Scottish Sundays, and a Glorious Day of Knitting

I'll start you off with a Glorious Day of Knitting, which could also have been named "Day of Frantic Driving, Intensive Estonian Knitting and Utter Exhaustion" but that doesn't really get people to buy tickets. So they went with Brei- en Haakdag instead. This being a Dutch event an'all.

After some well placed advise and misplaced sense of direction, we reached the event with 5 minutes to spare before the course started. Our frantic re-routing by way of a 80km road didn't leave us much time to breathe, let alone stop for coffee or a bathroom break. You get the picture as we reached the venue. I should add at this point that we were not the last ones to get to class. Minor triumph, but only that.

We took the Estonian Colour and Lace Knitting Course from the Dutch Knitters. They started out by telling us that this is normally a 3-day course, crammed into 3 hours, and to be honest, it did show. At the end we were rushed to finish the Lace instructions because the next class was waiting, while at the start we were shown a large collection of books we might be interested in. I'd think they might want to turn the order of events around, as they kindly provide a list of interesting books with the written instructions. That aside, I learned a lot.

Lace practise

Since I've already made the Laminaria, Aeolean and the Echo Flowers Shawl in the past, I'd met the lace techniques that were in the course already. This came in handy when my neighbours had a question, and at least I got my knitted cast on corrected, as I knew I was doing something wrong with that. We started with the colourwork, and this is what I came for!

Estonian braids

Don't you just love the different braids? Not all of it is great looking, I got the tension and the order of the tails wrong a bit at the start, but wow, I love it! the best thing is that I caught most of it from the instructions, so I'll be able to reproduce them all.

After the class ended we went down to the fair part of our day, and spent some time oggling and coo-ing some lush yarns, but I managed to keep to my wish list and only get spinning fibres. Obviously, the Belgians had some nice things so I scored a 500gr hank of yarn that is to be dyed, and two cones of merino, one black, one magenta.
It was lovely to find some new yarns and a shop I knew of but hadn't seen before, Penelope Crafts.They stock Cascade which I love for a 'simple' yarn. Mom got a cardigan's worth of blue and matching sock yarn so she can make a set ;)

As far as the Scottish Big Plan goes, boy is it ever so hard to keep going. When the rug got pulled it didn't just take away my ooomph, but also quite a large chunk of the base I was working from. With the buffer gone, this is turning into a very different sort of game. Wrong decisions start looking attractive all of a sudden, which is to say that one should be content with what one has, and not aspire to have what one needs. I've got my job until the end of May and quite likely beyond. It feels wrong to not want to have it, but..... oh go on, I need to stop myself from moaning about it. Now, if only I could find that little bit of Oooomph back, that would be nice.

Secret Knitting

One part of the Grand Scottish Plan (it goes by many names) was to find something to do that could be exported along with me. Something to do regardless of my position on the globe. The Secret Knitting is to be sent off this week, so I better get on with writing down the pattern, the instructions, and teach myself how to do layouts etc.



Meanwhile, I'm spending quite some time rehearsing for the Queen Symphony that we'll be performing on the 28th with Harmonie Cecilia Princenhage for their jubilee. Today was the first rehearsal with orchestra, and I've decided that the director is DH's long lost older twin brother from another mother. Makes it a lot easier and pleasing to the eye to keep focus on his directions. Ha! It's not even close to what we usually sing as this is a project (with 140 singers), and I hate to say I love this so much more. Next time there's a classical project and I'm in town, I'm definitely joining in.
During breaks, I'm making lists for the other big huge plan of bringing dyeing, spinning and knitting to the not-yet-yarnies. Oh boy.

PS. I don't know what happened to last week's pictures, or which they were or I'd put them back. Ehm, sorry 'bout that.