Monday, November 27, 2006

Rice Lake KidStop Part 2

The after school program at Rice Lake Elementary kindly invited me back, and asked me to teach the students the purl stitch. They want to make potholders/trivets as Christmas gifts, and want their flat knitted pieces to lay flat. The trick to that is, of course, to use a combination of knit and purl stitches. They will be using the garter stitch pattern, which alternates one row of knit stitches with one row of purl stitches.

I was very impressed with how easily this group of 3rd-6th graders learned the purl stitch! It usually took 1-2 tries with me looking over their shoulder chanting the 7-step mantra, "Through the loop, over the yarn, scrape the peg, make a big loop, take off the old loop, put on the new loop, pull the yarn." One of the teachers there today was one of my frequent students at Michaels, who helped get the Knifty Knitters into the school district, and we worked together with groups of four students at a time.

These kids have been using the looms for a while, and are very comfortable with the stockinette (flat knit) stitch, and the e-wrap (twisted knit) stitch. One of the girls stopped by Michaels this week-end when I was doing a demo. She was wearing a gorgeous scarf she had loom knit. It was an e-wrapped tube that she was wearing "wrong side" out, so it looked purled. She had used brightly colored variegated yarn which gave the appearance of diagonal stripes. I have some of the same yarn in my stash, and I'm going to have to make one up just to show off the picture!

The unexpected benefit of today's class is that my 11 yodd, who has steadfastly refused to do anything but the e-wrap stitch in a tube, happened to be watching while I showed the students the purl stitch. When one of the adult instructors asked my dd to show the purl stitch to her, my dd was able to do so! So now she knows too. :D (Let's see if she uses it, LOL!)

1 Comments:

Blogger Sonia said...

I am trying to learn the purl stitch. do you have any photos you can post of the process? I'm having trouble with the directions, I usually need the visualization to learn anything and if you have any other ideas I would really appreciate them.
Thanks

1/02/2007 12:34 AM  

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