Monday, June 18, 2007

Lesson No. 1

Stacey has such an interesting color sense. Under normal circumstances, you'd think that brown, pink, red, and purple might look really weird together, but the Romney X roving I got from her at MSWF this year spins up into... it's not really tweedy, but it's not really marled, either. It reminds me a little bit of the Crystal Palace Taos yarn because of the way the colors change. I'm going to ply the singles together after I finish spinning the rest of the wool. Picture forthcoming, of course. One of the neat things about this wool is that it has a little mohair-like fuzziness, even though it doesn't actually have any mohair in it. It's just... fuzzy. It might calm down a little when it's plied and dunked to set the twist.
In other news, I've taken on the challenge of teaching one of my friends to knit. It's really encouraging when someone says, "You know? I think I'd be a really good knitter", and then it turns out to be right. Some people have it, some people don't, and some people pick it up along the way. In her case, she's picking it up really quickly. It's very gratifying to be able to succeed in teaching someone something. Her first lesson was casting on, and then knit and purl stitches; I gave her a homework assignment, which was to practice every day for at least half an hour, the theory being that the more she practices, the better she'll get. Thursday, she's supposed to have another lesson... and I have to figure out what the next thing on my teaching list is. Depending on how things go, it might be increasing and decreasing, or it might be a few textures like ribs and seed stitch. Or something. Now I wish I hadn't gotten rid of all my acrylic yarn. Oh, well... the elementary school will make good use of it next autumn.

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