Ohio Star

I'll be travelling quite a bit this year - in addition to the trip to Iceland I mentioned earlier, I'll also be attending KnitEast as one of the teachers. It's being held at the historic Fairmont Algonquin in St.Andrews By-the-Sea in New Brunswick. I was only there for an afternoon back in 1994, and it was truly beautiful - I'm really looking forward to going back.One of the classes I'll be teaching is entitled 'Knitted Quilts' and I've been preparing by knitting swatches which will best illustrate the techniques we'll be covering. The goal of the class isn't to follow one of my patterns in this style, but rather for the students to learn the knowledge to translate pieced quilts into knitting patterns. Nine patch squares such as the swatch shown above are some of the simplest but more involved patterns are possible by using vertical joins such as can be seen in the beginning of an 'Ohio Star':Speaking of Ohio, Robin and I returned last week from our annual road trip to Columbus, where the industry's summer trade show is held once a year. We drove to Toronto to meet up with the lovely Julia Grunau of Patternfish fame, and the three of drove down together. As you can imagine, this resulted in a lot of driving for Robin and I  - about 30 hours worth over a period of one week for the two of, and some 18 hours for Julia. But we wouldn't miss it for anything - it's the one time of year we can count on meeting face to face with all those we usually only interact with through email.Once I returned, I had planned on choosing a raffle winner immediately but that proved futile since I wouldn't be able to ship it as long as Canada Post is on strike - or rather, since Canada Post locked out its striking union workers (the rotating strike which was in effect before the lock-out slowed things up, but this effectively brings everything to an halt). It shouldn't last too long, thankfully - the last time it happened, the government legislated the workers back to work and we expect the same thing will happen before soon. Luckily, the yarn and magazines are also in stock in our Maine and can ship out to any destination in the world (except Canada, of course). As soon as packages can mail out again, I'll pick a winner so anyone who hasn't signed up for the newsletter yet still has a few days.