Everyone’s a Critic

Yesterday I was up in Scarsdale teaching and Gerry was out with the kids, leaving the cats alone in the house. Unforuntately, the litter box got pushed up against the wall so it was inaccessible. Yes, you guessed it, one cat (Butkis, we think…) was compelled to relieve himself outside of his normal field of litter. Right on one of my designs which I left out on the floor by my chair. Fabulous.

What was even better was that I didn’t realize this until a friend came over and I reached down to pick up the design. Oy. Just when you get past this phase with the kids, now the animals start in…

It was a funny if relatively unpleasant end to a great day!

The classes at Sticks and String (45 Spencer in Scarsdale – by the train station) went really well! It’s a beautiful shop with a really exceptional selection of luxury yarns. They tend to specialize in high quality yarns that create good stitch definition – which is a relief from the all-novelty-all-the-time fever of the past few years. They do have some lovely novelty yarns, too, but it’s clear that they concentrate on knitting as an art and skill and not something to ‘get through quickly’ in order to get yet another boa scarf finished!

My only disappointment was that I wish the inc/dec class had been better attended. It really IS a great class, but the title isn’t very sexy (I have to work on that…) so it doesn’t draw the crowds it deserves. At any rate, both classes were really terrific – the students were engaged and full of good questions and ideas – everyone cabled like an Irish fisherman and we had some horizontal icord going by the end of the 2nd class. More than anything else, I feel like I empowered some knitters to feel that they can do ANYTHING that they have a passion to do (with yarn, that is… – or in other things, too!)

Today I’m veging – crocheting swatches and getting design submissions together for Classic Elite Yarns – but most especially I’m playing around with yarns from Art Yarns.

After my class Iris Schreier, the designer behind Art Yarns, graciously met me at her office to load me up with inspiring yarns and fibers. Tremendous! I’ll be using some of it for some designs which have already sold, and swatching with the rest. Her yarns are just exceptional, and have very individual and identifiable colorways.

I’ve also been living in yarn heaven when a super box arrived from Goddess Yarns. I hadn’t really played with these yarns much, but what I’d seen I loved! They sent yarns for me to use for some final projects for the calendar, and the selection and quality of the yarns is amazing! I’m especially in love with Emanuella – the merino yarn that has the most amazing spring. It’s a bit finer than other springy merinos I’ve seen, which makes it better for crochet.

Now I need to really buckle down on the crochet calendar. I’ve been editing patterns and revising photos as they have come in, so now that I’m at the point of formatting each pattern in Quark it should go relatively quickly. I also have everything in a related database so I can just export the info in the order that I need, so that there’s a nice uniformity. But it’s still going to be a haul.