Stephen West.

 Forgive my cell phone pictures. I actually had my Nikon with me, but ended up not taking it out.

This past Saturday, I took a top-down shawl class with Stephen West at MadTosh.

It was a ton of fun! We all knit a little swatch with a few different increase techniques in the first half of the class. The second half, Stephen talked about his design process and all sorts of ways to approach designing and shaping a shawl.

He brought a ton of his designs for us to ooh and ahh over. We were able to try them on, and even got to see some unreleased designs. I'll tell you now, there is a pattern that will be in Book 5 that I must knit. I saw it on the hanger and honestly thought it was going to be really unflattering, but I loved it on.

After the class, there was a reception where we all socialized, took pictures, and had patterns/books signed.

I of course wore my Spectra. I bought the Vulpix pattern while I was in the shop so I'd have something for Stephen to sign, but I think next up on my needles is going to have to be Clockwork. There were a lot of Clockworks at the class, and it made me really want one. I'm already playing with color ideas.

Vat Dye Discharge Workshop.

Although a few days late, as promised I have the full post on the Vat Dye Discharge workshop with Janet Taylor.

Essentially, what vat dye discharge does is take out the color where you apply it and drop in a new color at the same time. For example, the picture I already posted:

Here, the red was dyed first, and then I stamped on the gold. It took out the red so that the gold would show up. This was on charmeuse silk.

Another scarf I did is on habotai (or china silk):

The difference here is that the discharge part of the process moved faster than the dye, leaving a halo effect around the shapes.

We created big stamps the size of the scarves to make the patterns, but you can also screen print with it. We rolled our concoctions on...

And then stamped them on the fabric...

From here on out will be miscellaneous pictures from the workshop. If you're interested in learning the process yourself, Janet will be teaching the process at Penland in April and possibly at Arrowmont in the near future as well. I'm seriously considering going to Penland so I can explore this some more.

That's all for today. Coming soon, I finished a pair of socks that I can finally show off!