Rhymes with "safe asset"

Man, there's been TONS of knitting around these parts: a lace shawl, a cardigan, some wrist warmers, a hat, a cabled cowl, mystery socks... All of it is secret, but the items will be gifted soon, so I'll show you in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, I had the great fortune of attending a Kaffe Fassett/Brandon Mably lecture and day-long workshop. I've been a great admirer of Mr. Fassett since the early days. I have most of his books and videos, and whenever I get the doldrums, I dip into his rich tapestry world for a visual uplift. Never mind that I've never knitted a pattern of his (some of it is a bit too "Cliff Huxtable" for me) but the workshop sure gave me a hankering to start going BOLD with shapes and colours.

BrandonMably
Glorious Colour!

The gist of the workshop was to take a simple pattern (Persian Poppies in this case), choose tons of colours from the pile, and just start playing. As you can see, we all came up with wildly different results. Brandon was a fun teacher, gently teasing us when our swatches would start looking like "bland porridge" or "slices of muddy potatoes". With his help, we all stepped out of our comfort zones (acid yellow and amethyst purple? Yum!) with dazzling results. I learned a lot.

Kaffeknitting
Kaffe working on a gorgeous scarf

Kaffe&Nicole
Hanging out with the technicolour master

If you get a chance to participate in one of these classes, I highly encourage you to do so! And you may get lucky like I did. There was a door prize and I won!!! I still cannot believe it, but I got a Brandon Mably book, and a kit to make a sweater called Caterpillar from Kaffe Knits Again. That's 24 balls of 4-ply Rowan Scottish Tweed in 12 colours, people! I was SO chuffed!