My dear sister Annie Fain is traveling in France and sending me news about the fabulous food she's been eating, Bal folk dancing, and the kind people she has been meeting. I am lured into her world there as I dearly love to travel. While I rely on her stories to add some foreign spice to my day, I look for adventure here at home.
The most recent adventure in my life has been a dive into a deep-end of sorts: what ensued was me teaching my first knitting workshop. My class was full and took place at the John C. Campbell Folk School. All beginners, my students introduced themselves and buckled up for the journey.
We began discussing the relationship between needle size and yarn size then casted-on and soon they were knitting for the first time! What fun! The weekend progressed from there into a glorious fiber experience: in the mornings we warmed up our hands and fixed mistakes made in the wee-hours of the night, while practicing knitting and talking at the same time. We moved from knitting to purling, and ribbing. After lunch Saturday I took my class to Brasstown's local yarn store, the Yarn Circle, to dabble in the "what-if's" of knitting projects. After hours of knitting, I reminded them to look up and far away! something every enthusiastic knitter need not forget - so we visited the sheep at the barn, the pregnant ewes, our two Great Pyrenees, the shy kitty, and the rams living strategically far from the unbred ewes. Sunday morning we added increasing, decreasing, and casting-off to the list as well as reading gauges which led to a fun sweater-making discussion.
At the end of every class at the Folk School the students come together to display their work in an event called Show-and-Tell. Here we get to see what others experienced during their class. We all lucked out this weekend because there was a very generous chocolate making class going on. I sampled espresso flavored truffles, a rich layer cake, fudge of some sort and more until I learned that the key was not to look the students from the chocolate class in the eye for fear of being lured to their table again.
Yes ~ chocolate is a reason to digress and so I have. But let me take you back around to the knitting table where we had our lovely samples on display.
My student Brigitta Remole standing in front of our table
