Free Range Knitting: An Artful Scrap Shawl
With Celeste Nossiter
Looking for a new knitting challenge?
In this knitting workshop, you will knit without patterns or written instructions. All you need is needles, a variety of different yarns and curiosity to create your very own unique shawl.
Be ready to play and make it up as you go along with the Instructor’s guidance.
Start with casting on a small number of stitches and continue using short rows, textures and colors to create a one of a kind shawl.
Paint with yarn using garter stitch, stockinette, yarn overs, dropped stitches, seed stitch and easy short rows.
Once you get started you won’t want to stop!
This workshop is a good fit for an adventurous intermediate knitter. Even if you don’t know all these stitches, you’ll learn them as we go along.
The morning begins with samples and a demo, casting on, and learning short rows. In the afternoon, you will learn more stitches, while knitting and adjusting to get a good shape.
- Skill level Intermediate
- Age appropriate 18+
- Materials fee None
- Students should bring
10-12 different colors/textures of small amounts of yarn in worsted weight, appropriate sized (between sizes 5-8) circular needles 32” long, lunch, a drink, and notetaking materials.
Homework: look through your stash for scraps of different colors, textures and fibers; choose mostly worsted weight but novelty yarns can be added too. Put them all in a large bowl. Spend a couple of days looking at them, adding or subtracting yarns until you get a combination that you love. You could go monochromatic or wild.
Instructor
Celeste NossiterAll my life the joy and mystery of color has been my motivating principle, first in painting and now in knitwear design. I have a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA from Pratt Institute but after being a starving artist and unable to get a full time college teaching job, I gave up that dream. Twenty years later I discovered Fair Isle knitting. In 2003 a knitting tour of Shetland, Scotland rekindled my creative juices and I began making my own knitted designs. That sparked an intensive learning period when I experienced that color in knitting doesn’t work the same way as color on canvas.
Since I love travel I started analyzing traditional textile motifs from different cultures and the trade routes by which they are shared across cultures. Several trips to Turkey inspired me to translate traditional tribal Anatolian and classical Ottoman motifs into knitted designs.
My greatest joy is sharing my passion with students: helping them translate their personal inspirations into knitted designs. That includes an experiential, hands-on approach to learning more about color so they can get their desired results. I teach beginning and intermediate classes in stranded knitting and a playful approach to color theory. My heart’s desire is to bring out the inner artist that exists in everyone through stranded knitting and color study.
I teach at yarn stores including Fiber Arts on 4th; The Yarn Store at Nob Hill and Village Wools in Albuquerque;Looking Glass Yarns in Santa Fe; Purl in the Pines in Flagstaff, AZ; Vortex Yarns, Taos NM; private studios and festivals including the Taos Wool Festival, Mt & Valley Fiber Festival in Santa Fe; On Higher Ground Retreat in Taos and Fiber Art Fiesta in Albuquerque.
