What I Did on My Holidays

Was teaching this week at the Cottenham Summer School. I suppose the summer school is about 300 people in all, and covers a variety of activities from bridge and bricklaying to walking and watercolours. This year, they included knitting, and a lovely group of ladies turned up on Wednesday morning... I'd anticipated 7 of them, but the class filled towards the end of registration so we were a full house with 12 students plus me... here are Judy, Tracey, Diana, Gill, Christine and Maggie:

We covered various things over the days, including I-cord, colourwork (Fair-Isle/intarsia/slip stitching; slip-stitches were a favourite...); a bit of cabling; different ways of making holes (intentionally), and some non-linear-type stuff - log-cabin, short-rowing... bit of dry felting to embellish felted knitting; also scribble lace courtesy Debbie New. Here's the sample swatch I made up combining a lot of those techniques - I did have some individual swatches as well... This ought to become a scarf, if only because I've used nearly a ball of my very beautiful and quite pricey Swirl DK from Stash in it. And actually I do quite like it although it's not at all my usual colours!

Here are some more pictures of things people made:

Scribble lace from Mary from Sheffield (L), wielding the biggest baddest circular needle I've ever seen; and from Gill (R) using smaller needles but working drop-stitch to get the loopy effect; and below, from Maggie who doubled the fine mohair...

Here are Tracey's samples: she's going to be making scarves with these for the forseeable future...

and Addy's sample, which did all sorts of things and came out gorgeous (the row which looks green here is actually metallic gold, but the tables are turquoise which threw the camera completely...); this woman has only been knitting for a few months... she also makes the most beautiful things in basketry. Was too gobsmacked when she was showing us her rainbow-coloured fishing creel to take photographs, unfortunately....

Gill did a sample with holes, using Rowan Paper Tape, which looked quite a bit like coral;

My first time teaching knitting; my first time teaching a session longer than 2 hours... and it was a bit of a deep-end thing; three whole days. Came out feeling as if I'd been through a mangle, but in a good way!