Mooshky Madness!

Oh, wait, this is a sunflower again.The sunflower opened Tuesday morning. The hummingbird found it Tuesday evening.
Wednesday morning I woke up feeling just about as zing-y as a hummingbird and got ready to go to Galina Khmeleva's "Mooshky Madness" class at the Michigan Fiber Festival.

We knitted a couple of swatches using "mooshky", the Russian version of nupps. But first we cast on with a long-tail cast-on.

I'm a mostly self-taught knitter. When I learned to knit as a girl, it was using the backwards-loop cast-on. Pretty much every cast-on I learned since then, I've picked up from books in the last six years. Except for this one!

This is the cast-on Galina taught at the Orenburg class I took from her the year before last. It's quite stretchy.

The bottom swatch is made using a chart for lily of the valley, very similar to the one in the summer 2004 Knitters magazine.

After I took the Orenburg class in 2007, my mom gave me the magazine with the shawl pattern in it as a birthday present.

I was a little intimidated by the bobble section of the chart at the time. But now I've knitted the bobbles/mooshky/nupps as taught by the designer herself. I'm inspired!

And here is the lily of the valley shawl itself, the one in the magazine, held by Galina and the hands of one of my classmates.

Galina brought many shawls with designs enhanced by mooshky: designs with hearts and even one with two squirrels in the center! But she said they had not been published, so no pictures.

I feel so lucky to have a local fiber festival big enough to bring in designers and teachers like her.

And still coming up on Saturday and Sunday: the vending part of the festival, and the demo table where I'll spend several hours with other members of the West Michigan Lace Group. Maybe I'll see you there!