Floating Knitting Retreat

I'm just back from a Floating Knitting Retreat that was run by Cat Bordhi of moebius knitting fame. She has a new book out that does some very interesting things with sock 'architecture'. I've fallen in love with this book and I believe that it will make sock knitting a lot of fun for the foreseeable future for me.

The retreat was in the beautiful San Juan islands of Washington state. Just to give you a taste, here are a couple of pictures:
It's a beautiful area, though not very far from where I live. And not too different in the way it looks--different islands and different mountains.

We spent three days riding on the inter-island ferry, the ferry that goes around to four of the San Juan Islands. There's no charge for walking on the ferry, and it made the nicest knitting classroom and gathering place that I've been in for a long time.

We had great weather for the time we were there. It only rained part of one day. For this time of year in Washington, that's pretty remarkable.

I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop that Cat ran. She's very low key and is willing to let students do what they really want to do. I found renewed interest in several things, but especially in sock knitting and playing with some different sock shapings. I definitely have a few pattern ideas out of this.

This was the second of two retreats that Cat did this fall and if you want to see what the other one was like, in theory, this link will work. It's currently not working at all (server down or DNS entry not there from the error message), but I figured I would include it anyway.

My friend Bonnie and I used this retreat as an excuse to get together and have some knitting time. It was great to see her and I'm very glad that we did this. We then went on to do a yarn crawl on the way back to SeaTac to get her back for her plane flight. I bought way too much yarn on the yarn crawl. Combined with the lovely gifts from the retreat, I had to make far too many trips into the house to unload my car.

And, speaking of all that yarn and ideas, it's time to go do some knitting!