While on vacation in Banff I admired beautiful qiviuk yarn at $138 for 2 ounces, about 200 yards. The small knitted items were soft and light with a beautiful halo. The yarns may well have been the most beautiful yarns ever and, even at that price, I was tempted to buy enough for a small scarf.
But I knew my knitting wouldn’t measure up to that yarn. It’s not that I am a perfectionist! But I want to be a better knitter. I want my knitting to be worthy of beautiful yarn. I want the things I knit to have the look of “hand made” not “home made.”
And so I came home and signed up for Basics Basics Basics, a correspondence course offered by The Knitting Guild of America, TKGA. The course was recently revised by Arenda Holladay, who now acts as the instructor. The three lessons covering pretty much everything necessary for basic knitting: casting on, binding off, garter, stockinette, ribbing, lace and cable stitches, four increases, four decreases, gauge and basic pattern writing. The pattern writing is an optional assignment for students who want to continue on to TKGA’s Masters classes. The student knits swatches for each lesson and sends them to Arenda for a very thorough evaluation. Arenda is amazingly quick to send the swatches back with both compliments and suggestions for improvement. If a student is having difficulty with a particular technique Arenda invites, but does not require, her to try again and send another swatch in for review. I had difficulty with the M1 increase and repeated that swatch for review.
The Basics course does not require the student to master each of the skills. I wanted my first swatches to be perfect. They weren’t! Despite knitting and reknitting, they just weren’t perfect and when Arenda sent them back to me, she had pointed out where I needed to make improvement. Interestingly, the spots pointed out by Arenda were not the ones I had stressed over. Lesson learned! The next two lessons I made a good faith effort to knit my best but sent them off knowing they Arenda would return them with suggestions for how I could make the stitches better.
But I knew my knitting wouldn’t measure up to that yarn. It’s not that I am a perfectionist! But I want to be a better knitter. I want my knitting to be worthy of beautiful yarn. I want the things I knit to have the look of “hand made” not “home made.”
And so I came home and signed up for Basics Basics Basics, a correspondence course offered by The Knitting Guild of America, TKGA. The course was recently revised by Arenda Holladay, who now acts as the instructor. The three lessons covering pretty much everything necessary for basic knitting: casting on, binding off, garter, stockinette, ribbing, lace and cable stitches, four increases, four decreases, gauge and basic pattern writing. The pattern writing is an optional assignment for students who want to continue on to TKGA’s Masters classes. The student knits swatches for each lesson and sends them to Arenda for a very thorough evaluation. Arenda is amazingly quick to send the swatches back with both compliments and suggestions for improvement. If a student is having difficulty with a particular technique Arenda invites, but does not require, her to try again and send another swatch in for review. I had difficulty with the M1 increase and repeated that swatch for review.
The Basics course does not require the student to master each of the skills. I wanted my first swatches to be perfect. They weren’t! Despite knitting and reknitting, they just weren’t perfect and when Arenda sent them back to me, she had pointed out where I needed to make improvement. Interestingly, the spots pointed out by Arenda were not the ones I had stressed over. Lesson learned! The next two lessons I made a good faith effort to knit my best but sent them off knowing they Arenda would return them with suggestions for how I could make the stitches better.
Probably the most important thing the class taught me was to look at my knitting not just critically, but with an eye for why something I didn’t like was happening. Why is a stitch stretched out? Why is there a hole where there shouldn’t be a hole? I didn’t learn to fix everything immediately but I learned to think about it and had suggestions to practice that would fix it. In the end I knew I’d learned a lot when right after sending off my last swatches I cast on the ribbing for a sweater. Thanks to what I had learned in Basics Basics Basics, my ribbing looked so much neater than any ribbing I had ever knit before. Thank you, Arenda!
In my next postings, I’ll photograph the swatches from the three lessons and share some of what I have learned. But right now I’m off to sign up for Level 1 of TKGA’s Masters Knitting Program!
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