Mitred Square Knit One Below Test

I finally got to a point where I could take a look at this random cabling knit one below technique. I'm not exactly sure where I'll be going from here (since I have only one skein of each of the colors I have used, but I think it could be a very interesting project!

Sunday at Stitches Midwest 2012

Since we didn't sign up for the fashion show, we had to view the fashions in the market. We decided on class in the afternoon and market in the morning, but have now decided it might have been better to reverse that order. Sunday afternoon is a hard time for class and some vendors put things on sale towards the end of the session.

So as we wended our way through the market for the last time, I tried to keep an eye open for the things we missed at the annual Fashion Show. This shawl was very impressive.

Ruffled skirts seem to have been the in thing this year. There were all manner of ruffles from this red dress with ruffles across the bottom...

to just plain skirts

Of course with a knit skirt, you also need a jacket, so they provided some lovely accompanying jackets too.

 I'm sorry this one is so out of focus. I like the styling very much (but not necessarily the color choices).

Of course black is always au courant and more akin to the kind of thing I would wear personally.

This green piece has wonderful texture

Some of the jackets also picked up the ruffle (or ornament) theme.



Betsy Hershberg's book on bead knitting came out this year, and the market was full of tributes to her work and of course supplies for purchase.



 As far as the grand prize went, neither my sister nor I managed to win it! In fact we came home without a single prize this year either of door or merchant variety.  Here is the winner collecting her cash prize.

After the handing out of the money, it was time to prepare for afternoon class. I ran upstairs to get a diet cola and then we started to work on stranded knitting.  I was TIRED!  This would have been a better class for me if I had had more sleep and energy, but I did manage to get the hang of things. The Course was Stranded Color: Just Beyond the Basics with Beth Whiteside. I think Ms. Whiteside is an excellent teacher. She seemed to be having a hard day and felt she had not made herself clear, but I feel she did just fine.

 

We worked on how and where to hold the yarn when working with two colors and taking care not to get the carried strands too tight.

 There are some lovely patterns that can be made with short carries and we were provided with some patterns and got to look at some  very pretty samples.

Then we got to steek our work. The biggest problem with the class was not having enough time to really produce enough knitting to have a long enough steek and Ms. Whiteside insisted (and rightfully so) that we do the actual cutting in class. (It was apparent that there were those students that were so horrified by the idea of cutting knitting that they would never have performed the act if she hadn't forced us to do so before her eyes.) Here is my cut fabric from both the front

and the back

The crocheting is supposed to help secure the edges and keep things form unraveling. I didn't even have 100% wool yarn and it seems to have worked (although we were warned not to yank on it too hard! (wink!) Here is my finished project with a little bit of edging to try and reduce the curl (didn't work) and make it look a bit larger and more finished.

 And then, unbelievably, it was all over.  The vendors were gone, there was no sign of knitters and not even the place to hand in our conference review sheets was left  to be found. This meant it was time for the ritual goodbye meal. My sister and I seem to have settled on a nice Indian meal at the finish of each conference. This time after perusing several restaurant reviews, we chose a closer place. Our last restaurant had been glorious and stately, but we really wanted to knit so we chose a place near the famed (but unvisited) Woodfield Mall. The restaurant was called Gaylords. I had been to a Gaylord's in the San Francisco area and assumed this was  apart of the chain, although nothing about the place seemed to indicate that this was the case. In fact the exterior looked inauspicious and un-chainlike. The building itself was not even graced by a sign.

The interior however was nice and there seemed to be ample Indian/Bengaladeshi/Pakistani clientele to make us think that the diners might know good Indian food when they were served some, so even though it probably is a chain, it is an establishment with good dining options.

I forgot to take a picture of my meal (which was a sampler of Tandoor meats and some Rogan Josh.) It was all quite delicious.  I did splurge and have dessert - a scrumptious kulfi with pistachios just the way I love it!



Then we went back to the hotel to watch the very strange Olympic closing ceremony.

My sister was blown away by these hats.

and I'm still not sure what the supermodel thing was all about, but it was stunning spectacle.

My favorite part was the giant octopus that unfolded on the stage.



I'm not real clear what that has to do with the Olympics or Great Britain or anything else really. Anyway, we stayed up way too late marveling at the end of the Olympics, but it was a fantastic send-off and we were sorry that our time was at an end.

Saturday Evening - Stitches Midwest 2012

After a long day of classes it was nice to be able to go back up to the room and not have a long evening of fashion show and banquet. The banquet is fun, but sometimes it is nice to just sit back and relax. We did however decide to check out the line into the fashion show so that we could see what the other students had been up to.

There were quite a few lovely things, but what really struck me was a piece by someone I have been meeting at Stitches for several years.



You may remember  my blog on Roberta's beautiful coat from 2 years ago. Every year she manages to come up with something amazing (usually knitting without a pattern creating straight from her head.) This year she had outdone herself with a gorgeous knitted kimono with a Chinese dragon across the back.





The colors are so rich and saturated and the piece is fabulous from any side.



Here is closer shot of the dragon's head.

 

I am happy to report that Roberta won the grand prize. Someone else yarn bombed her car (and the husband built an armature for displaying the piece. I'd have loved to have seen that!) 

Naturally there is one other feature of the student fashion show that makes it exciting and that is seeing what fantastic costume Lily Chin knits to show up in. Here she is in this year's piece!

