Laurie Kimmelstiel's knitting workshop

Flashback time: 2 weeks ago, Thursday, Jerusalem.

A group of about 15 knitters (only one of them male - brave knitter Dan!) gather in Jerusalem for a Laurie's workshop, titled "knitting outside the box".

We started by introducing ourselves and how we learned to knit, then a big bag of soft, pretty skeins of yarn was passed between us (to the sounds of "ooh"s and "ahh"s - you really can't get these kinds of yarn here!) and we each chose a skein. While Laurie explained to us about herself and about her book...

...we were supposed to roll our skein into a ball and start picking up stitches and knitting along the edge of one of our swatchs.

This is where I think things went a little bit wrong. People got their skeins tangled, not everyone knew how to pick up stitches, and nobody was really clear on exactly what it was that we were doing.

Turns out we were knitting ruffles - which is actually a very neat trick However, it all took up most of the workshop time, and despite some talking between the knitters and Laurie's attempts to start a conversation about the empowerment we get from knitting, the knitting itself kept us all very busy and quite unable to focus on anything else.

Almost 2 hours later, we were done:

Laurie then spent quite a while with us, giving us patterns, advice about yarns we brought with us and about the luxury yarns (by Artyarns) that she brought, and generally being very informative and nice.

I've never been to a knitting workshop before so I didn't quite know what to expect. I got out of the workshop feeling I could have used a larger variety of things to knit (which I think was Laurie's plan - she asked us to bring 4 swatches and we only used one). However, 2 weeks later I can say that the workshop did change some things in the way I knit and think about my knitting - trying to think what yarns I could add to the edges of projects and how I can use small amounts of leftover yarn to enhance my knitting.

Special thanks go to Yael who arranged the whole workshop and is an amazingly fun person, Orly for riding to Jerusalem with me and providing hours of entertainment, Safranit - just cause I finally got to meet her, and she is so much prettier in real life then in photos!, Dan - just for showing up :), and of course Laurie for the time and efforts and good ideas.

By the end of the workshop I spoiled myself with a skein of silk, strung with tiny glass beads. It's so soft, so sparkly, so beautiful. I wanted to knit a small scarf with it, but the longer I wait the more I just want to frame it..