25 Slick Tricks with Candace

On Monday I went with my knitting buddies Sharon and Kim up to Lexington for a workshop with Candace Eisner Strick. The workshop was arranged for Sharon's knitting guild. Kim and I were the only "outsiders" there. The rest were all from the guild.

It was an all-day workshop, starting at 9am and running til 4pm. We had about an hour for lunch, which was potluck, provided by the guild. What a yummy array of foods. There definitely was a LOT of food.

Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, so I can't show you pictures of Candace, her lovely kits and samples, the guild, the food, etc. Please do check out her website though. She has some very unique designs, and the "Merging Colors" yarns are incredible. The yarn is soooo soft and the way the colors blend together in the garments is magical. She had all of the samples that are on her website there for us to fondle and drool over.

Candace is a great teacher, and quite entertaining as well. The day flew by and it was quite a nice experience.

A good many of the 25 Slick Tricks I already knew. There were also techniques I had done before but managed to brush up my skills on those a bit. Still others were shown with a slight change from how I was used to doing them. I did manage to learn a few brand new (to me) things that I will definitely put to good use in my knitting future.

Latvian Braids (very cool)
Invisible Cast On for Ribbing (equally cool)
The One-Row Buttonhole (better than the gaping Two-Row Buttonhole)
Knitting in your loose ends as you go
Converting bind off shoulder shaping to short row shaping to eliminate "stair steps"
Binding off over cables


New Sock Pix!!



The first ones are my "blizzard" socks. I try to have socks going when I am travelling, and name them for the situation or place where I was knitting them. These are Koigu. Toe Up (Queen Kahuna style) with a ribbing that I made up because I couldn't get the Melanie's Twist pattern to work out and I got frustrated.

The second pair are my "lodge" socks that I started almost a year ago when we went to the Great Wolf Lodge for spring break. These have an after-thought heel. It was my first attempt at the ATH and truthfully I am not all that thrilled with the way these socks fit. They are definitely cute (LOVE Trekking!) but having not done ATH before, I was afraid to finish them up, not knowing if they were going to be "right" or not. I decided before I left for Diane's to just kitchener those heels and get them off the needles. I think you can see from the photo that there is too much heel. At one point, I may redo the heels (that's the whole point of making them after-thought, right? So you can replace them if you need to) For now I'll live with them. I definitely learned something about ATH socks. And what I need to do to make the next pair better if/when I decide to use that heel again.