Stitches Midwest 2016 part 2

Saturday morning we had a class on Increases and Decreases with Judith Durant.

I had mixed feeling about this class. Judith was a good teacher and clearly knew quite a bit about the subject. She has written a book about 99 ways to increase and decrease.

This is the project we worked on in class. Unfortunately neither mine nor my sister's looked like that.

Ours looked like little pig faces - I think there needed to be a few more transition rows.

I  ironed my pig nose only to discover it  isn't even centered in my piece.

It wasn't always clear to me where we were supposed to start our increases and decreases on the hand outs (obviously) and I felt like there wasn't much more to the class besides the hand outs, unless we thought of questions we wanted to ask. This was the case with  several of the courses we took this time around.

Kennita Tully's Short Rows class also felt that way and I think it would have helped if she had demo'ed the techniques before we did them. I liked that we had a swatch project for the class - a little vest that would fit a small Teddy bear.

 

Unfortunately, I was not having the best of days and could not do a short row to save my life, so I lost the first half of the knitting period and only got my vest half finished after I got back on track. I had great difficulty understanding the written instructions (and was tred as I say) but since I had done all of these short rows before I can't tell if it was me or the instructions. We did Yarn Over, wrapped, German and Japanese short rows (top to bottom in each section of the vest.) It was an instructive swatch, but Ms. Tully worried too much about us being able to finish and thus didn't spend the time we needed on the technique.

Saturday evening there seemed to be a wedding taking place in some of our usual places for holding the banquet.  This might have been the bride:

Sunday we had our last class and our best class by far. It was Lily Chin's Cable course.We learned all about the sex lives of cables.  I think I have taken this class before, as well as Melissa Leapman's Celtic cables, but Ms. Chin is such a fantastic teacher that one always learn a ton (even having had the course before.)

We didn't have much time to practice, because Ms. Chin had so many examples and stories to tell, so I won't bother with my 4 row swatch, but my advice to others is to take any course they have opportunity to do so with Ms. Chin and they will not be sorry (uness they are easily offended and then these people might as well take a class from a handout or just read a book.) My sister and I left the class completely blown away and inspired.

After class we went to the market where I did some real damage and listened to Rick Mondragon read the  names of the door prize winners. Once again it was not us!

So traditionally I put a picture of my purchases up at the end of my Stitches blogs - so here is the damage: