MAO Uncensored and Spring Fling

What a week! 

Last week was a pretty intense knitting week.

Monday I attended the monthly meeting of Friends of the Fleece in Allenton, MI (just outside Berville).  I Kitchenered the toes of two pairs of socks that I had previously knitted on my circular sock machine, finishing two more projects toward my Ravelry challenge of completing 25 projects this year.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Mary Anne Oger was the featured demonstrator in Grand Blanc at the home of Julie Boylan, for a seminar entitled MAO Uncensored.   We all took our knitting machines, to hopefully get some personal problem solving with MAO, but since MAO has so many wonderful techniques and beautiful garments to share, we really did not have much time to knit.  That was OK, because I would really rather spend my time learning from the expert than puzzling things out on my own.

I had taken my modified KH-910 to practice setting up and find out what I might be missing for a remote presentation, in order to prepare for my upcoming Penguicon presentation in May.  That is only two weeks away so I have really got to get that finished, and get some practice on pulling in photos using IMG2TRK to prepare for the demo.  I did find out that I was missing some tools and the cable for my laptop, so it was a good exercise. 

On Tuesday night, I did an inventory of my KnitWords magazines, which Mary Anne published from her Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada location. I wanted to see how many I had missed.  It turns out that I am only missing issues #1, #2, and #12.  I probably have issue #12 somewhere, since I never throw anything away, and it seems like that would be in the middle of the year.   I intend to create an eBay search for the other two.  I bought several new patterns on CD, and a book "Knitting on the Edge" from Mary Ann.

Thursday was a travel day.   A friend and I drove the five-hour trip to Peru, Indiana, to attend Spring Fling at the Knit Knack Shop.

Mary Anne  was also demonstrating there, as was Arnetta Kelly, Susan Lazear, Carol Wurst, and Sandee Cherry.  There were 5 hour-long sessions per day.  I attended one with Sandee, one with Arnetta, two with Mary Anne, and the rest with Susan Lazear.  If I had to use one or two words to classify each demonstrator, I would call Mary Anne technical and exacting, Sandee stylish and easy, Susan design-focused, Arnetta intensive, and Carol friendly. 

My friend won door prizes both days, as well as the "table" prize on Friday.  I won the table prize on Saturday, so we score four cones of yarn.  Thanks,  Charlene!  I also picked up some sponge bars for my upcoming Machine Knitting 101 class, a couple of Piecework  magazines and some Eucalan from Carol, a vest pattern from Sandee.  Susan checked my records for Garment Designer and Stitch Painter and verified that I have already purchased the Style Sets.

We returned home late last night and just beat the ice storm that hit most of Southeast Michigan today.  I found that Design-a-Knit 8 had arrived in the mail, so installing that is going to be a task for the upcoming week.

Today I finished unpacking the car and did some sorting out of patterns and magazines to make room for my Spring Fling purchases.  I checked my PCs for the Cochenille Software and found that only my oldest working laptop has the style sets installed.  When I turned on the new laptop, it installed a new Windows 10 update.  I was afraid that Garment Designer might have  broken, because after the Windows update completed, the Hasp key did not work when starting the software.  I rebooted the PC and was relieved to find that whatever the problem had been, it appears to have been fixed.