Birkenwasser knits

My choice from this year's class program at Jyväskylä Summer Knit Festival was Nancy Marchant's Grab bag of brioche techniques. I have a few brioche designs of my own, but that doesn't mean that I know it all. And if you can learn from the Queen of Brioche, I believe it's better to use the opportunity!


Nancy's class was on Saturday afternoon, and unfortunately, it started at the same time that my trunk show finished so I was a bit late (sorry for that!). I was there well before the cast on of the class project, though, so I got started with two-colour long tale cast on with everyone else. During the class we also learned syncopated brioche, crossing brioche stitches, mixing brioche with garter stitch, cabling brioche stitches, and, finally, stem-stitch bind off.



Of course, we were the best class she ever had (and I bet she doesn't say that to every class ;) You can see how much we got done in three hours! Someone finally got the courage to ask if Nancy could sign her book, and after that there was a line up of brioche books to be signed. I only remembered after the class that I should have brought the Bart & Francis scarf that I knitted earlier this year. You can't remember everything...


If you ever have the possibility to take Nancy's brioche class, I recommend you do!

Nancy Marchant is the queen of brioche, and I've been wanting to knit something designed by her for quite some time already. So when Lankakauppa Kerä announced the beginning of their year long From Head to Toe challenge and the second item to knit was a scarf, I knew that it was time to pick one of Nancy's designs. I chose Bart & Francis for the interesting brioche pattern. The instructions are great, and there are both written and charted instructions. The pattern has enough going on to keep you interested while knitting, and after a couple of repeats you don't need the instructions anymore as you can always look at the previous repeats. My only problem with the instructions was that there seemed to be a mix up of right and left slanting decreases, but looking at the pictures soon fixed the problem.




This was a nice pattern for learning a couple of new techniques: two-colour Italian cast-on and Italian bind-off. The cast-on technique is easy and creates a nice beginning for two-colour brioche patterns. The bind-off wasn't so easy and I managed to get it wrong in the beginning. It's also known as the kitchener bind-off, and it's done with a tapestry needle. Unlike grafting a seam, such as the toe of a sock, there's only one end to finish, and for me that made it more difficult to see which way the needle should go into the stitches. You can see how the beginning looks crooked and then the stitches start to look good. Of course, I should have started over when I noticed that it was going wrong, but I was lazy and decided that no-one is ever going to take such a close look at my scarf anyway.


I added one pattern repeat to make the scarf a little bit wider, and then simply went on for as long as there was yarn left. This actually produced about the same length as the instructions said. I took the scarf project with me for our winter holiday in Indonesia, but I didn't get much knitting done and I missed the deadline. Having eventually finished, I believe I'm still in for the 9 items KAL. Although, I did also miss the wrist warmers stage... Putting effort on the sweater stage now, while also trying to finish my gloves for stage three.

It's RUMS day.