Dream week, day 2 (Tuesday)

Today we started our personalised program. In the morning, I had Anne Smith of MKM talking about "Racy Raglans". She had started with the basic fully-fashioned way of decreasing, and gone onto various different methods producing different effects and come up with about 22 variations including mini cables and an arrowhead one - unfortunately we rather ran out of time. Also learnt that cardigan, balaclava and raglan all had military origins. We had a bit of a giggle because she mounted her samples upside down and they rather looked like bikini bottoms!

After lunch, I had a hands-on with Anne Brown of Posh Frocks fame - knit a simple shrug in 90 minutes. It was a straight strip of 800 rows and I had chosen to wear my blue lambswool dress, so was sweating buckets by the end of it. It was made with Uppinghams baby 4ply and killed - I started the sewing up during the class but ran out of time. Two people managed to complete it, though! One knits for a living I think. I just wished I had a motor! The noise was unbelievable when 10 people are in full flow.

Last class of the day was a talk by Iris Bishop about plaids and checks. She showed us some wonderful samples using knitweave and other techniques - and today I've a hands on with her so can hopefully try some of them out for myself. It amazes me where she gets all of her ideas from.

When I got back to the hotel, mmryse borrowed my laptop for a bit whilst I sewed up the rest of my shrug, and whilst I got changed she wove in the ends for me, meaning I could wear it for dinner over my evening dress. It turned out really well - will photograph it at some point for the blog and for Rav.

I won another bottle of wine, and the woman sitting next to me (whose ticket I was looking after) also won - so two bottles of wine for our table! Might refrain from voting today, give someone else a chance! After dinner, Nick from Uppinghams gave us a great talk about the various yarns and things he has available and handed them around. He also does things for spinners, I had no idea you could get acrylic as tops.

Had a message that my recalcitrant mid gauge carriage has no problem talking to the seller's PC10. So I'm a bit stymied as to why it won't work with my kit.