I bought a bunch of different colours of Manos del Uruguay Wool Clasica at the Madrona 2009 marketplace.  I had bought a bunch of colours last year at the Seattle Knitters' Guild's Fiber Frenzy meeting.  With all the wool, I thought I should finally knit the "15 Easy Pieces Kimono Jacket" pattern that I've had for practically forever.  I didn't have the pattern with me when I bought the yarn and ended up not having enough of any one colour for the larger sections so I thought I'd be clever and make the jacket a patchwork of the colours I did have.  This is what I got:

The chestnut red in the left body really clashed with the reddish-orange I used for the shoulders and upper arms:

I broke down and bought 2 more skeins of the dark sage (top of three colour strips) and 1 more skein of the navy blue I used on the right side.  The jacket pieces are looking much better now.  I feel as if I have knitted the jacket twice so it's a good thing I'm enjoying the process.

I gave Pavel & Linna a rather bright gnome hat at their baby shower.  Nicolai is now a year old and Pavel sent me a picture of him wearing the hat.  Isn't he cute?  It looks like he has a flame on his head.

I had a afternoon class (3 hours) "Double Up & Around! Circular Double Knitting Techniques" with Lucy Neatby.  Double knitting is a technique for knitting two layers on one set of needles.  Using this technique the knitter can switch the yarn colours and end up with a reversible scarf or blanket, etc. with the design in reversed colours.  Lucy used her DVD Double Knitting Delights as a teaching aid.  It was great to see the technique being taught shown on a large screen while Lucy went around to help individuals.  I much preferred it over gathering around a teacher to look over their shoulders while they demonstrated a technique.

I had a lot of fun in the class as Lucy is a great teacher and double knitting is a fun technique.  I did have problems with the technique for knitting a pocket on a single-knit fabric using double-knitting so immediately after class I started another pocket to get the movements "into" my fingers.  My sampler started with the double cast-on for two layer knitting, then reversing the colours, then single layer knitting with double-knitted pocket.

I went to the marketplace after the class and bought copies of almost all of Lucy Neatby's DVDs: Double Knitting Delight, Intarsia Untangled 1 & 2, Knitting Essentials 1 & 2, and Finesse Your Knitting 1 & 2.  I feel these DVDs will come in very handy for remembering/learning new techniques and tricks to improve my knitting.

Saturday evening was the retreat banquet.  We had the surprise of a barber shop quartet showing up to sing.  One of the attending women's husband had hired the quartet to give his wife flowers and a song for Valentine's Day.  The quartet sang a couple of additional songs to the delight of the attendees.

Elsebeth Lavold was the featured speaker.  She talked about her history in knitting design.  She had lots of photos and was very interesting especially when talking about needing to invent new knitting techniques to display the sharp changes in viking cables and runes.  I plan to go to her exhibition "Knitting Along the Viking Trail" at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle before it closes.

I didn't have a class in the morning so I got up a little later and after breakfast headed over to the marketplace in the pavilion.  I figured that after Cat Bordhi's talk the evening before a lot of people would be looking for her books.  I eventually found a copy of New Pathways for Sock Knitters in a booth that seemed to have nothing to do with socks.

I then settle down in the main part of the pavilion to work on finishing my Estonian lace sampler.  I sat at a table next to Syne Mitchell's loom and talked a little weaving while knitting.

Syne was teaching classes on weaving for knitters using rigid heddle looms at the retreat.  She let me weave a few wefts on her 4 harness loom.  I discovered that treadling gives a weaver a real leg workout especially since Syne had put bungee cords on hers to create a higher shed.

I finished knitting my lace sampler around noon and was able to show it to Nancy Bush later that day while having her sign her book on Estonian Lace.  She said she was happy to see that someone had finished the sampler instead of leaving it half done after class was over.  Nancy also signed the copy I picked up of her Folk Knitting in Estonia book.

