5.19.2011

Sally Melville Came to Visit

Sally packed 'em in at the DKC last night. It may well have been standing room only.

One of the founders of the DKC told me Sally was the first ever DKC speaker 15 years ago in a church basement. The organizers had planned for 80 people but 135 showed up!

After that they moved to a bigger location and Sally continued to be an annual guest speaker every January for the first 5 years of Guild meetings.

Last night Sally's talk was about her iconic use it all up approach to knitting with small quantities from stash remnants. She talked about the boyfriend sweater that started it all (yup, right after the knit was done, so was her daughter's relationship with said BF.) and then worked through strategies to sort and store stash for best results as well as how to consider the colour possibilities within it.

She had lots of examples incorporated into her talk, all of which were available afterwards to see and feel up close.

Knit designer Glenna C. was in attendance. She brought her recently completed lace weight Pi Shawl which she unfurled during Show and Tell to many collective gasps of wonder. I finally made the effort to introduce myself. I've probably followed Glenna's blog longer than any other so it was nice to chat with her for a few minutes after the meeting, especially since the gloves I'm currently working on are her design.

Tamara and Alissa from Passionknit were sitting just ahead of us. They will be making a presentation on knitting skirts at the June meeting. Tamara's Rav page shows with 8 knitted skirts so far she was at the front of the skirt craze currently going on (witness the sidewinder phenomenon at the Purple Purl and beyond).

Fiona Ellis was in the house as well. She brought a knitted pillow cushion design with applied I cord she made for the magazine "Needle Pulling Thread".

I noticed Elise Duvekot author of Knit One Below was also in the audience.

It was a great knitterly night but I'm afraid I didn't have it in me to continue on afterwards with the others for  post Melville chatter. Instead I was a party pooper racing home just as the first few fat raindrops were falling and honestly only minutes before I myself was falling into bed.

I'm off out the door with the dog now, hopefully before the next round of showers begins.

Thanks for dropping by today!

3 comments:

Brendaknits said...

It sounds like a wonderful evening. Such big name knitters in attendance. enough to reduce the ordinary knitter to observation status, I would think. It was Sally that taught me to sort my stash by colour.

Anonymous said...

Wow -- that night sounds fantastic!

Anonymous said...

Nice to hear about Sally. I am going to retreat with Sally as the teacher on Quadra Island in early October. I hear only good things about her, so am really looking forward to the weekend. Peg on Vancouver Island!