It IS About Choices

When I read Kellie's post below, it made me smile, because her last statement really sums up my knitting philosophy. Knitting is about choices! Since then I have been on the road teaching most of the time. Today is my last day with students before I head back to California tomorrow.

I have taught a variety of classes on this trip and the thing that students seem to respond to more than anything else is I give them permission to have their own "right" answer. For my own knitting I often have "rules and guidelines" that I follow because they work for me, my style and my personality. When I share those in the classroom, I call them "Gwen's rules for Gwen". I will RARELY use "always" or "never" in a class, because so often there is more than one "right answer".

So this got me thinking.....do I have any universal rules in the world of knitting? This is what I came up with:

1. Be consistent, at least within each project. What ever choices you do make, use the same answer/process/technique throughout that project.
2. When someone compliments you on a project say "thank you" and possibly share that it was made by your own two hands. DO NOT try and point out every little mistake or imperfection.
3. Knitting should be fun. This doesn't mean that you will never have moments of frustration or confusion, but BY FAR, the fun, good, positive, relaxing moments should always outweigh any negatives.

There might be others, but this is all that I could come up with that I felt were TRULY universal. What are yours?

Read More

Glad to Be Here, Gwen!

I'm Kellie and I am thrilled to be one of the Knitting Professors with Gwen. I am appreciative of her kind introduction and can say all the same good things about her. Frankly, I think of her as a true knitting genius, and love the way she teaches and designs. I look forward to posting here and exploring both the technical and artistic sides of knitting.
By way of introduction, I have been knitting since I was a child, and am almost completely self-taught. After learning the basics in a children's class as a young girl, I found myself fascinated but without known resources, such as shops or books, so I would look at sweaters with a magnifying glass while poking around with a knitting needle. In this way I learned the structure of the knitted fabric first, then how to follow patterns and read about knitting much, much later. The first time I followed a written pattern, I was in my twenties. For all the years in between, I just made it up as I went along. Here is one story that illustrates some of my knitting life: I taught myself to do cables without a cable needle in about 1980, by carefully examining a cabled sweater and discovering that the stitches were knitted in exactly the same way, they were just out of order. So, I took my stitches off the needle and manually reversed them, then knitted them. When I found shops and books and patterns some years later, I thought that cable needles were a brilliant convenience. It has made me smile to see the emergence of cabling without a cable needle as something new and amazing. I can do it both ways, but I really appreciate the help that a cable needle gives. So there you have it-knitting is about choices and there is really no wrong way to knit. In the end though, this learning process has served me well and I look forward to helping you understand your stitches better so you can have absolute confidence about your knitting.

Read More

Welcome to Our Newest Professor

Starting today, the Knitting Professor blog becomes the Knitting Professors -- yes plural. I am excited to announce that Kellie Nuss of Knitting Inspiration, a great friend, fabulous sample knitter and knitting instructor extraordinaire will be joining me here!

Kellie visited me for a couple of days before we headed west across the state to teach at Stitches West in Santa Clara. During our drive I shared my long time wish to have this blog be more of a "conversation" regarding knitting techniques and the choices that we make. Kellie said she was up for it -- so here we go. And don't be surprised if the look of the blog as well as the name changes over the next few months to better reflect our combined personalities.

In some ways we are a lot alike (we both love sharing our knowledge and are GIANT knitting geeks) but we are also very different (I am a HUGE extrovert, Kellie is much more of an introvert). So, as I often promise, I expect that our postings will be much more frequent than you have historically seen on this blog. But I think that this time it might REALLY come to pass! In the mean time, if you have any questions you would like to have answered, please leave us a comment and we will start sharing our answers.

Once again -- Welcome Kellie!!!

Read More