Introducing...Vintage Knitting College

Happy Friday! Thanks for all the positive comments about my sponge roller set tutorial! I'm so happy to know some of my tips may help someone else out there. :)

Today I just have a brief post to unveil an exciting and big new project for my blog: the Vintage Knitting College!

I was chewing on the idea for the Land Girl sweater knit-along after I proposed it ever a couple of weeks ago. There was some interest, but not as a much as I was hoping for, with at least one or two people interested in the idea of the KAL but wanting to do a different pattern. That got me to thinking that it might be better to do something more like a series of posts and tutorials about vintage knitting and colorwork. Out of that (plus my obsession with campus-inspired fashion this Fall) hatched the idea for the Vintage Knitting College!

Basically, it will be a long-term project of instructional posts about knitting, geared towards knitters who knit from vintage patterns. I'm not going to set any specific deadlines, but figure I'll continue to periodically post tutorials and informational posts for the Vintage Knitting College over the next year or longer (possibly including fun things like guest posts and giveaways now and again, too!).

Because my Fall-focused mind is on colorwork knitting right now (fair isle and other stranded projects, as well as intarsia picture knitting), and because it did seem like several of you liked the idea of a fair isle knit-along, I'm going to focus first on vintage colorwork patterns.



In a series of posts over the next several months in a "class" called Colorwork: 101, I'll cover techniques that can be applied to vintage patterns that involve colorwork. Such as converting patterns to knit in the round, steeking, and charting colorwork when the pattern doesn't include charts (many vintage patterns don't include charts for where you change colors, which slows you down like molasses). I'll also probably wax poetic now and again on picking colors with a vintage look in mind, yarn suggestions, and more. And while it looks like from my opening logo that I'll be focusing only on sweaters, I won't! Expect accessories to crop up now and again, too.

Over time I'll probably cover some of the basic concepts I went through in the Briar Rose KAL, such as resizing patterns, creating your own sleeve caps and the like. I hope to have several posts per topic area, like colorwork, basic techniques, advanced techniques, lace and such. This will get fleshed out more thoroughly as I go along. If you can't tell, I'm trying to take this fairly easy, so it remains fun for you and fun for me! :) Expect things to go at a fairly slow pace sometimes as I don't always knit only vintage patterns, and not everything I plan to knit will get documented in the Vintage Knitting College, or I'll never get anything else done. lol

Many of the posts on a given topic will follow through the life of a project. So even though it won't technically be a knit-along, I'll let you know ahead of time what I plan on knitting and instructing on, so if you'd like to follow along with that or a similar project, you are more than welcome to. And depending on interest level, I may start a general Vintage Knitting College Flickr group for people to post inspired-by creations to! I'm hoping over time for this to become a nice resource for vintage knitting, and will probably devote a separate page on the blog just for the knitting college, once it gets rolling.

And the first project on tap? Well, I admit I'm still deciding! But it will be a vintage stranded/fair isle pullover pattern from the 1940s, and possibly one of the ones shown in my logo! Oh speaking of logos, as this gets going I'll create little logos in case you'd like to promote it on your own blog. :)

Phew, I've finally shared my little (well, big!) idea. Do you like the idea of the Vintage Knitting College as an ongoing knitting resource? Let me know via comment or email if you have any suggestions (for colorwork or other knitting). I'd love to hear from you.

Have a great weekend, and happy knitting!