down here in Seattle as well as up in Vancouver. The sheer amount of work is daunting, but I very very much enjoyed wrapping my brain around designing sweaters and thinking about how to make the sweaters fit just perfectly. Well I have a couple of months before the open house, when i would need to decide.

New Fibers
I broke the bank... well almost :) I now have about 6 pounds of various types of fiber to spin, amazing, colourful, beautiful, soft, fluffy and just darn right gorgeous fibers stashed away in various places around the house. Maybe these next couple of months I will spend spinning it up so that I can use it if I take that course I want to take... Perhaps that is way too ambitious, maybe using commercial yarns would be easier/less stressful in the long run. I certainly have enough other yarn to do that.

FO
And to top it off, I was suffering knitting withdrawls while I was in the knitting course, watching all the people around me knit all kinds of things, so I started a hat on Thurs. Absolutely love it, so much that I stayed up late to finish it last night, spent 40 mins weaving in ends this morning, still have an hour or so to go finishing it, then blocking, and it's done! First hat that I have ever had that took *9* balls of yarn... Ah well, I will have yarn for future projects :)

That's it for now!