Tuesday, January 27, 2015

January 2015 - meeting notes


The first Kniterary of 2015 saw about 20 Kniterary members brave the extreme cold for another great night.

The Return of Kelly
Our fearless leader has returned and none too late! Although Monica enjoyed organizing our evenings in Kelly's stead, she is very glad to share the pain joys of Kniterary with Kelly, once again.

Kelly and Monica have also started planning this year and have come up with some fun ideas for 2015, including:

February - Denise Powell will talk about Inspiration and Creativity: Where Do You Get Your Inspiration?
March - Knitting Olympics, with competitions in Speed Knitting, Behind the Back Knitting, Tandem Knitting and Blind Knitting. We may even have prizes?!
July & August - as always we will be enjoying some movies; some suggestions include

We also have Veronica in talks with Kelly about doing a third evening of Knits that Fit. Veronica has hosted some incredibly informative and interesting evenings on achieving perfect fit in your knitting. Veronica's first evening talked about altering patterns to get a truly flattering and effective fit. The second evening she demonstrated how and where to take your own measurements. This third evening will be even more discussion of altering patterns for your perfect fit, and we look forward to it immensely.

Our Gallery
One of the pages that we would love to get filled is our Gallery page. We would love to feature photos of members projects. Don't feel like they have to be masterpieces. We want to feature the variety of crafts that our members enjoy...knitting, crocheting, spinning, embroidery, or weaving! We may be called 'Knit'erary, but we want to recognize all of the crafting that our members do!

Knitting Help
Last night at Kniterary, a member was starting her first lace project and had a few questions. The first issue was how to do a provisional caston. This caston provides you with a row of live stitches that are held while you continue with your knitting, until they picked up and used within the pattern. They are especially useful in symmetrical shawls or scarves, sleeves or hems, and even on button bands. In this particular pattern, they were to be used in a garter tab to start a shawl, and we decided to forgo the provisional caston because it would only be using 3 stitches and would not alter the look of the pattern at all.

If we were to have used it, here are a couple of great videos to help you create this very useful caston.


She also wanted help reading the charts in her pattern and there are some great articles out there, including this one from Knitty.com.

Please feel free to send us any crafting questions you might have, and we will answer them on our next Kniterary Night, as well as writing up any help we provide here on the blog.

Vintage Knitting
Without belabouring the entire presentation, for anyone who would like to look through the presentation again, here is the PowerPoint.


And here are the presentation slide notes.
You can also view the handout (with Google instructions, and link list).