Stitching Retreat 2014 Recap

This past weekend was the second edition of the “Stitching Retreat 2014” organised by the Zurich Stitch’n’Bitches group. It was held in the Fällanden Youth Hostel. My knitter friend Sabrina put all the pieces together and she did great job.

The hostel is located next to the lake Greifensee in the town of Fällanden, 10 km away from Zurich. It has a beautiful landscape surrounded by woods and pathways to enjoy running, or walking next to the lake. But, unfortunately, it has been raining most of the time. 

We had the entire hostel only for us, so we could craft and chat freely. We mostly remained at the big room, though.

This year’s edition had two new features: we stayed two days instead of one, and we had a knitting class and an informal spinning class, where I taught my fellow knitters who wanted to learn drop spindling.

The event started on Friday evening with a delicious Mexican dinner prepared by a group of participants. After the dinner we spent the night knitting and chatting. I was supposed to work on my WIPs that I took with me, but I decided to cast on the adorable new design from Susan Claudino, Slo’Moe. I am knitting this for Valentina, my little niece whose birthday is next week.

On Saturday after breakfast, we had more knitting time and around 10:30 the spinning lesson started. I was nervous because I had never showed or taught how to spin before, but I had a wonderful time.

This was our spinning table; we spun the singles on Saturday and left the plying for the following day.

Here are Sabrina and Murielle spinning their singles:

On Saturday afternoon took place the knitting class. The name of the class was “Let’s Knit a Pouf” and it was taught by Anne-Catherine Lüke from knit-kit.ch. I did not participate but I could take some pictures of the group and the teacher. They were very concentrated learning how to knit this home accessory.

After the class, the teacher came to say hello to the entire group and I had the opportunity to show her my yarn, the skeins I dyed specially for the retreat. She liked them and I hope we can probably work together in the future. 

Speaking about the yarn I dyed for the retreat, this is a photo of the skeins:

I could sell almost all of them and I am so thankful to the people who bought them! This gave me the strength to keep dyeing and preparing the opening of my Etsy shop.

After the excitement of selling my first skeins of yarn I headed to the campfire to join the group. We had a great aperitif with wine, garlic bread, marshmallows, cookies & chocolate. Something to keep us busy before dinner. 

The night passed very fast because we stayed late chatting and crafting again. Just perfect but I must admit that on Sunday morning I was really tired.

In the morning though, we had enough energy to finish plying our hand spun yarn. It was so nice to see a small skein of a single ply made out of alpaca and a two plied wool yarn resting on the spindle.