I love to teach, I love travel, and I love my knitting friends. So when I was asked to teach at Yarn Fest I immediately said yes, even though I was expecting in early February. Since we now have a new (adorable!) addition, I am bringing the family along. (Bonus: If you’re in one of my classes, you’ll most likely get to meet a very cute baby before class starts!). The family will be enjoying the sites in Colorado while I’m teaching, and hopefully we’ll all make it to Rocky Mountain National Park for a day. I’m hoping there will be some snow on the ground since we’ve had such a mild winter here in Philadelphia.
If you’re in the area, or traveling to Loveland for the event, I hope to see you in one of my classes. I’ll be teaching five classes this time around, and luckily they are my top five favorites! To view all the workshops visit the Yarn Fest site and click on Explore our Workshops. I can’t direct link to my classes, but there are drop down filters at the top of the page that allow you to sort by date, teacher, and technique.
First up on Thursday, March 30th, is a full day class, Tyrolean Knitting: Learning Twisted Stitch Cables and Embroidery. From the Tyrol region in Austria, this style of knit is reminiscent of the flowering springtime alps, and it always makes me think of The Sound of Music. Don’t be surprised if I start humming “The hills are alive…” during class!
Tyrolean Knitting is a lot of fun, and it incorporates a lot of techniques: Twisted stitches, cables, travelling stitches, lace, and embroidery. We’ll be using our pattern Grey Skies Handwarmers as the class sample, but we’ll also cover vintage Tyrolean patterns and talk about designing our own. Learning to embroider on your hand knits is the icing on the cake of this 6 hour class. We’ll be working with The Fibre Co. Canopy Worsted, with Canopy Fingering used for the embroidery.
Thursday evening from 6-9 I’ll be teaching a short workshop on roositud (meaning rose patterned), the Estonian inlay technique. Roositud is kind of like embroidery, and kind of like tapestry weaving. It’s a deceptively simple technique that looks very impressive!
We will be using Kate’s Lenten Rose pattern (the full pattern will be yours to keep) as a class sample, using the motif on a small pair of wrist warmers.
We will be using The Fibre Co. Road to China Light for this class, which is a larger gauge than what is considered typical for roositud (read: it goes a bit quicker!). As an added bonus, you will learn the Channel Island cast on and cast off to finish the wristers!
On Friday we move from Estonia to Sweden and talk about Bohus Stickning. This class is one part history lesson and slide presentation, and one part technique. The Swedish workshop founded by Emma Jacobsson, Bohus knitting is best known for its beautiful hand-knitted items made famous in the late 1930s through the 60s for their attention to detail, innovative design and color, and exacting standards of craftsmanship. There will be two different wristers to choose from, one a bit more challenging and one perfect for color-work beginners.
The pattern for the wristers on the bottom are based on my Freyja Sweater, and the ones on the top are riffed off of the Seurat Pullover. In addition to the two wrister patterns, students will get a copy of the Freyja Pullover redux, Juno, to keep.
But Saturday is the big day – Beyond Stripes. This is a class Kate and I developed to cover ALL the color work techniques in one day. Students will use an assortment of The Fibre Co. yarns to create a fun sampler covering Setesdal, Selbu, Fair Isle, Bohus, roositud, intarsia, and embroidery!
We’ll also cover two-handed color work, tacking long floats, proper tension, and choosing colors for optimal effect. This class is a lot of fun, and if you haven’t taken it with us before I highly recommend it.
Sunday we will visit lace knitting with Demystifying Lace: Learning and Loving Reading Lace from Charts. Using our very first MKAL shawl, the Meadowsweet Shawl, as a guide we will learn to work lace from charts, understand how to measure gauge in lace, work symmetrical decreases, keep count of our work by using the chart as a visual guide, fixing mistakes in lace, care and blocking, and even a bit of design theory! We will use The Fibre Co. Meadow in class, and all students will get the full Meadowsweet Shawl pattern to keep.
This is a multi-level class that is suitable for those who have minimal lace experience as well as those who want to take the plunge into designing their own lace shawls.
Are you attending Yarn Fest this year? Let us know in the comments!
I hope to see you in Colorado!
