Going nuts

Craftsy is a great website with video classes on all sorts of topics. Once you buy a class, it's yours forever, to watch as many times as you want. I recently bought Custom Yoked Sweater with Amy Detjen, and it is amazing! I'm a pretty experienced knitter, but I still learned a lot.

One thing that Amy Detjen recommends is instead of knitting a boring old swatch in order to check gauge, knit a stocking cap instead. The sweater that I'm making for Annabelle will have a row of orange leaves as well as the squirrels and acorns, but that would have made the cap too tall:



I feel like a total badass. I learned to knit English style, holding the yarn in my right hand and "throwing" it around the needle. Thanks to this class, I can now knit continental style with the yarn in my left hand, which is much faster, AND I can use my right hand for the second color, basically knitting with both hands at the same time. That right there was worth the price of the class, but I also learned a lot about how to trap long strands of carried yarn, and the back side of my knitting has never looked better!