I'm Teaching at Sew Expo

We got our Sew Expo teacher information on Friday, along with badges to use on social media.

The class catalog is live on the site, and registration opens on January 16. I am teaching three classes:

  • Make Holes in Your Knitting: The Basics of Lace

  • What Do All These Symbols Mean? How to Read a Knitting Chart

and, of course,

  • Twisting and Turning: Basic Cable Stitches for Texture and Design

These are all classes I’ve taught before in some way, shape, or form, and I am excited to be teaching knitting again. Pass the word around!

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I put together the baby quilt top yesterday and I basted another quilt top with batting and backing. I don’t think it’s my imagination that quilt batting is getting thinner. (This was Warm Company Warm and Natural.) Like everything else, the quality is going downhill.

I love my rotating cutting mat:

This made trimming the hourglass units a breeze. The baby quilt pattern called for eight different pink fabrics and a yard(ish) of white background. That was supposed to make 64 hourglass units. When I got all the units up the design wall—a queen-size white flannel sheet tacked to the wall next to my sewing machine—I discovered I was missing one unit. I got a ninth pink fabric and made four more units and swapped those out with four original ones, just so things wouldn’t be quite so matchy-matchy.

I found the missing unit under something else after the top was sewn together. Oh, well.

I also put a border on the baby quilt. The pattern didn’t call for it, but I decided the quilt needed a border. I used a 10th fabric for that. I have to get a backing for it before I can quilt it, but I’d like to have it done before the end of January.

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Watching the weather forecasts for this coming week has been very entertaining. We got roughly 6" of new snow yesterday, but there is a much larger storm coming in off the Pacific on Tuesday. (The phrase “bomb cyclone” is being tossed around, which sounds ominous but is a legitimate weather term.) I said to the husband that I suspect the Tuesday storm may bring us a windstorm. We get these “back door” cold fronts that come down the mountains from the east, and they’re usually accompanied by a pressure gradient that causes a lot of wind. We’re about due for one. And the storm on Tuesday will be followed by a drop in temperatures. The high on Friday is forecast to be -9F. THAT IS AIR TEMP, NOT WIND CHILL. The low is forecast to be -23F. I need to make sure we have enough heat lamp bulbs for the chicken coop. Hopefully, this cold weather won’t bring a string of house fires.

Of course, I-90 over Snoqualmie Pass was closed again last night due to people in AWD vehicles thinking they are invincible. I continue to be amazed that no one has been killed.

I am mostly caught up from the week of being under the weather. If you haven’t noticed, the podcast did get moved to its own website. That has made keeping track of things on my end much simpler. I’ve still got a thousand little details to track down, but at least now each activity has its own home.