New Skills

My Minions,

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of spending two glorious hours at Hank, A Yarn Boutique with Llama Una running through the fingers of both hands as I learned the basics of Fair Isle knitting.

Before I get into the class, project, and takeaways, let's talk about this yarn.  It is 100% baby llama, and it is super soft and squishy with a slight halo...it makes my fingers happy!  I'm seriously considering buying an inventory of every color to use for every project that calls for DK weight yarn. Go get some and see if you don't instantly fall in lust with it!

 Our project for the class is the Eden DK hat.  It's not a hat I would have picked out on my own, but I'm liking the way it's working up so far in my yarn.  I think the green is probably the reason I would have overlooked it.  I'm not a fan of green.

Class has mostly been about how to read the pattern for the color work and how to hold the yarns.  I think I could have figured out the pattern on my own with very little learning curve.  Holding the yarn was an entirely different matter.  For the sake of keeping the yarns straight, it was suggested that we hold the main color in our left hand (Continental style) and the contrast color in our right hand. This resulted in a brief lesson on Continental knitting, and more specifically how to pick the yarn that's being held by your left hand to create a knit stitch.  I was shocked to find I could knit the main color with very little movement of my hand.  It was so efficient!  It dawned on me how some knitters are able to knit so fast!

This got me thinking that maybe the Prime Minister's scarf would be less torturous if I used the project to teach myself how to pick English style (not Continental because, let's be honest, doing anything with my left hand is very awkward).  It's been a bit awkward, but I'm not knitting any slower than before and I'm holding out hope that I'll get faster.  Until that happens, I'm still on track to complete the scarf just in time for Easter (I'm going to spare you having to look at the scarf again. It looks the same only a bit longer).

In other knitting news, I ripped out the Empress Mum's headband because I didn't like the way it was turning out.  It was too lacy and not as wide as I would have liked.  So I recast it onto smaller needles and added in extra stitches to have two cables going around the whole thing instead of one.  I was able to make significant progress on this while "watching" the Heir's basketball practice earlier this week. It still looks narrow, but that's because it hasn't been blocked.  I like it much better now!

Until next time,

Jessica, Empress of the Universe