Make your heart like a lake
with a calm, still surface and
great depths of kindness.”
[Lao Tzu]

Lake Huron at sunrise.

I just returned from a speaking engagement at a knitting retreat on the shore of Lake Huron, just north of Port Huron. For me, it was delightful, enriching and encouraging.

The Retreat

The Woolgatherers’ Knitting Guild in Ann Arbor, MI sponsors their annual retreat in Burtchville, MI at the Lake Huron Retreat Center. The facility not only offers comfortable accommodations and nice meals, but also has ample meeting rooms for classes.

The Classes

The next post down shows a photo of the Lake Huron mitten from the Great Lakes Chill Chaser Collection. We spent Saturday creating mittens. The knitters found several errors in the pattern and I realized I’d accidentally printed a version for handouts that was an earlier iteration of the final version. I have uploaded a correct version in the mitten post so the knitters among you can try it out.

The other class was an exploration of the technique called Ladder-back Jacquard. This is a commercial machine knitting technique that has been adapted to hand knitting. You may download the swatch handout that we used at this LINK. There are many how-to YouTube videos that demonstrate a variety of interpretations of this technique.

Point of Interest

Look at the horizon in the middle of the sunrise photo. You can just see a cargo ship steaming its way south to Lake St. Claire and points east. It put me in mind of the Edmond Fitzgerald.