Annie+Modesitt

==Annie Modesitt is an amazing woman who knits beautiful works, creates her own patterns, and teaches others how to better their skills. She was gracious enough to answer a few questions I had, read below.==

__//MY QUESTIONS//__
__//- What tips do you have for aspiring knitters?//__ Knit your brains out. Seriously. Malcolm Macdowl, in "Outliers", stresses the importance of practice and repetition in finding the genius within yourself. I agree 100% with him on that, and add that the more you practice your knitting, the more intuitive it will seem. We don't knit to make things, we knit to make ourselves HAPPY.I'm asked about tips all the time, but in reality there are no shortcuts. There are little things that can be done to hasten the portion of a project, new ways to think about things, but the truth is that if someone hasn't put in the 'legwork' of knitting for at least several hours a week, the tips just won't mean anything to them. We're constantly evolving as knitters, thus a tip we may hear today that just passes over our heads won't make sense for another year (or five) when it has a pertinence to a current project. __//- Can you help me improve on my techniques?//__ I can help many folks in many way, but each knitter - like each stitch - is very individual. The best way I can help someone is to understand clearly where they are, where they'd like to be, and how much effort they'd like to invest in the journey. I can help them get from point A to point B through many different routes, but there are many different paths and each one isn't right for every person. __//- What are some of your favorite things you knitted? Why?//__ I think my all time favorite knitted object was a wicker chair that I knitted about 10 years ago. I bought a beat up old chair at a yard sale, the back and sides were out of it, it was just a wicker skeleton. I patterned out the shape and size of the pieces that would be required to fill in the gaps, then knit them up using mason's twine (available at any hardware store.) Because the twine was nylon, it shrunk when boiling water was poured on it, so after carefully attaching the pieces by "sewing" them in place in the chair, I poured boiling water on each piece and it shrunk to such an extent it was very taut - hard, almost - and created a very passable imitation of wickerwork. The main difference was that it had been knit in lace, so it had an entirely different effect. I enjoyed this piece for many reasons, first among them that it was so unexpected! Folks did NOT expect to see a knitted chair, and I was thrilled to be able to create such a useful item (we used the chair for years, finally parting with it when we moved from New Jersey to Minnesota a few years ago).


 * If you want to find out more about Mrs. Modesitt, go to her website, []!