Coming down from FiberCamp 2011

More experiments with community-building in the Boston knitting world and beyond! Last weekend, the Common Cod Fiber Guild hosted the second annual FiberCamp Boston, which we held at MIT in some unused classrooms. It was a little crazy — nobody told us that there were going to be high-schoolers running all over the halls — but we managed to pull off a great event anyway. I ran the registration booth, which was enhanced this year by the fact that we actually had an internet connection, and I still had the opportunity to run one workshop and take a couple of others.

My workshop was meant to be more of a hands-on affair, using the document camera I usually bring when I’m going to present to a large group, but due to some technical difficulties, I was unable to use this machine and was stranded in front of 30-some expectant knitters with nothing but a giant bag of double-knitted samples. So I did a glorified trunk show — showed off the progress of my work in double-knitting techniques, then did Q&A for a little while before showing the very basics of double-knitting — my cast-on, and the general technique of double-knitting. Little did I know that Sara Streeter was filming with the intent to publish … or I would have practiced my spiel, and paid more attention to how many “ums” and “ahs” I interspersed with my talk. Nevertheless, I think it came out OK.

Aside from that, I took half of a photography workshop, then raced off to learn how to knit and purl backwards — not as hard as it sounds — and now I need to figure out how to do that in double-knitting. Then I need to make a double-knit entrelac pattern! I got to hang out with a bunch of awesome people, and I got to show my Whorl’d Tree bag to Kathy Elkins of Webs, who provided the yarn for it.

Next stop: Mind’s Eye Yarns for the Red Line Yarn Crawl on March 26th, where I’ll be at 2pm until they get tired of me. I’ll probably hit Windsor Button beforehand, just because I don’t think I’ll have time to visit Dorchester.