Knitter's Fantasy & designing

Knitter's Fantasy
This was held on Saturday April 4, 2009 in Youngstown, Ohio. The work of organizing is rotated among 3 guilds. Our guild puts it on next year. It makes lots of money for us. We spend it on things like bringing Lily Chin in to teach for a weekend in May this year.

I taught 2 classes; Chart reading and Great Beginnings and Endings. Chart reading starts with reading various simple charts, knitting swatches from them and finally charting from a written pattern. Great Beginnings and Endings takes a number of cast ons and teaches bind offs that mirrors them. I kind of muddles that class. My notes and the handouts have been improved. All classes that I teach are kept in notebooks, one per class. I keep swatches, pictures and other miscellaneous stuff in each notebook. I also have a bag of big yarn, needles, crochet hooks, etc. that I use for teaching. It makes it easy to repeat a class.

What did I buy at the vendor market? Not much yarn. I don't have time to knit up what I have. However, a set of Kollage square sock needles followed me home. I like them! I wish they were 6" instead of 5", but I'm adapting my grip so I don't get poked. The points are nice. They're light weight metal, but not slippery. Mine are copper colored.

Family Easter
It was a fairly quiet day. No wild egg hunts and other little kid festivities. We went to Erie, PA for dinner with quilting daughter, a 2 hr drive each way. Nice day for a drive! I finished knitting the baby sweater. On the way home, I was crocheting a dishcloth and dropped the hook. Could not find it! I had not escaped the car, but was hiding. I finally found it Thursday after thinking of more places it might have fallen. It was trying to hide under the floor mat. I have more hooks and discovered that I was working the pattern wrong anyway. My girls like dishcloths, so I'm trying to make a few for Christmas gifts.

Socks for Plymouth Yarn
I did up a few swatches and they like two of them. I'm waiting to hear more.

Red socks
I finished one and have toe #2. Lace knitting will proceed today.

I started swatching a lace shawl for Oasis yarn. He asked for a trapezoid shape. The base pattern looks great. It's from one of my Japanese books. I need to get more than 4" knit, so I can play with edgings. The swatch is purple, a color I have lots of. The shawl will be black Aussi sock. I should get it started by the weekend. Deadline is mid June for the TNNA show.