Saturday, May 13, 2006

Happy Dance

I'm ecstatic.

Beginning July 10, I will be teaching knitting at the     Hyde Park Art Center, in the beautiful new facility. The new site has huge spaces with great light for galleries and studios. It was designed with a great deal of input from participating artists. I toured it yesterday after meeting with the Studio Manager. The studios are so inviting! I cannot wait to take a painting class, since my home studio was turned back into a living room after DH moved in.

Summer term at the Art Center is a ten week course. With two and a half hours per session, 25 hours instead of the usual four or six offered per class at retail shops, I hope to be able to inspire my students to find their individual voices in the language of knitting. The emphasis will be less on completing garments and accesories, and more on learning to use the tools and materials to create unique works of fiber art. Of course some students will want to complete useful items, and that is fine, but the emphasis is shifted, and I look forward to the experience with great joy.

Thank you and bless you, EZ and AZ.

Knit in Public


You will find me knitting in public at DucKon, probably near the Art Show.

Friday, May 05, 2006

Midwest Masters

My weekend in Wisconsin was wonderful. I took three classes from Anna Zilboorg: Lace edgings, exotic multicolor stitches, and twisted travelling stitches. I was brain dead by Sunday afternoon and went home, stopping at the Borders in Gurnee to pick up a copy of Big Girl Knits.

The lace edgings are just that -- and not hard to do. They would add a special touch to almost any project.

The "exotic" multicolor stitches are all variations on slip-stitch patterns, in which only one color is worked at a time, over two rows. In the round, colors could be changed every row for interesting variations.

The twisted travelling stitches are in the Bavarian tradition. These take a bit more patience to work, because you are twisting stitches on every row. Anna filled in a bit of history that I'd never heard before. It seems Irish cable stitch patterns are an elongated version of these Bavarian stitches. It happened when Irish and Bavarian knitters met in the US and brought samples home and tried to reproduce them.

I'm working on translating some of the Aran cables back to their denser forms, just for fun, while I wait for Stitches, where I will probably purchase the Bavarian pattern books.

Anna herself is a gentle and very smart person. Before teaching knitting, she taught at MIT.

Inspired!

Carol

This was a tagline on an old post to the Knitty lists:

"Remind them that they are the creatures who knit the wool, not the
creatures who grow it on their backs!"
-Barbara Walker to Elizabeth Zimmerman, 1971