Thursday Evening Stitches Midwest 2012

After class we had the opportunity to have hors d'oeuvres in the Club Room on the 15th floor. There is nice ambience there and we had some tasty wine and lovely little appetizers.

  

This is the buffet table complete with among other things, humus, cream cheese and ham wraps and little cups of cheese morsels. I only wanted a few pieces of cheese but you had to take the whole cup, so not wanting to waste food I wrapped the left-overs in a napkin and put them in my back-pack (and of course I forgot about them, so was pulling little dusty cheese cubes out of my sack all the rest of the weekend!)

As with the rest of the hotel, the decor is carefully planned and pleasing.

Because Stitches houses most of the teachers on the 15th and 16th floor of the hotel, we also got a chance to peek at them in their off time. That is Anna Zilboorg and Nicky Epstein at the middle table for example.

Nicky was the guest speaker of the evening and I was particularly thrilled to get to listen to her as I have tons of her books and especially love the ones on edgings. She showed us many of her designs and I had no idea she had such a long and illustrious career as a knitwear designer.

She was a surprisingly down-to-earth Southern girl who has pretty much done it all in terms of knit designs. She started off doing complicated color work. Like the following two pieces.

 

This one is a hopelessly intricate wedding sampler:



She then moved on to other types of designs from her textured tree of life...



..... to detailed clothing pieces.

 

She also told humorous stories about her career, like how she won first prize in her first design contest for McCalls (I think she said) and tried to convince them to give her third place instead because she wanted the set of knitting needles and not the huge (for those days) sum of money that came with the first place win.

These patterns are more like what I was familiar with

and I was happy to hear her detail the elements of design for us, so we could think about ways to follow in her footsteps.

After the presentation I asked her to sign one of my books and then it was past time for bed.  My sister and I were both exhausted, so we stumbled up to bed