GWEN BORTNER WORKSHOP

"CREATE A MASTERPIECE FROM LEFT OVER YARNS"

My knitting guild recently brought Gwen Bortner, owner and designer of

KNITABILITY

to CLEVELAND, OHIO

We all spread out our stash balls of yarn then we went around and made a "magic ball", borrowing from everyone's stash. We were told to make the lengths "RANDOM" and as we began to knit, we learned that

SHORTER lengths were BETTER.

My magic ball :

ALL ABOUT COLOR:

Gwen explained the following highlights:

1. It's easier to see color against BLACK.

2. Equal proportions are not always good and are in fact NOT good.

3. The PROPORTION of the colors is the KEY.

4. Black goes with anything.... or use a nearly black deep navy or deep brown.

HANDPAINTED YARNS:

these people really know color and will usually have the proportion right. Unwind it, look at the distribution of color lengths, the proportions.

Take a look at

LAURA BRYANT of PRISM YARNS one of the best with color in the knitting world.

HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR STASH:

Gwen says organize single balls by COLOR.

Using mulitple colors and don't know which to use next or when to switch???

ROLL A DICE, use a
RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR, try to be RANDOM.

TO KNOT OR NOT ??

I learned it's best NOT to knot, but rather work with both ends for several stitches then trim the ends. This saves having to weave in the ends as well and samples showed that you cannot tell where this was done.

Look at your piece at ARM'S LENGTH to really see

how it looks.

We went over various patterns including

"FUN WITH STRIPES", "SLIP STITCH", "BRICK", and "MOSIAC".

Gwen's 3 swatches pictured here were all made from the same MAGIC BALL of yarn (with black added to the first on the left) and each looks so totally different !

If you ever have the opportunity to take a class from GWEN, I highly recommend it. She is fun, down to earth, creative, and practical. Her only rule in class is "NO RIPPING OUT", we're here to practice and learn.

Also stay tuned for her book on ENTRELAC soon to be published.