 Franciscan toe nail polish!!  I bet that is hard to find, maybe I could make a bundle on producing some (although I bet it is a limited market!)

Saturday at Stitches Midwest 2012

Saturday was a hard day. I simply didn't sleep well and my brain was mush. We also had two classes.

Our first class was Fixing Lace Mistakes with Brooke Nico. She was a fairly new teacher and for this reason I was excited to find out more about her. The fact that they had decided to start classes at 8:00 AM did not thrill me and it made getting breakfast before class pretty tough.  Since I am a fairly advanced lace knitter I wondered whether I would get much out of this class. But, because I was so tired I didn't do too well at our tasks. I think this class was useful to me, but for those who have done lots of lace projects, it might not be the ideal class. I do however think the practice was priceless. Ms Nico is kind and well organized and as my sister noted, she (my sister) feels very comfortable in a class where the teacher is willing to kick off her shoes.

 Ms. Nico taught the class barefoot. (She had by the way, some great shoes withher. I had been wondering who the woman in the silver cowboy boots was as I watched her walk down the hall on Friday.)

We had three basic tasks in the class (which was well organized and clearly thought out.) Our first  task was to learn to look at our knitting and keep our pattern in mind as we worked. I liked the idea of figuring out an anchor point in advance so that you could keep track of whether you were doing your stitches in the right place. I also learned you can put mohair in the freezer to make it easier to rip out. Our first swatch (done at home) was used for working on this section of the class.

Task two involved knitting a second swatch but then exchanging our knitting with a partner who would then make a mistake for us. We had to correct the error.

This worked fine for me. I think it took me much longer than it should have, but since I was so tired I was happy to have success. I found and corrected the error and I don't think you can tell at all that there was ever a mistake.



This is not the case with task 3 (well, um actually it is the case with task 3 now because I ripped the whole thing out in frustration - so there is no evidence of my poor reconstruction.) I think this is where total brain fatigue  started to set in. We had to unravel 12 stitches for 7 rows. My sister really felt uncomfortable with this and I probably should have felt more uncomfortable than I did. It seemed like I didn't have much trouble with the reconstruction except this one little area, but I kept fussing with it and ended up ripping out several times. At the end of class I thought I had it. (But then I looked at it again later and that is when I tried once again to correct it and finally decided to rip out the whole thing. I think perhaps I will try this exercise again. I ended up with stitches that looked overly large and loose, so I want to see what I can do about doing a better job - and of course I have a huge mistake in my current lace project just waiting for me to have the patience and sufficient sleep to try and deal with it.) So... no example for this part of the blog, sorry.

For lunch we had leftovers and were able to go upstairs and have a more relaxed dining experience. I believe we also took another trip to the market as my sister was always deciding to buy one more piece of equipment for the up-coming class, because she had not brought x or y with her on the plane. At lunch we also gave Paola (the desk clerk who had helped us so much the first day) some flowers. (If you ever need anything at that hotel - she is SO, SO kind and helpful. She is definitely the one to ask for!)


Since we spent much of our in-between time walking through different parts of the hotel, I thought I'd add a few pictures here of some of the  decor and places we saw. This is the lobby atrium. It is quite large and has many, many seating areas. In the back you can see some of the gauzy ceiling hangings over other sitting areas. The  round shape on the left is the chimney for a fireplace. This was the general area where the pajama party was held on Friday night. (I was just too tired to participate, but went up to take a peek.)

On the first floor there are also  many sitting areas with bold colors and cool design traits.

As you can see there are rhythmic elements that pull the design together (upright vases abd the repeated use of primary colors) while the difference in furnishings also allows each area to have a cohesiveness to itself.

I already showed the hallway with the wooden pieces all over the walls. Here is a close up of what they look like.

We saw the elevators (of course) every single day multiple times, it was a pleasant area and I had not taken a picture of them. The area was bright and cheerful (an attribute in general of the hotel).



Unfortunately it was not as bright inside the conference and hotel rooms, but the public areas of the hotel are really full of light and very appealing.

After lunch we had our second class. This was Elise Duvekot's  Mitred Squares with Knit-One-Below . We had already taken other classes with Ms. Duvekot.

 I had done Knit-One -Below and Columns of Color. My sister had also had at least one of these classes. Ms. Duvekot is extremely kind and gentle and it was like coming home to be in a class with her again. We were shown samples of what we could do with the Knit-One-Below Stitch and Ms. Duvekot explained how it was different from Brioche stitch.





We were reminded that it produces a very wide fabric relative to regular knitting, that it is elastic and that it doesn't curl. (Best of all it is a great way to prevent color pooling in variegated yarns. (Example above of stockinette versus Knit-One Below. with the same yarn).

We were also reminded that our own gauge can vary greatly from that of others. We were shown two socks knitted in the same yarn by two different knitters:



We started out with a simple 15 stitch (per side) square. That worked pretty well after we reminded ourselves how to do the stitch.

 If we had time (and I didn't really) we could try a larger square with a cable. (An example of what the cable looks like can be seen in the socks below). Tehse were brought in by one of our class mates.

I cast on for the larger square and then decided to only do half a cable , so that I could play with the effects of the wavy lines.) (I'm inspired to play with this and do a larger project with lots of wavy lines.)



I had just bought a bunch of brown sheep yarn for half price and now I know what I am going to do with it! (BIG SMILE!!)