Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Those amazing North Carolina knitters

I'm just back from Charlotte and Asheville and some truly amazing knitters. While in Charlotte, MB and I dropped by Baskets of Yarn and got to see some finished and almost-finished Stash Jackets. I taught my Stash class at the Baskets' Winter Retreat in March. The knitters took my ideas and ran, no, raced with them. Take a look:
This is Margaret, who teaches at Baskets. She made her Stash to wear to a grandchild's wedding next month. And she BEADED it. Now, I'm a novice when it comes to beading -- I've made one beaded bag. Here's a close-up of just one of her beaded sections:
She also used silver beads, pearls, some iridescent knitalong yarn, all in shades of silver, pink and white. Stunning. And for you beaders, she used #8 beads, putting them on with a crochet hook by removing the knit stitch from the left needle, adding a bead, replacing the stitch and then knitting it. Now I'll have to try it on the silver and black Stash I have in progress.

Then there's Diane's stained glass version, using white as windowframes:

This, by the way, is my original Stash jacket. Somehow I never got any photos of it, except the one in Knit Fix. So while MB was photographing at Baskets, she caught me as well:
Then MB and I drove up to Asheville for the weekend, staying at the sunny and welcoming Cedar Crest Inn not five minutes from Yarn Paradise, which owns the literary address of 6 All Souls Crescent. It's in Biltmore Village, on the side of Asheville adjacent to the Biltmore estate, built by one of Edith Wharton's relatives. Wharton liked the place, which says a lot, since she was notoriously picky about the architecture and decoration of houses -- she and an architect friend wrote the first-ever book on interior design, called The Decoration of Houses, published in 1897. But I digress.
The knitters/students at Renee Augins's store are a pleasure. During the Advanced Knit Fix class, in which some of the fixes I show aren't in the book, everyone was jumping right in, hands on.
Here we're fixing a cable cross, no mean feat. And in the other two classes, the students learned entrelac in one morning (now you see why this post is titled with the word "amazing", because heaven knows it took me more than a morning to figure it out) and got their own Stash Jackets going. The color combinations that they've got started are stunning. I'm jealous.
All right, off to write something else with Edith Wharton references. Have a lovely day, all of you. I'm sitting in my studio, Loveday (our long-haired calico cat) curled up asleep on her window perch, next to MB's triptych of my hands knitting as words fall from the needles. Everybody should have as true a friend.