Tuesday 5 February 2008

Annie Modesitt's Lace Class

You will recall that I was at a lace class taught by Annie Modesitt in November at River City Yarns. I posted about it here. I have learned so much in the days since then. In a lot of ways I knit with much more assurance now, much more ease because of just a couple very small things she said in the class.

But there was one thing I could not get, one I missed, and quite possibly the part that just made me feel like the veriest fool on the planet. It has to do with left leaning decreases. I'll show you how mine look on mom's Christmas scarf. You can see how almost decent my right leaning decreases are, and how sloppy my left leaning decreases are, some straight some very leaned some medium leaned. In class I was utterly confused by her instructions of how to make the darn things be nice.

Yesterday while cruising blogs, I visited hers at Modeknitdotcom, , and guess what. She was talking about this very part of her class. Check out her February 1, post and the photo at the top of February 2nd.

All I can tell you is this works to make those single left leaners nice as a smooth baby's bottom. I even figured out why I was lost the moment she talked about this in class. That has to do with how I was getting them done till now, and how I've been looking at the various ways of decreasing on the flat and in the round. My project today is to work through her mini tutorial, and see what happens.

There was precious little knitting last night. There was some book reading about knitting, and finding of one knitting book at the drug store but no actual knitting. Son 1 finally is home from the hospital, and the entire evening was about getting him food he can make, drugs for his infections, and getting him settelled. I did work for a short time this morning on the blue scarf, but it hasn't changed enough to show you anything significant (like finishing).I did notice this the other day. This is the backside of the lace. How come no one told me that backside of lace, even stockinette stitch lace has cool and interesting things happening? These little hillocks and bumps are fascinating, and I just don't get it. Everybody talks about the front of their lace, but like everything knit, there are two sides. Check out thge other side today. Who knows what you will find.

Come to think of it, that is good advice for a lot of things. Check out the other side. They are probably just as nice and as interesting as this lace.

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