Fabulous Workshop!

Today I took a three-hour workshop with Kristin Nicholas at Colorful Stitches in Lenox, MA. We all brought along a knitted swatch, and proceeded to learn all sorts of fabulous ways to decorate it with duplicate stitch and embroidery. But first Kristin showed us lots of her projects, many of them from her most recent book, Kristin Knits, showing us how the overstitching changed the nature of the items. She also suggested some great ideas, such as decorating a plain store-bought sweater with the stitches we would be learning. Her enthusiasm and energy were catching, and throughout the afternoon I heard nothing from the participants but the most excited praise and exclamations that we could actually do these things! It was so very empowering, and ever so much fun. Afterwards, she presented a slide show on how she works with color and how she gets her inspiration. She encouraged us to open our eyes and see color combinations in everything around us. She sees them not only in such expected places as flowers against their leaves and the sunflowers in a field, but in the rusting old trucks in her neighbor's yard! The slides were great, and I highly recommend her blog if you'd like to see examples of her photography.

I'd decided to knit the fingerless flower gloves from her book, but the colors just weren't me. So I picked out four other colors of her Julia yarn, but thought perhaps I might take the opportunity to run them by her. I'd tried to balance light and dark colors, but watching her evaluate them together was really educational, and while two of my colors stayed in the mix, she suggested a few better possibilities to substitute for the remaining two. She then sketched out the mitt with colors indicated to help me remember. How very nice of her!

If you ever get the opportunity to take one of her workshops, or see her slide show, don't pass it up!