Before I stop going on about VK Live in San Francisco, I did want to tell you about the two other classes I took.

Saturday morning was Color Interaction in Fair Isle, which was taught by Mary Jane Mucklestone.

She gave us each 6 skeins of Jamieson’s Shetland Spindrift (there was a materials fee for this) and two little pattern snippets.  The colors she gave us were pretty difficult to work with, which I appreciate.  When you go by patterns, they will often specify horrible colors that look just dreadful by themselves, but go with the other selections almost like magic.  So it was sort of like that, only we were doing the hard work of figuring out how to make that magic ourselves.  The first exercise was to figure out the relative values (light to dark scale) of the yarns.

So we had to sort them dark to light, then figure out combinations and how the relative values as well as the colors contributed to the success or failure of a color combination.  While we were knitting, she had tons of example swatches of both successes and failures, that she brought around to show us.  Sadly, all my pictures are super blurry, very much like the below.

We just knitted little tubes of our patterns, because it was a 3 hour class ( a 3 hour class!), so we had to be a little efficient.  Here are what we all came up with by the end of the class time. Everyone had such different combinations!

I kept messing with mine – here is a slightly less horrible picture of my finished (for now) experiment. I had some combinations that worked and some that didn’t.  It really is valuable to swatch and try out your possibilities!

Finally, my last class of the con was A Sense of Proportion taught by Franklin Habit!  Taking a class with Franklin has been on my bucket list for a while, and it was really great!  He was witty and funny and nice, and had good information.  He was a very organized teacher, and had great handouts for each section of the class.  It was a lecture class, though we were welcome to knit while listening and to ask questions as needed.

The class was on using sort of educated guesswork to make scarves, hats, mittens and socks.  If you know the gauge of your yarn and needles you want to use, and some basic proportion information, you can just wing a lot of things without a pattern!  Very informative, and I will definitely try a couple of things using this method.  Sometimes you just want a hat, you know?

He also brought a lot of samples of things he had knit and designed and passed them around for us to check out.

Also – and I was on the fence about whether this was dorky or not – I brought my Dolores in her sarong to class and sat her on the table. It was a little fangirlish, but I thought it might be fun. He came over to check her out, and complimented me on how I had done her eyes! I was going to ask him to hold her so I could take a picture, but it got busy right then, so I decided just to call it good.

So anyway – I would call it a very successful trip.  For anyone who likes knitting, classes, shopping, or honestly just hanging around with a bunch of knitters should definitely consider going!  The schedule for next year is set, and there are a couple of good options.  Hope to see you in Seattle – October 2019!

Now that’s it – I promise!