Once again, life somewhat got away from me, but for a good reason. Last weekend I went to a knitting retreat in Madison WI and had some great classes, two of which were with Native Knitter Jennifer Berg!

The retreat was organized by The Sow’s Ear yarn shop, which I have written about a few times. It is a great shop with lots of fabulous yarn and notions, an attached cafe, and a lively event calendar. The event was held at a hotel near the shop, which happens to be where DH and I stayed on our first exploratory visit to Wisconsin.

Saturday I had a class on fiber arts and community, taught by one of the shop staff members. It was a lot more fun than it sounds like from that description. We learned some fiber arts history, had plenty of time for discussion, and learned a Scottish wauking song! That link will take you to some YouTube videos of people singing wauking songs, if you are interested. Below is our cheat sheet – Scottish Gaelic on the left and phonetic on the right.

In the afternoon I had my first class with Jennifer Berg, on different types of felting. She is a really good teacher, and talked a lot about Navajo culture and art while we knitted and felted. I do not have a finished project to show off, but hopefully will one of these weeks. Sunday I had a second class with her, this one on designing colorwork. For this we used her Tse Koh cowl pattern. The idea was to knit the two outer pattern bands as they are in the design but make up our own pattern for the middle band. I almost have my design finished, but again do not have a finished project to show off.

And finally, there was some good shopping! The Sow’s Ear had a table, of course, and they also had a person who sews bags and two local dyers. Even though there weren’t a lot of vendors, there were a lot of nice yarn and associated things to buy. I wound up with way too much yarn and a pair of nifty needle gauge earrings!

All in all, it was a good time, I got to hang out with fellow knitters and learned some stuff. Hopefully will have some finished projects to show off soon!