Get Your Learn On

Sadly, I will no longer be able to go to The Verdant Gryphon Open House occurring later this month. The Fiasco gave himself a hernia on his second day of teaching (poor guy) and his surgery has changed our whole schedule around. However, this does mean that he'll be getting better sooner than later, which is the most important thing, and perhaps I'll be able to meet up with my fellow Bugga-lovers some other time.

In the meantime, I'm really starting to look forward to October! Not only is there Rhinebeck, but the weekend before that is Stitches East in Hartford, Connecticut.

 

I've gone the past couple of years just to visit the impressive market floor, but this year I think I'd like to take a class, as well. There are so many to choose from! If I were wealthy and capable of time traveling, my schedule would look like this:

So many cool things! Socks, shawls, stitches, finishing, sweater fit, embellishments, spinning, weaving, sketching... ahhhhhhhhh overload! I'm leaning towards the Friday AM class with Shannon Okey, author of The Knitgrrl's Guide to Professional Knitwear Design and owner of Cooperative Press, an indie publishing company that puts out lovely knitting books. I'm interested in the class, which discusses how to take what you see in stores and on runways and recreate it in your own knitting designs, but I'd also really just like to meet her. Although learning to weave would be pretty cool, too. Decisions! Anyone going to Stitches?

Also, in truly excellent news, Craftsy members can use a coupon code to get 20% off of Stitches class fees or 50% off market price admission! For those unfamiliar, Craftsy is a craft-related website dedicated to not just knitting but sewing, quilting, cake decorating, jewelry making, paper crafts, you name it. Its biggest draw, in my opinion, are the classes it offers itself. I've signed up for four classes, two of which were free, and two were purchased at half price through various sales and special offers:

That averages out to $10 a class, which is truly a steal. I've only just started the pattern writing class but will be focusing on working through them all now that I have more free time. I definitely recommend checking out the website if you haven't already. I have a pattern store there, too, as well as my design-related projects listed. It's a new-ish site so they are constantly evolving and updating features, but I found that the easiest way to add a project to the site is to go to the pattern page for a design and click the "+Add a finished project" button. For a while you couldn't see which projects were made from which Craftsy patterns, but this seems to have fixed that.

Do you use Craftsy? Just Ravelry? Any other social-media-knitting-related-sites? Do you buy hardcopies of patterns from festivals or yarn stores?