I am attending another virtual Vogue Knitting event this week! I have two classes each Thursday and today, and one each Saturday and Sunday. So far the courses are great and I am learning a lot 🙂

First thing Thursday (and I do mean first thing – this VKL is on Eastern time, so 10 am there is 6 am for me) I had Lace by Music with Andre de Castro, which was about Portuguese lace. He is researching this topic and beginning the process of working on a book, though he says that will take a while. There are a couple interesting facets of Portuguese lace knitting:
– it is on a purl ground
– it was mostly made for edgings and insertions for household textiles and not mostly made for shawls or similar, though you certainly can use it to make garments or accessories
– the notation is entirely different than Western knitting notation
– patterns were not published or formally distributed, but were occasionally written down by hand using the traditional notation.

So we learned a tiny bit of Portuguese, the notation method, and we got a couple of pattern in our class handouts. I managed to learn it OK, but definitely needed to keep referring back to the terminology sheet! As it turned out,

I wasn’t using the best kind of yarn for this lace style – it is usually done in a smooth, tightly twisted yarn to show off the stitches. I had a more loosely spun fuzzy looking yarn, so these samples are not optimal, but they get the job done.

Then I listened to a lecture by Karida Collins, owner and dyer of Neighborhood Fiber Co, on matching your hand dyed yarn to their best project types, which was very interesting and informative.

Then my last class yesterday was an introduction to Sequence Knitting with Cecilia Campochiaro. This was a great class! I am reading her book on sequence knitting, and this was a wonderful chance to hear her talk about it and demonstrate the different principles of this knitting system.

This sample is the same stitch sequence [k4, p2] done in the one-row method, the shaped one-row method, and the serpentine method. Briefly, in the one-row method, you start a row with the start of the sequence and end where you end. You may have incomplete sequences at the end of a row. The shaped one-row method adds shaping to that. The serpentine method wraps the pattern around flat knitting – if there is part of the stitch sequence left at the end of a side, you finish it on the other side. The different methods create very different looking fabrics, as you can see!

Friday’s classes are brioche lace, choosing colors for colorwork knitting, and designing yoke sweaters with motifs. Hoping they are as good!