I have just got home from this course with Jane Crowfoot – I am an exhausted but very happy and very humble knitter 🙂 Lots of piccies to show you!
I’d thoroughly recommend this course to any knitter – you are bound to learn something.

I’ve had Jane’s book “Finishing Techniques for Hand Knitting” for ages.

Mastering mattress stitch from this book improved the quality of my finished garments by a huge leap so I was already a fan.

I learnt heaps on the course – I thought I was pretty good at finishing – how wrong I was!

Among other things, the course covered mattress stitching, a fab way of using short row shaping in shoulder to make it neater to sew up, several techniques for sewing up shoulders (including a truly scary one where you rip the cast off undone 😯 ), neat button holes and the epiphany moment for me – how to pick up stitches neatly around the neck – I have been making a horrible error all these years…..

I spent much of the day muttering things like “that’s witchcraft” or how could I have knit for so long and not known that?”

Here’s some of my “work” from the course

A fabulous montage of squares…

My error filled attempt at a neckline (but I now know what I’m doing wrong)…

Apparently “pick up and knit” just means pull the loops through the fabric onto the needle….it’s 100 times neater and quicker than the way I did it and I don’t get an ugly ridge.

Front and back of how I used to do it…-ick! ugly! 😮 In case you’re interested, I would pull the loop through the fabric onto the needle, then do a knit stitch before pulling the next loop through the fabric. Useful it you want stability but just look at it – ughhh…

… my mattress stitch, sewn up with bright green yarn…

and simulated sleeve sewn in with mattress stitch…

And finally, my master piece! a mattress stitched shoulder, with the cast off’s pulled out! the brown line is my stitching – it looks like it was all knitted in one piece.

This was the point at which I started muttering about Witchcraft!! 😆