St. Enda is almost done as I'm finishing up the collar. I am surprised that St. Enda is my first Alice Starmore sweater. It certainly will not be my last. In 1996 I took an Aran Knitting class with Alice through my former LYS in Durango, Colorado. I paid what I thought then was the princely sum of $100 and showed up at a local hotel bright and early. I was the youngest person in the class and the two women sitting at my left were discussing how you know when to admit your husband to a nursing home. The woman at my right didn't really know how to knit at all and I had to explain to her what reverse stockinette stitch was.



I wish I could remember what Alice was wearing - it was a creamy white Aran sweater but I couldn't figure out which one of her designs it was. A lot of the students in the class were wearing their own AS sweaters. In the Hebrides had just come out and there was a huge muscular bald guy in her entourage (he looked a lot like Mr. Clean) who was knitting Erisort in the purple Scottish Heather shown in the book. I went over and watched him and mumbled something to him about all the bobbles in the sweater/coat and he said he had actually counted them all. The number was in the hundreds.



Alice first talked about the history of Aran knitting and then focused on knitting using a chart. At that time I couldn't knit with a chart so it was very helpful. She had us all knit a cabled swatch using a chart. When she walked by me I expressed my embarassment at the way I hold my needles. (I knit holding the right hand needle like a pencil - I think this is sometimes called the French method of knitting) Alice replied that it didn't matter at all because I was a fast knitter with that particular method. How cool is that? To have Alice Starmore herself tell you your knitting style is okay. One of the students asked her if she knits the sweaters in her books and she stated that it was mainly done by test knitters. She knits up the swatches and does the design configurations but usually others knit the actual sweaters.



I still have the notes from the classs. She talked for quite a long time about washing and caring for Aran sweaters and even mentioned woolly boards. I know I asked her about cast-ons. I noticed that all the sweaters in the book used the long-tail cast on so the cast-on edge and the patterns always start on the right side row. The result is that the bottom hem of the sweaters and sleeves was the reverse side of the long-tail cast which didn't look that great to me. In St. Enda I changed the cast-on side (i.e., I started the pattern on the wrong side of the work instead of the right side as specified in the patterns) so the hem bottoms would look better.



There was an accompanying trunk show and I got to touch all the sweaters from In the Hebrides. Erisort and Malin most impressed me. Then Alice signed my copy of In the Hebrides (which probably makes it worth 10,000 dollars now) and I went off on my merry way wishing I too could live on an island and knit all day long. But Bosco the cat and Snickerdoodle the lop would miss me probably.