Another month has flown by...

Where does time fly? I don't know what has eaten up my weekends since the last post, oh wait a minute, maybe it was the weekend of knitting Feb 7 at Haus of Yarn when Chris Bylsma was in town....or maybe the hours I've spent on the Verizon website looking at all the new Smartphones and trying to decide what I have to have (Samsung Omnia won), or the fact that the Tour de California bike race is on Versus and Lance Armstrong has come out of a 3 year retirement (good knitting time too). We love to watch the Tour de France and we actually remembered that the Tour de California is in Feb, so we have watched it everyday, today is the last day.

DH and I had actually planned to go to Georgia this year and find us a good spot to sit to wait for the bike racers during the Tour de Georgia. Well, the organizers of the race decided not to have one this year, maybe next year. Of all things.

OK, the weekend of Feb 7. It would have been my mothers 74th b'day and I know she would have loved to go to this class with me, so I packed her small brass urn (which fits in the palm of my hand) into my pocket and she was there with me in spirit. The 2 classes taken with Chris Bylsma was Advanced Finishing and Eight Empowering Edges. The classes were packed. We especially liked when Chris referred to the knit stitches on a swatch piece of stockinette stitch as martini glasses. That just fits perfectly with knitting water don't you think?

Here are a couple of pics from the class:
Chris herself:



If you haven't taken the time to take knitting classes, you must!! Knitting classes are great to take. So many things to learn, especially tricks. Some of the edges we learned are indeed empowering and the finishing, well we aren't just making scarves are we? Learning how to seam shoulder edges, sleeves to the body, etc, we learned how to make them look "finished" and not just handmade. For preparation of these classes, we did have swatch homework. It was very important to be prepared with your swatches and the swatch size requested. We were supposed to have 5 swatches sized 8x8. One woman had arrived with 1 swatch about 3x3. Needless to say, she left after only 1 hour in a huff, but it was her own fault, she wasn't prepared. If you shell out $50, you should be prepared. That reminds me, I have swatch homework for Stitches South. I had better get going on that too.

As for knitting projects, I have been working on the Best Friends Jacket. Getting to the last sleeve has taken a while but I'm getting there.

I started and finished another neck warmer, this one was in a soft yellow Malabrigo, for a co-worker. She loves it!!


Tamiko is modeling it for us.

The other project I am working on is the Mini Mochi ribbed scarf. The Mini-Mochi yarn is wonderfully soft and the colors are fabulous! Free pattern on Ravelry.

We ordered our new Samsung Omnia online so it will arrive this week and I will be engulfed with learning that for a while. So I'll update later.

Comments

I couldn't agree with you more about classes. I always learn SO much! Sounds like you were prepared and had fun!