Knitting at Southern Decadence

While I was in New Orleans, two new friends asked if I would teach them to knit. So I brought one of them down to the Quarter Stitch, and we perused yarn. Now anyone who knows me knows that I am a self proclaimed yarn snob, and I prefer the high end yarns. So we looked at Malabrigo Rios, and a few others. They settled on Malabrigo worsted. JP likes orange, and got glazed carrot. Mike likes pink and got something that I cannot remember now. But it was PINK!

This is the glazed carrot that JP fancied.

This is the pink that Mike fancied.

Using the long-tail cast on, I put 20 stitches on each needle. I showed them the basic knit stitch, and warned how not to add stitches on the end by knitting the loose stitch below. They caught on fairly quickly. JP was trying to knit loosely, and Mike's endeavour reminded me of my own first scarf: tight to the point of being able to stand up by itself. There were some obvious screw ups (who doesn't make some mistakes the first time they knit something?) but by and large, the lads got it. Later I showed JP how to purl, and to make stockinette. We kept a three stitch border of garter on each side, to keep it from curling, but he got the purl stitch pretty quickly. I warned him about yarn-overs, and he liked the look and feel of the stockinette. He did have, however,  29 stitches on his needles the last time I saw his work, but since they live in California, I reckon some other teacher is going to have to correct JP's tendency to unwittingly increase his scarf.

JP hard at work.

Mike hard at work.

While the lads were hard at work on their garter rows, I had frogged a project, and was intent on casting on 220 stitches, sans stitch markers to mark every 25 stitches. It was heavy going, since I was also trying to keep an eye on the newbies. I think they got it, and they have since discovered that one can learn knitting techniques on YouTube. I hope to see them again, and I hope that knitting takes with them.