… on my basic breathing skills, which seem to come and go somewhat erratically, thanks to this cold.
Chris and I taught our beginner’s lace knitting class yesterday. Biggest lesson: fifteen students is too many. People picked things up at different rates, of course, so we had to do a lot of moving from one person to the next, quickly assessing individual situations and changing gears. Margaret, the owner of The Golden Fleece, helped out too, which made things better. By the time our last student left, everyone had gotten her shawl cast on, had learned how to read a chart, and knew which parts of the chart to repeat to work both havles of a top-down triangular shawl. (When we have a moment, Melissa will convert the class notes and the chart to a pdf, so I can post it on-line, and we’ll include pics of the shop sample.)
Once I got home, completely exhausted, I had a nice, long soak in the tub, then charted up a longish swatch for a new shawl idea and sat up past midnight knitting it because I couldn’t bear to sleep until I’d seen how it worked up. I have four shawls all going on at once inside my head, demanding to be swatched, written down, and knit up—and it’s beginning to feel a bit crowded in there.
I can sympathize with teaching a large group of knitters. I teach beginning knitting to 4th-8th graders at summer school in classes of 10. One pair of hands is not enough and I appreciate it when there are one or two returnees in the class. They can be so helpful.