Just got back from Vogue Knitting Live in San Francisco!

Mom and I went for three days (and a day of travel on each end of that) and had a great knitty time!  There was so much going on, I’m going to do a couple of posts on this trip.  Too much to write in one.

We each took three classes, and also enjoyed the shopping and just being in a knitting-saturated environment. We stayed at the hotel where the classes were being held (Hilton Union Square in San Francisco), and it was magical.  There were other knitters all over the place, everyone wearing their sweaters and shawls and knit skirts and whatever.  Knitting in the lobby, knitting in the halls, knitting in the elevators.  Mutual admiration society in the elevators and in line to buy food at the little grab-and-go restaurant off the lobby.  It was fun to be in an environment where you are pretty much surrounded by like-minded people, who all care about at least one thing that you also care about.

Anyway. We spent Thursday mostly getting from Anchorage to San Francisco. Friday we each had our first class, a little goofing around time, and then SHOPPING .

My first class was Tuck Into Your Own Brioche Cowl with Nancy Marchant on  – you guessed it! – tuck stitches.

She just recently put out a book on this technique.  Brioche knitting is a kind of tuck stitches, but there are other, somewhat more complicated varients.  The class materials were an extract from the book, with a bit of additional explanations.  Without getting too much into the detail of it, instead of doing the sl1yo once per stitch, like you do in brioche, for other tuck stitch patterns, sometimes you slip a stitch and yarn over a bunch of times before you finally knit or purl it.  And you can do this a bunch of ways to make nifty patterns in your knit fabric.

She took us through an example exercise swatch, and showed us lots of example cowls of the different stitches and the effects you could get by using different weights and kinds of yarn together.

Then she took us through designing a cowl using the stitchionary in the class materials and got us started.  (we had casting on the average amount of stitches for this project as homework for this class so we could just GO!) I got a couple of inches done on mine, and am looking forward to finishing – its a fun technique, and I learned a lot from her!

Tomorrow – shopping!