One of the women who had finished the sampler in class had blocked it in her hotel room Friday night.  She had it draped over her spinning wheel cover on Saturday and it was gorgeous.  I blocked out my sampler once I got home.  I've been showing it to everyone I see.

I took an all-day (6 hour) class on Estonian Lace from Nancy Bush.  The defining feature of Estonian lace is the nupp (rhymes with "soup").  We worked on a small scarf with a scallop edging, 32 nupps and a row of K3tog, yo, k3tog that resulted in hourglass shapes.  This is the most complicated lace I have ever knitted.  I got up through the hourglasses during 6 hours of class.

When I originally looked at Estonian lace patterns, I wondered why anyone would want to have bobbles all over a scarf or shawl.  Bobbles would dig into one's back when leaning against a chair.  I happily learned that nupps, while giving a great sense of definition to a pattern, are almost flat and won't be irritating to wear.

Two women actually finished the sampler in class which I found very impressive.  My sampler has several errors but I kept reminding myself that Nancy said it's just practice and don't rip back.  I concentrated on learning the techniques and am happy with the final result.

Right after class, I went to the marketplace and bought a copy of Nancy Bush's Knitted Lace of Estonia.  I plan to knit a lace scarf pattern that Nancy had published in Interweave Knits magazine.  The pattern has about 240 nupps so I should be quite good at knitting them by the time I finish the scarf.

Friday was another day full of learning and I was exhausted after class.  I relaxed for awhile and ate dinner.  Then I went to the Teacher's Gallery presentation in the ballroom.  Cat Bordhi gave a talk on creativity and design that I found very inspiring.  After her talk, I wandered among the displays of the various teachers' knitting.  Some truly beautiful knitting art was shown, and I was able to touch and examine it in detail.

I eventually ended up in "The Living Room" on the mezzanine and finished the Hourglass Scarf I had been knitting for relaxation. (Deb is wearing the scarf in this picture.)

I had an all-day (6 hours) Latvian Mittens class with Beth Brown-Reinsel.  There were about 20 of us in the class, 3 to a table.  Beth took us through a two-colour cast on and half-braid, a lace scallop, and fringe in the morning session.  I hated doing the fringe.  Turns out my yarn was the wrong type.  I had brought 4 different colours of Lorne's Lace Shepherd Sport, a slippy superwash wool when I should have used a stickier wool yarn.  Everyone who had a sticky yarn like Vuorelma Satakieli loved knitting the fringe and its look.  Everyone with a slippery yarn hated knitting the fringe. You can see in the photo how badly my fringe came out - uneven loops, wrong facing loops, etc.

 

In the afternoon session, Beth took us through a herringbone braid and the various ways to hold and knit with 3 colours in one row.  She had 6 people at a time come up and look over her shoulders while she demonstrated the various ways.  I practiced a couple and decided I like two colours in my right hand and one in my left hand for 3 colour knitting.

As class was ending, the woman sitting next to me showed me a different way to do a SSK and I practiced that on my sampler.  (Usually a SSK is slipping a stitch as if to purl, slipping another stitch as if to purl, and then knitting the two stitches together.  She showed me slipping the first stitch as if to knit, slipping the second stitch as if to purl, and then knitting the two stitches together.  This results in an SSK decrease that more closely mirrors a K2Tog decrease.)

I had dinner that evening at the Bite Restaurant on the 4th floor of the Hotel Murano with my roommate and two other knitters we ran into in the waiting line.

All-in-all a very enjoyable day packed with learning.

Madrona Fiber Arts Winter Retreat is a great knitting convention that is in it's 10th year.  The retreat is so popular that people attempt to register as soon as registration opens on the website.  Last year the number of people attempting to register took down the servers.  This year's retreat was February 12-15 with registration opening at 1pm PST on November 13th.  I decided to get ready by going to website at 11am.  I noticed that registration was already open so I immediately signed up for 4 classes and got all my first choices: Latvian Mittens with Beth Brown-Reinsel, Estonian Lace with Nancy Bush, Double Knitting with Lucy Neatby and Steeks with Janine Bajus.  I also arranged to share a room at the hotel as I didn't want to commute from Seattle to Tacoma every day.

