Knitting retreat

Virtual VK Live – And the Rest

quiteayarnblog

Friday was another busy day, like Thursday. In the morning I had Lacing Up Brioche with Nancy Marchant, which was pretty fabulous. As with regular lace knitting, for each opening you make, which creates a new stitch, you have to remove a stitch to keep your stitch counts even. There are two ways of creating openings in brioche fabric, and she showed us both methods, along with several ways to remove stitches. At the end of the class we had little samplers that demonstrated all the new techniques and stitches we learned. I messed mine up a little bit at the top, but I had ripped this back and redone it already by this point, so figured it was good enough!

Friday afternoon my class was on designing your own round yoke sweater, which was mostly a lecture class with a little bit of sketching work toward the end of the session. The teacher is an artist and art teacher as well as a knitting designer, so she had some good rules of thumb to share about using motifs as well as regular knitting design rules and formulas.

Saturday I had intro to marling, again with Cecilia Campochiero, and again she was fabulous! Without getting too much into her methods, a big feature of figuring out how you want to combine yarns is microswatching – knitting teeny little swatches of the combined yarns to see how they look. You can then use these microswatches to play with how you want to order your marls. I did one microswatches combination during class:

Here are my teeny swatches with the yarns
Closeup of the swatches!

Then because I had the yarn colors, and my mind basically always goes to Halloween, I did another set in a different set of yarn combinations:

Today’s class was on making tessalated motifs. I have to be honest, my brain was already full when I joined in to this class. It was well taught and interesting. I took notes and followed along, but I just could not make myself do the exercises right now. It will be useful info later though!

One of the great things about the virtual format is that it makes attending a class much more accessible. You don’t have the bother and expense of traveling to an event and staying there, not to mention the time away from home. There have been people in each of the classes from all over the place – not just the US, but all over the world. If you are interested in attending, VK has said they are doing one of these events each month – they have already announced their August and September dates. Now that I know they will be doing more of these I can calm down a little bit and just attend every once in a while. Thanks for your patience – I promise to stop blathering about VK Live tomorrow!

14 thoughts on “Virtual VK Live – And the Rest”

  2. That sounds like a really useful and fun event. I’m glad you’re sharing about it. I don’t think I can handle learning anything new these days on top of work and the house and the little bit of knitting and sewing I manage. I want my knitting to be relaxing. And now fiddle again! At least that won’t be brand new. My brain feels very full and my body tired. When my boys were over last night we watched What We Do in the Shadows again (the movie) and I noticed Deacon’s Halloween sweater and thought of you. I would love to knit it. If you don’t remember it you can see it here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/762113534/deacons-replica-sweater-from-what-we-do

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Oh, I know what you mean! There are times when the stuff I have to do (work, home stuff) is just totally overwhelming and I have no room for any more challenges. I think one of those periods is coming up soon, so I’m glad I was able to get these classes in now 🙂
      OMG – I totally forgot that sweater! I think it’s doable – it would just be intarsia. Now to figure out the pattern…..

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  3. As I read through your post I was beginning to wonder how you could learn so much in such a small amount of time. I see you reached a limit;)
    The classes sound so information packed. I love the microswatches, particularly you’re Halloween ones. The lace brioche is so nice. I’ve never seen it before!
    Doing the virtual classes seems better than attending in person to me. You can spend the travel expenses that you’ve saved on extra classes:)

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Yup – I reached capacity by Sunday afternoon 🙂
      All the classes I took were definitely information packed! They are two hours each, but intensive. Lace brioche definitely requires concentration, but rewards the effort 🙂 I agree about the savings and being able to redirect those funds!

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  4. Your lace brioche sample looks much tidier than mine! That was a fun class.

    Your marl samples are cute! I’m not a big fan of marled yarns, but you might persuade me with those. Would be interested in seeing them in stockinette, too.

    My first Love Note Sweater gave me fits trying to decide which 2 yarns to put together (fingering plus mohair). The ones that looked too marled sent me back to my original purple on purple. It all worked out.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Yours looks great! I had to rip back a couple time – so third time was the charm up until I got to the mesh at the top, which I still messed up a bit. It was a really fun class 🙂
      They actually are little bits of stockinette – they just curl up like that. It is interesting looking at the two different sides and seeing how knit and purl stitches show up a bit differently!
      I remember! That sweater turned out just beautiful 🙂 I’m not sure how much marling I will wind up doing, but it’s interesting for sure!.

      Like

      Reply

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.