Yarnover

I had a most excellent time teaching at Yarnover in Minneapolis last weekend. Yarnover is the once-a-year conference for the Minnesota Knitting Guild. June Hemmons Hiatt was the keynote speaker Friday night. She wrote the amazing The Principles of Knitting tome. Everything you would ever want to know about knitting is inside it.

Her website is PrinciplesofKnitting.com. Her latest passion has been belt knitting, the very efficient knitting method made famous on the Shetland Islands. June and her son Jesse have created a new fangled version of the knitting belt -- beautiful and in multiple colors.

I taught a class on methods of color knitting based on a beautiful flower motif in Jokkmokk Flowers pattern. This gorgeous pattern is based on a mitten in Erika Nordvall Falck's wonderful mitten collection from Norrbotten, Sweden. The flowers are a regional pattern, and widely used in Sami mittens. Her former mother-in-law used the motif often in family mittens knitted in many colors.

When a knitter works a larger color work motif, like the the flower in the Jokkmokk Flowers mitten, he or she must know what to do with longer stranded floats. In the class we sampled methods of stranding, variations on what to do with long floats, and experimented with two alternative ways of doing color work. 

I had great fun, and the students were the best! Seriously! Gold stars, guys.

I also had a chance to meet up with River City Yarn store owners, Barb and Cynthia. River City Yarns is a great store in Edmonton, Alberta. Being dyed-in-the-wool Canadians, Barb and Cynthia have named their store brand yarn "Hat Trick," dyed in the National Hockey League team colors. They interviewed me along with Lars Rains. Here is a part of that fun...