(The Swedish equivalent of Hi Y’all! :-))
Cornelia Tuttle Hamilton here and I am thrilled to be this month’s guest blogger, but not as thrilled as I am about being the featured knitting instructor for K&YA’s retreat in Quechee, VT this April!!
While knitting came into my life some 36 years ago (yikes!), and yoga only five, the combination of the two has been wonderful. At this point I cannot imagine my life without either one and when Lisa reached out with the opportunity to be part of one of the Knitting and Yoga retreats it was like a dream come true.
You’re going to be in for some fun knitting during this retreat! First off, I will be teaching my revolutionary DropStitch Openwork™ technique which allows you to create geometric openings in your knitting without having to break the yarn for making the columns.
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| Flat Shoals Scarf |
I had been working with self-striping yarns for yarns and wanted to do something new. I had already pioneered large buttonhole openings in fabrics but now I wanted to see how the self-striping yarns would look with columns in between the openings. I knew I didn’t want to have to cut the yarn for every column and have all those ends to weave in later. Too much work. It took two years of somewhat grumpy pondering but one day I just sat down and the technique was born!
The other workshop will be about Surface Stranding where you will learn how to capture a contrasting yarn on the front of your knitting allowing you to use a wide variety of thicker and hands-on yarns. Yarns that have a lot of ego, is how I like to put it. You’ll be able to put the technique to use working on my Alcott Laptop Cover.
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| Alcott Laptop Cover |
For the past few years I have been developing Heaven’s Hand, my own line of mostly silk yarns and I am proud to say that my latest addition, Sister Silk, is featured in the S/S issue of Creative Knitting Magazine! A milestone!! I thought it would be fun for you to get to sample the yarns and we will be doing just that in the form of a Yarn Tasting at the retreat. It will be a blind test allowing you to use all your senses to match the yarn with its description! Great fun!
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| Creative Knitting Garment |
Late last fall I got back into yarn dyeing. I had done quite a bit of vegetable dyeing when my boys were small and I lived in the Swedish countryside, but that was a while back. I really enjoyed it and so I decided to develop my series Colors by Cornelia using my Heaven’s Hand silk yarns as a base. Inspired by the watery beauty of impressionist paintings, many of the colorways are subtle and tonal, some even romantic.
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| Colors by Cornelia |
It is my great joy to develop new stitch patterns and techniques and share them with fellow knitters. New knitting techniques give you more possibilities and more confidence to experiment on your own and allowing you to personalize your knitting in ways you never thought of before! I’ll be bringing an assortment of yarn, books and patterns for perusal and/or purchase.
I am looking forward to seeing you all on the retreat!
Happy knitting in the meantime,
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| Cornelia Hamilton |
That's me!!! Did you actually make that top I was wearing in it? It was kinda fun.
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