Knitting Mondays: Taking a Class

Every knitter – no matter how experienced, no matter how skilled, no matter how many years you’ve been knitting – has holes in their knowledge.

For me, it’s knitting with beads.  I’ve dabbled in it, but I’d never completed a full project, and I knew I wanted to learn more.  As luck would have it, knit designer Laura Nelkin was scheduled to come to Toronto, to teach at class at Lettuce Knit.  Laura’s one of the best designers working with beaded knits; her designs are beautiful, interesting, and clever. She’s got designs for those just starting out with beads, and designs for knitters seeking a serious challenge.

Her class “Advanced Lace with Beads“, filled up quickly, and I was happy to have a place on the list.

Laura, in action

And what fun it was!

Experimenting and learning.

We worked a small sample swatch, to try out several ways of adding beads to our work.

Fun and educational

We made nupps (and a few swear words, too, for those of us whose needles were too blunt to work that pesky p7tog).

Loose nupps are the best kind of nupps.

And we played with color combos.

I learned lots of great stuff – and not just about knitting with beads.

Laura shared a genius trick for working with charts…

Brilliant!

If the chart shows the WS rows, use a highlighter to highlight those rows, and highlight the corresponding WS definitions of the stitches on the chart legend. That way, you’ll always know which way you should be going on a particular row, and how to work a given symbol’s stitch on that side.  Simple and so very very helpful.

As a knitting teacher, I don’t get to take nearly enough classes, but every time I do, I learn something. I usually learn something about the subject matter in question, of course, but there’s always at least one other nugget – a clever tip, a suggestion for an easier way to do something, an explanation of a technique that helps your understanding.  After all, there’s no way we can all know everything, and a different perspective is sometimes just what you need to expand your thinking, or add to your knowledge.

I love taking classes. If you haven’t taken one recently, I can’t recommend it highly enough.