It's rainy today, but no-one minds, since we're all indoors for six hours of knitting classes. I'm feeling much more confident after last night's knit and natter, which we had out on the terrace in the evening warmth, overlooking endless cornfields (Tracy has spotted deer leaping through them!) Sasha guided me step by step through her intarsia technique and suddenly it clicked, and this morning I could start work on my dandelion motif properly.
Knitting and nattering on the terrace.
This year's programme is all about colour. The morning's class today was on free form crochet with Tracy. For those of us who needed a brush-up (or in my case, to learn from scratch!) there was a chance to learn the basics of crochet, while the others worked on more nature-inspired motifs in crochet.
This afternoon, we've done a class with Sasha called 'colour your world'. We each were given the challenge of picking five yarns in colours we like, plus one in a colour we really don't like – this was surprisingly difficult. We then experimented with knitting stripes incorporating the colour we usually avoid, and then compared what we'd done. Two important things were learned: firstly, 95% of us hate browny-orange-tan colours (someone tell the yarn companies!). Secondly, if you can be bold enough to use colours you dislike in moderation, they can look amazingly good by way of contrast with others: brown, for instance, worked beautifully with white, bright pink and dark turquoise.
Chris, experimenting with FrouFrou by Bergere de France
We're also learning about new yarns: Chris is among those experimenting with Frou-Frou, an elastic-ribbon yarn that looks ravishing knitted up. And we're finding out how others knit: everyone seems to have a different way of holding their needles, with a strong northern and Scottish contingent who hold their right needle under their arm.
Joan, Nicky and Sandra demonstrate their knitting style.