On Wednesday 2/11, I packed my suitcase and took the #39 bus downtown to have lunch with George.  I then took the Sounder commuter train from Seattle to Tacoma and then the Tacoma Link light rail from the train station to 2 blocks from the Hotel Murano.  My hotel room had a view of Mt. Rainier.  (Look to the left of the Tacoma Dome's white root.  Mt. Rainier is kind of blending in with the clouds.)



Hotel Murano dedicates each floor to a different glass artist.  My floor was for a Japanese artist whose name I forgot to write down.  Her featured piece was a long canoe-shaped boat with a girl in a dress at one end and a rabbit-headed figure in the same dress at the other.  It was quite lovely.

I met Jen and Fred Hagan for dinner that night at Paddy Coyne's on Pacific Ave at 9th.  My roommate for Madrona, Barbara Mormile, joined us.  It was fun to catch up with Fred and Jen who weren't attending Madrona this year.  After dinner I was so exhausted that I was in bed by 10pm.

Yesterday was my last day at Avelle: The New Bag Borrow or Steal.  I've been having lots of health problems and could no longer commit to a 40-hour work week.  We parted on amicable terms and I will have fond memories of the people I worked with.

Today is the 21st anniversary of my arrival in Seattle (okay, it was a Motel 6 in Issaquah and I didn't actually set foot in Seattle proper until the 24th) and I still love it here. 

I spent the first 23 years of my life in the Greater Los Angeles Metro Area and wanted out from the time I was 14.  I hated the heat, I hated sunbathing (unlike two of my sisters who were sun-worshippers), and I wasn't crazy about the beach.  I finally joined the Air Force after college to escape and my first base assignment was in Northern California at Travis AFB about half-way between San Francisco and Sacramento.  Naturally when I had time off I headed to San Francisco with its cool breezes rather than hot, dry Sacramento.  I spent 18 months at Travis and then moved to my second base assignment at Offutt AFB in Omaha, Nebraska.  There I experienced tornado warnings, huge hail storms and blizzards for the first time.  I prefer earthquakes.  I spent 2 years in Omaha where I did like having four seasons, but I missed mountains. 

I thought about moving to the Colorado Rockies when I got out of the Air Force, but one morning I woke up with the thought "I'm moving to Seattle."  I had never been to Seattle but I loved what I learned about its climate in a Physical Geography course I was taking at Bellevue University in Bellevue, NE (just outside the air base).  Since this was 1987 before the World Wide Web, I went to a Robert Half office in Omaha and had them fax my resume to their office in Seattle, then I had the Air Force pack up my stuff to send to Fort Lewis in Tacoma, WA until I requested it.  I got out of the Air Force on April 15, 1987 and immediately drove to the house my mother had recently purchased in Denver.  My mom and sister suggested I move in with them and get a job there, but Denver reminded me too much of LA with the dry brown hills and sprawl.  A few days later on April 22nd I got a call from the Robert Half agency office in Seattle asking if I could be in Seattle by 3pm on Friday the 24th for an interview.  The phone call came at 10am.  I had my car loaded and was out of Denver by noon.  I spent the night in Twin Falls, Idaho and got to the Motel 6 in Issaquah at 11pm on the 23rd.

I fell in love with western Washington and didn't leave for my first 5 years here.  I spent my free time exploring the Seattle area and the Olympic Peninsula.  I remember being at Sol Duc Falls and thinking "This is paradise.  Who needs the Caribbean?"  Yes, I actually LIKE rain.  It keeps everything so green.  Even the gray skies make the green of the trees look more vibrant to me.

Sometimes I think of coulda/woulda beens, but I always end up happy that one morning I woke up thinking "I'm moving to Seattle."