This was the first class I took, right after arriving on Thursday afternoon. I don’t really have a problem with my short rows, but I thought that more knowledge in the old brain is better than less, so why not try something new?
Susanna Hansson has you knit two generous homework swatches so you are ready to go right away when you arrive in class. She has everyone start with the “before” part of the short rows, and then wait for everyone to catch up before moving on to the “after” part. So there are times when you are either bored waiting or furiously knitting, depending on your speed. For me, it was fine, I got to work on my side project during the waiting time, which wasn’t too bad since I am not a speed demon.
Then she has everyone start back to the point of working across the short row stitches and has everyone wait again so we can all have the same Aha! moment together. And we did! This technique is great and really isn’t visible on the front side of the work.
Next you start on the second swatch and this time you are doing the shaping in the opposite direction, so she again has you wait to learn this technique with everyone together, and again, it looks great.

Since we were moving along at a decent clip, she threw in an additional technique called Japanese 3-needle bind off. This is basically just pulling the back needle’s stitches through the front needle’s stitches in one pass across the needle, then binding off the traditonal way with the stitches that are now on a single needle. I had accidentally discovered this technique myself when I was first trying to do a 3-needle bind off, but it didn’t look as nice as the way she demonstrates it, with specific placement of the needle into the stitches for each movement. It really looks nice.
The swatches here have been worked from class and then bound off using the above technique. I haven’t blocked the swatch, and if you look closely, you can see the short row turns every five stitches across the very center edge of the swatch. I am sure that blocking will remove the slight indication of where I turned.

For those who want to see the back.. here it is. Same thing here, you can make out where the turn happened, but I’ll bet after blocking it won’t show. I may block this swatch and post later if I think of it. I have been knitting so much since returning from classes last Sunday. All these classes have really pulled me out of a bit of a funk I’ve been in the past few weeks, and I can’t wait to knit every day now.
Ms. Hansson was a lovely teacher, open to ideas from the audience and I think she learned some things from us also. It’s always a good sign when a teacher is also willing to be a student. I really enjoyed the class and this makes me want to rip out my progress so far on Eris and re-do my short rows.